Just me maybe, but I believe it disfigures their God-given beauty...
Though I already *knew* this somewhere in the cobwebs, it was wonderful to read this, put so well!
“At its core, every desire we experience is really a longing for God.”
That’s great. Thanks for posting this.
you are welcome
The human soul longs for union with God, but is bound by our corporeal nature and our fallen state and can't achieve it, at least not easily or for lengthy periods of time. We are destined for mortal death and the separation (albeit temporary) of our souls from our bodies - which is an unnatural state of being (again from an eternal and divine perspective).
This is where our carnal passions enter in. The soul seeks the joy of reunion with God and our fallen bodies seek to fill the void of longing in the soul. So what do we do? We do things...one thing after another...that offer us short-lived pleasure...
We eat too much. Eating's not bad in and of itself, in fact it's necessary to sustain our bodies. But WE do it for pleasure and to excess.
We drink too much. Alcohol in moderate doses is actually good for your digestion and your circulatory system. But you drink too much of it you get drunk. You get drunk too often and you become dependent, among other things.
We overindulge our sexuality. We have to have sex to procreate...I won't go too far here because I know young people probably read this.
We overindulge, PERIOD, on whatever it is that brings us fleeting pleasure. ALL OF THESE THINGS TAKE THE PLACE OF GOD. Not good. And we tell lies to hide it from others. And we lie to ourselves to say it's alright.
In short, we sin. The Greek word for sin, ἁμαρτία, means to miss the mark. What mark? God. Union with God. And we miss because so many of us don't even know what we're aiming for. Nearly all of us, I'd say. Very few have gotten a taste of the uncreated eternal. And most (if not all) of them are ascetics who have dedicated their lives to constant prayer.
Christ assumed humanity, was crucified, suffered, died, was buried, and arose to conquer death for us. By this he released us from mortality's hold on us and offered us the hope of eternal reunion with God and an alternative to our fleeting, sinful, mortal passions