Fourteen years ago, on a Memorial Day weekend, I was finishing my third hour in a porno shop. I had spent the three-day weekend in almost total obsession. Finally someone entered my viewing booth for sexual contact.

The three-day lust trance was over. Now reality: the smell, the dirt on the walls, the peek holes, the degradation of myself and another human being. “Pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.” Waves of shame, then hate — hate of me.

This was the last time of “sex with another.” But only the beginning of understanding the “heroin factory” that the lust drug had created in my head since first flooding my body, mind and spirit and polluting the ground water of my soul.

I was a child of four when my tent of innocence was ripped open by the sexual abuse of an older boy. I had been tricked into being degraded, but a magical new “buzz” rose within me. This feeling rising within me, even to this day, announces the coming of lust.

I was an only child, born in the middle of the Depression, in 1935. My mother was 19, my father 31, when they were married. He was alcoholic and the son of an alcoholic. When I was eight, my mother died suddenly of a massive heart attack.

Then I lived with my father and his 80-year-old mother, my grandmother. I resented her. My father was often absent drinking. One time in my early teens when he came home in the middle of the night, I physically and verbally abused him and disowned him as my father. Resentment had moved to expressed rage.

When I was 11, a friend’s older brother initiated us into masturbation. The habit took root with a vengeance. Not the ordinary developmental thing. Repeated masturbation, with the added excitement of risking discovery in the classroom. My outlet for rage, pain and loneliness was now in place.

As I entered high school, self-hatred grew and shame pervaded my very being. I relied on a friend to help me feel of value. He was my idol from grade school, now a popular athlete, handsome, and spiritually inclined. Because he was my friend I felt more worthwhile.

When I was a sophomore in high school, a number of events converged to bring about a religious conversion in my life. I drank my first hard liquor at a New Year’s Eve party and passed out. In fear of the disease that killed my grandfather and was destroying my father and uncle, I resolved to stop drinking.

A friend with whom I carried papers was killed two weeks later. In March of that year I went on a retreat led by a priest who worked with prisoners. A former World War II chaplain, he heard “soldiers’ confessions” — reviewing one’s whole life — way into the night as long as anyone came. Love radiated from this man in the pulpit and toward me as I, in his presence, confessed the sins of my life up to that point. I was sixteen.

This experience — my first Fifth Step? — helped me feel and believe in a way I never had before, that God was a God of love and compassion and I had met him and could count on him in my struggle with lust and life. I followed the directions of this priest who had heard everything I ever did: I began to go to Mass daily, to examine my conscience regularly, and I found a spiritual director. I saw him every week and I was open with him about every aspect of my life and sexuality.

I entered into an extended period of celibacy. I began to expand my network of friends. My sense of self-worth grew. I began to dream of doing for others what had been done for me through those who publicly gave their lives to God.

At 17, I graduated from high school and with great relief, left home to begin the adventure of entering religious community. Early on there was intensive spiritual training and much structure and discipline. Masturbation was not a part of my life at this time and had not been since my high school conversion and my use of prayer and spiritual disciplines that flowed from it. Lustful literature was not available to me nor was alcohol. Always, however, there was a romantic, or idealized male relationship that “fed” me.

After four years of this protected environment, I went from the country to the city to study for my degree. Alcohol was now available. I began to drink and eventually, to masturbate. Within six years I was into compulsive masturbation, even with objects. Next I began to sexualize friendships with classmates. I wanted to be lusted after and became a tease.

After I was ordained a priest, the pressure of the public role and the split between my secret actions and that public role created a stress that I numbed out with more masturbation and infatuation. After a three-week manic high, I was hospitalized for a month.

The basic pattern of the addiction is clear from my early history. Now the progression starts. Photographs of hard-core pornography were made available as exhibits in a post-graduate sexuality class. I returned again and again to view the same photos. The fire was lit. Some years after this I went into a porn shop for the first time in a city some distance from my own. A conflagration took place within me; the forbidden, the dangerous, and moving pictures. I went for same-gender porn. I found it more lustfully stimulating.

I determined I would never go into a porn place in my home town. Within a year, I did. Now was added the danger of discovery and recognition. The next boundary crossing was while I was on vacation in the city where I grew up. For the first time I attempted to proposition a man in a dangerous part of town. I was unsuccessful and was pursued by two cars full of men ready for violence. I totaled my car in another part of town fleeing to safe territory. A lawyer friend of a friend took care of this for me. Another decade of progression was to come.

I tried a geographic cure. I had been challenged by co-workers at staff meetings about angry outbursts toward authority figures when drinking. I moved a long distance away to an isolated part of the country. The drinking was curtailed. Acting out with others and self seemed to recede when I was in place, but intoxicated anger, without alcohol, gradually increased.

When I traveled, I was filled with total lust obsession, and part of the cruising pattern was voyeurism and exhibitionism. I would leave for three days of rest, then come home hungover from a one- to three-day lust binge fed by rest stops, malls and cruising areas.

