Dear Theophilus, 

As I promised you in the last letter, I am going to continue looking at what are called the deadly sins which plague each and every one of us.

Sloth, sometimes referred to by its old name of acedia, is a state of dejection which gives rise to feelings of despair. Now this does not sound like a sin but it is so seen by Christendom. What it does is rob us of life and the desire to do any good. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, rejoices in nothing and finds purpose in nothing. It harbors the monstrous lie that one can find satisfaction in oneself without reference to anyone else. Its root is in the excessive love of self which issues in a deficient interest in and love for, other people. Sloth endures no hardships nor any penance. What sloth does is lock us in time. We do not look forward, we do not see the panorama that is opened by eternity and as a result, we despair of God's mercy. Part of this arises because sloth does not teach us to praise and to rejoice; there is an overemphasis on the corrupt and the harsh. A close companion of sloth is anxiety which is essentially a dread of nothing which drains away the possibility for us to enjoy God's creation. Sloth is primarily a sin of omission, a sin of neglect. Technology has freed us from much of the drudgery that used to haunt human life but the time that has become available for us is used to turn inwards and become totally absorbed in ourselves. The answer is strength of courage, strength of character which comes through a greater involvement with our neighbor and with the world around us.

Avarice is considered a sin whereas in our society it is almost seen as a virtue. Why should there be limits to our consumption? Its basis is a form of idolatry as we start to value things over people and over ourselves. Avarice is the inordinate love for created goods. With avarice, people surround themselves with things they do not really need or want and after a while they do not even know what they want. Avarice leads to a form of self-annihilation. Avarice ironically makes us less than whole and is one of the conditions that leads us to sloth because we lose our enjoyment of things. (Isn't it interesting how sins are tied to each other like in a web?) No other standard is set for us today to challenge the concept that pursuit of wealth and possessions is one of our highest aims. A society that does not see good in the pursuit of poverty (the very concept sounds strange and deranged to us) is itself impoverished. It was St. Francis who saw with what effort his father pursued wealth and St. Francis came to see that the pursuit of poverty is even more difficult. If priests are called on to declare a vow of poverty, why shouldn't other leaders do the same? Society starts to indoctrinate us from a very young age instilling in us the idea that acquisition is an honorable goal and success is judged by the extent of our acquisitions. What we find in avarice is a self-love that has run amok and calls what is black, white. Often this avarice hides itself under the cloak of security - we are acquiring to protect us from the vagaries of life. But what we normally find is that instead of feeling more secure, our insecurity grows. The getting of possessions is often sinful, although we do not always see this as this is hidden from us in the interactions of our society. We may be able to buy a can of peas cheaply and praise our economic system for its wisdom little realizing that the can in which the peas come is bought cheaply because a Bolivian mine worker earns pittance and has a life span of 30 years in order to supply us that cheap can. What avarice teaches us is that sin is insidious and sly and becomes so much a part of us that it looks like the norm and anything that challenges it seems strange and perverted but, throughout all this we must remember that without love, no man is free.

Gluttony, another of what may be called the hot sins because it is committed in company as opposed to cold sins such as pride which alienate us from others, does with food what avarice does with possessions. It is one of the two sins that abuses what is essential for our lives, the other being lust. It is interesting that the sins attack the beauty in creation. Pride disparages beauty in anything else but itself. Envy cannot bear the sight of it and gluttony reduces everything to the mere mechanism of consumption without thought of praise or thanks. Gluttony tends to be a companionable sin being committed in the presence of others but it is still a sin of perverted love. It is fundamentally a sin against the rest of creation which it is intent on consuming whether it is needed for survival or not. In our society it is often masked with the pursuit for a high standard of living but its point is to show others how much better off you are. It is fundamentally a sin of ingratitude and displays a meanness of spirit which does not see anything to be grateful for. This sin, as others, enslaves us and we become slaves to what we consume leaving us hollow in our center trying to fill this void but failing while becoming a form of food junky. One of the ways that we can fight this sin is to become aware that everything that we have is a gift and the proper response to a gift is gratitude. Start by saying grace before each meal or a simple thank you before you consume anything and maybe this will make you more aware of what you are about to participate in.

On the heels of gluttony we have lust. This sin, like others, makes us solitary. Ironically, lust is not so much a sin of the flesh as a sin against the flesh. The flesh is an integral part of us because it is through the flesh that we present ourselves to the rest of creation. It is through our flesh, as well, that we hurt other people no less through acts of sexual infidelity as through acts of physical violence. Through lust we humiliate our flesh and that of another, very often, in our time, in the name of freedom. What lust does is it destroys our capacity for loyalty and makes us incapable of enduring relationships. Love is something that has to be worked on and in our day of minuscule attention spans this becomes difficult. The beloved needs loving attention just as a work of art needs to be looked at over and over in order to appreciate it and learn its depths. Lust is devoid of humor and playfulness because it lacks the familiar and is impermanent. One of the reasons why the Church condemns homosexuality is due to the fact that homosexual liaisons tend to be impermanent. Another factor is that in true love you love that which is other than you, and one of the greatest differentiators among us is our sexuality. Homosexuality is tainted with narcissism because you are drawn to that which is like you. This is not to say that all heterosexual relationships are idyllic or not fraught with failure and pain but they have the potential for something which homosexual relationships can never have. At the heart of lust is the placing of self-gratification at the pinnacle of goals. It is interesting to see what the Church taught are the results of lust: hatred of God as an avenger of sin, love of this world and an inordinate fear of death. Lust tends to distort our view of our nature seeing our sexual life as the measure of our entire life. Our society, and we with it, have lost our compass and do not know why we are here except to continue. Lust underlines in big bold letters that love is at the root of our virtues and our evil. The terrible tragedy of our time is that the teacher of our morals, of our behavior has become the mass media, especially television. Look at the values espoused there (not even considering violence); you are the only one who counts (pride), you can have what the others have (envy), eat so much that it makes you feel sick but you can take medication against that (gluttony), you can have sexual relations with whomever you wish, whenever you wish and the more, the better (lust), shout and bully to get your way, and get applauded, because, after all your rights are paramount (anger), get, get , get because you never have enough and this is the way it should be in the real world (avarice). Day in and day out, this message gets hammered into our skulls and is it a wonder that we have this loneliness and void inside us as we wander wondering what is wrong with us?

Sin is not something with substance of its own; it is parasitic and its raw material is love. Our great literature and our experience in our lives attest to the fact that our love goes wrong. We need to know about sins and I find it liberating to meditate on them and be reminded of them. I know it sounds strange, and even morbid, because we think that a discussion of sin is inevitably a downer but this is wrong. We need to widen our horizon and to see beyond the spirit of the age who does not liberate us but confines us within the narrow borders of the vision of the times.

There is one other aspect of our nature that I want to discuss with you and that is the concept of original sin. Probably no other idea of sin has been more criticized but, at the same time, more misunderstood. What original sin says is that our nature has a flaw in it and that no matter how much we may try to overcome this flaw, we fail. On the face of it this seems very restrictive but we will see that this is a liberating doctrine. The fact that our nature is flawed frees us from all our attempts at perfection which our guilty conscious foists on us. You do not have to be perfect because you cannot be perfect. Since you cannot be perfect (there goes pride) you cannot expect others to be so either and you begin to accept them as they are. You realize that there is much in common between you and your neighbor and on this you start to build your love of your neighbor. You become, at the same time, more tolerant and more gentle with yourself which enable you to struggle with your sins even more.

With this I end,

Yours truly,

Bar-Abbas

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