The fundamental problem is that people's efforts to become holy, or at least in-control, are fundamentally unrealistic and therefore brittle. They restrain and control and repress and deny - until, every once in a while, when no one they care about is looking, they pop open and have some clandestine sex, or a binge, or gambling spree, or whatever. Why do television charismatics pick up hookers or cruise washrooms? I will make the radical argument that it's not because they're hypocrites - it's because they're committed to a concept of holiness and self-control that is unnatural and unintegrated.

The question is how to be wholistically holy.

How to be holy in a way that doesn't force you to take ultra-guilty vacations.

Here's my concept of it: acknowledge your humanity and make loving behaviour towards others your guide and standard. Feed your sense of the numinous with prayer, meditation, voluntarism (community volunteering, including posting on this board), creativity, and enjoyment of the arts and the unoffending pleasures (good food, good company). Masturbate with full joy and mental range when you need to. Take risks on extending your love to people (including boys in our case) without getting involved in the the sub-holy with them, like inappropriate sexual expression. In short, don't try to control sensuality by choking joy and pleasure. Unless asceticism really agrees with you, in which case, by all means live in a cave and eat locusts and wild honey. But if you find yourself leaving the cave to have sex with the nearest goat, don't just feel dirty and guilty, rethink your holiness, because you're probably on the wrong path entirely, not just stumbling.