Now came the terrifying realization: all of this was occurring without alcohol. Alcohol had been my cover for 20 years. I could always blame it on having “one too many.” Now “it” had a life of its own. The life of lust obsession without alcohol progressed for three more years.

After the incident in the porno shop, superiors separated me from my work and my living community. I was sent to an urban area to seek help. There I was with my closest friend, one of the intimate friendships in my life that I had not sexualized. I had always told myself that when I was with someone I really cared about, who knew me and I them and we felt affection for one another, “I never had any problem.”

After two weeks, I was into voyeurism and cruising a local mall.

A key delusion was now dead. No one, no matter how good, caring or loving, and no friendship, no matter how significant in my life, could enable me to control lust. Indeed, lust was slowly eating away at my capacity to relate on any real level to those who really cared for me.

I went to a city where I knew there were 12-Step groups for sexual recovery and other resources. Someone told me there was a fellow trying to start an SA group. I called the number given me and asked, “Was it true?” “Sure, we need you,” was the reply. “Show up tomorrow night.” I went and found three others. This was the fourth meeting of SA in this city. I was home. I felt safe. The date was December 1983. I have not found it necessary to act out since that day.

During the first year, I attended five to seven meetings a week and spent hours with my sponsors and other recovering members. My sponsor, over two years sober, assured me that a day would come when I would be able to begin to tell the difference between “chemistry” and intimacy.

Six months into sobriety, I tapped the buried grief from my mother’s death, 41 years after her passing. For over an hour, tears rose up from a depth I had never before experienced. Healing. Freedom.

I reconnected with the remnants of my mother’s family and reached out in gratitude to the men who had been significant mentors to me in my life. I made conscious, intentional space for friendship, especially for the friend who had been with me and helped me make the decision to go to any lengths to seek recovery after my last acting out. Over the years he has taught me how to be a friend. My sobriety has helped our friendship grow from dependency to one of mutual respect. Forty-five years of faithful, caring presence in my life.

Most important, I discovered sex was indeed optional. I began to experience a celibate life as a way to express my faith and love in the service of others. The joy and freedom to actually live this lifestyle was an experience that was more and more me. I was who I am. What a gift to be with sober married men who were also choosing periods of extended celibacy for the sake of healing in their marriage relationship.

The blessings of sobriety have been abundant. I began to learn a new language; I started a significant research and writing project. After four years in recovery, I risked and found a friendship to blossom with a woman who has become a cherished friend in my life, a friendship I could never have experienced without the close mentoring and support of my SA guides and my community. She was an artist and she drew out the artist in me. I began to paint and write poetry. She awakened in me feelings I had never before experienced.

I was near 10 years in recovery when I got a surprising phone call from a superior who knew my story. I was asked to present myself for an office of major responsibility and trust. Might you guess I’ve always been a bit marginal? And now I am asked to take a most sensitive position of trust, doing work for which absolutely everything in my life to that point helped to prepare me. I was supported in this by my sponsor and my community and friends who knew my story. “You are the one to meet this need,” they told me.

I am now in my sixth year in this position. It has not been easy, even with all the support I have received, yet I am growing and happy. My sponsor has challenged me to new levels of surrender in finally accepting that my depressive episodes and periodic highs do indicate that I have a chemical imbalance carried by three generations on my mother’s side of the family. After three years of resisting, I am now following my doctor’s suggestions. Yes, I have a physical as well as an emotional and spiritual disease.

My inclination to play God in other people’s lives, trying to fix and control them, created a second bottom in my recovery. The pain drove me to seek help from S-Anon and others.

I had decided not to start an SA meeting when I moved to the city in which I am now working. I had too many things to do. Well, God had other plans. Within two months, he sent me two fellows in incredible pain. I wasn’t too interested in sponsoring anyone. I thought I would take a year and “observe” in other 12-Step groups. But I said to the two in pain, “Call me tomorrow if you want to stay sober another day.” I wasn’t expecting that to go on for long.

But they started calling and kept calling and they stayed sober! They asked me to repeat the questions I asked them the day before. “What questions?” I said. “The ones about desiring sobriety.” So out of this evolved our “Daily Desire for Sobriety Renewal”:

1. Can you admit you are powerless over lust?
2. Do you desire sobriety for today?
3. Are you willing to protect and strengthen this desire for one day, one hour, one minute, one second at a time?

One day a caller unexpectedly threw a surprise at me — “Are you willing to hand over your will and life, just for today, to the one who kept you sober yesterday and protected you from the full consequences of your lust in the past?” “Yes.”

Although I have been spared many public consequences of my disease, the humiliations I experienced have been real and sufficiently painful. What one of AA’s early non-alcoholic friends said of AA members surely applies to us: “These fellows have a specialty. Their specialty is humiliations; and they have found the way to change humiliations into humility and thus be readied for a deluge of God’s grace.”

Through that deluge of grace I have come to know my true identity and your true identity: we are beloved of God. Always and everywhere, even in the depth of our insanity, we belong to that Love.