Fornication is not something we like to talk about in church, is it? And with good reason.
For many of us, it's a dirty word and makes us feel uncomfortable. For others, it conjures up images of being made to feel guilty about our intimate relationships with other people.
But St Paul is clear and, no matter how embarrassing it is for a priest to preach about it from the pulpit, the subject must not be swept under the carpet because it does affect us - it affects us all, even the most chaste of us.
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What we have to remember is that fornication is not the only sin but it is a sin that can do us untold damage. St Paul tells us that we cannot expect to be sanctified - be made holy - if we cannot "possess our vessels" by which he means "control ourselves". But, as usual, it is the Devil who likes to focus on one thing without getting at the real issue. The endless debates about sexual activity that are raging in the Church are a smokescreen for one important fact that we are being encouraged to forget.
What do the people say to the Church when it tells them that fornication is a sin?
"It's my body. I can do what I like with it!"
Do you hear that? What is this person really saying?
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People who say things like that see themselves as separate from their bodies. To them, the body is an instrument or a plaything, but an instrument or plaything of what? The soul? The mind? Something else? Who is the "my" if we take the body out of "my body"? Is there anything left if the body is removed?
Well, yes, there is the soul but it's incomplete. There's something wrong with souls without bodies. The soul is what makes a body alive. If there is no body then there is nothing to do the living. The soul needs the body in order to be a complete human being. A body without a soul is just a corpse; a soul without a body is like an ocean without water.
And this is the problem. We are being tempted to tear ourselves apart in order to destroy the image of God that we bear. As soon as we start thinking that our body is just a toy then we miss the very fact that any thing which affects the body also affects the soul. And whatever affects the soul affects the body.
Fornication, along with greed, hatred, gluttony and sloth, distorts the natural way that our bodies work in order to obtain some temporal pleasure. Here is a grotesque irony. The more we think of the body as our plaything, the more the soul becomes a plaything of the body. The worst of this is that we don't even notice. We lose our soul by gaining the world!
It gets worse. In seeing our body as a plaything, we also see the bodies of others as playthings and thus deny them their God-given humanity. Further, if we see the body as a plaything, then we can start seeing children as an inconvenience and an obstacle to gratifying fleshly lusts. Thus, the very act designed to bring a loving family into being becomes, by fornication, a means of hating the family.
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Lent is about reuniting body and soul. The fast is a very simple way of doing so because the bodies desires become linked once more to the desires of the soul. Denying the body a little food means that we become aware of its true needs in God, and we become more attuned to what we need to stay together, body and soul. Fasting helps us to recognise our excesses and expose other ways in which we treat our bodies as separate from ourselves. It helps us learn respect for ourselves as things of body and soul inseparable.
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Fornication is a deadly sin against the self, let us be clear on that. It is, however, utterly forgivable for those who seek forgiveness. One day, God will transform us into who we are meant to be - body and soul, neither one without the other. Until then, we should try to stop ourselves from coming apart.
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