If you keep your body free from disease and sensual pleasure it will help you to serve what is more noble. He who forsakes all worldly desires sets himself above all worldly distress. (Maximos the Confessor)

Power, wealth, and sexual variety are top contenders for worldly desires. What about justice, daily bread, and love? Are these also worldly desires?

Power is entwined with justice, wealth with health, and sex with love. Is power the problem? Or does the problem come from seeking to serve the self?

I love a fine meal, even if I am eating alone. This is self-serving. It is certainly sensual. How does it detract from what is more noble?

I vividly recall and give thanks for a Eucharist celebrated in Salzburg nearly 40 years ago. The incense, the music, the art and architecture ... the divine has never seemed more present to me.

There is a potential problem with self-serving sensuality. Appreciation can too easily become obsessive. I can too easily seek to control and amass that which only has value when it comes and goes as grace.

But there is also a problem when, in seeking to avoid the sensual, we reject authority, prosperity, and affection offered by God.