This past month my church began a new sermon series titled “Snakes and Ladders” where we are relooking at the “deadly sins” and the “holy virtues” which shaped the medieval church for a thousand years until the sixteenth century. Up until then, ethical thinking in Western civilization was virtue-based or character-based. However, with the rise of reasoning and the emphasis on the Bible in the Church Reformation, ethical thinking became more behavior-based or law-based. All virtue teachings that focused on deepening or enriching one’s life gradually disappeared and was replaced by a law-based system of commandments based on, duty, obligation, etc. In this blog, I want to explore again these deadly habits and notice how nurturing the virtues connected to these deadly experiences can lead to a more abundant life, a deeper sense of spiritual life then can be found through just teaching theology and following ethical principles or a religious law. The early church fathers identified seven deadly sins: sloth, pride, lust, greed, envy, gluttony, and wrath. Connected to each of these deadly sins, the church father identified seven holy virtues that arises as one works at and transforms each of the deadly sins. From transforming sloth comes joy/inner rest, from pride arising humility/inner confidence, from lust emerges chastity/intimacy, from greed comes generosity/abundance, from envy arises contentment, from gluttony emerges temperance/fullness, and finally wrath transforms into love/power. The deadly sins point to what happens to our soul when it is not fully oriented toward God and God’s love. Our soul becomes sick with the dynamics of sloth, pride, or lust or greed or envy or gluttony or wrath…or some combination of these diseases. The stronger these dynamics, the more unwell our soul is, the more symptoms of soul unwellness we will experience and express. The holy virtues point to what happens to our soul when it is more oriented toward God and God’s love. When this happens, our soul becomes healthier and this is evident through the dynamics of joy, humility/confidence, chastity/intimacy, generosity/abundance, contentment, temperance/fullness, and love/power being more present in our lives. The church fathers call these seven sins the “deadly seven sins.” By “deadly”, they meant that all human sins could be traced back to these seven sins. These deadly sins or orientations of the human soul were the root of all sin and all evil. When you understand the deadly sins in this way, you can begin to appreciate why the holy virtues became so important in the medieval church. These holy virtues were the signs of spiritual health, signs of Christians being in healthy communion with God, signs of Christian souls being spiritually transformed by God’s spirit from their diseased soul caused by one or more of the deadly sins. People tend to see sins and virtues as simply human acts or behaviors often caused by wrong beliefs or simply ignorance, that “people don’t know better.” If you see sins and virtues in this way, the solution is obvious: we need to educate people. If people are properly educated, people will soon stop sinning and live a more virtuous life. This is the basis of much character education in our schools, in our families, and possibly in our churches too. Many people believe that we can teach people to become good virtuous people. The early church fathers who formulated these deadly sins and holy virtues had a totally different way of thinking about spiritual formation. They believed the reason people sinned was not about ignorance or wrong beliefs. It was caused by the human soul becoming improperly formed. I want to take this insight one step further than the church fathers did. They saw these deadly sins as the root of all sin. But what is the root of these deadly sins? I want to suggest that these deadly sins are the coping strategies people use and developed to cope with what I call “deadly experiences”, experiences in life that deeply damage their human soul. Let me illustrate what I mean. When a child experiences being seen, mirror, and valued by their parents and others in their holding environment, they will develop a natural inner confidence, appreciation of self, and a healthy pride. But when this healthy mirroring is not reliable, then the child has to self-generate this self confidence for themselves which is formed by always comparing oneself to others, and making sure we are perceived as better than others. That deadly experience of not being mirrored well by our parents is the root of the sin of pride. The sin of sloth develops when a person is not able to experience a profound sense of self-acceptance and self-love, experiences that arise from divine reality when we are loved and supported well by our parents. When our holding environment allows us to have these types of experiences, our nervous system settles and we move into a place of deep rest and being. When we are not able to experience these valuable experiences of divine love and rest, we seek to self-generate these restful experiences through being lazy and irresponsible. That is the sin of sloth. And this is true of all the deadly sins. No longer able to easily experience intimate connection naturally, our ego seeks to make intimate connection happen with others leading to the sin of lust. The sin of envy is our ego seeking to get what others have so we can enter a place of contentment, an inner contentment that often fails to rise naturally. When we struggle to feel the experience of enough or abundance, we become greedy believing more materials possessions will fill that hole in our life. The sin of gluttony arises due to our inability to feel fullness and satisfaction that arises from within. The resultant hunger causes our ego to look to the outside world where we gorge ourselves with hopes of satisfying that hunger. Finally, the sin of wrath arises due to our inability to feel our inner power. As a result, we hate all those who cause us to feel powerless. Each of the seven deadly sins are coping strategies our ego develops to cope with the holes or disconnections we feel in our soul with our divine nature. And all of these holes, hungers, and blockages are due to experiences in our life, often in our childhood’s holding environment, that deaden aspects of our soul. These deadly experiences and deadly sins have profound effect on the formation of the human soul. If we feed our soul with things that are not good for the human soul, guess what happens: our human soul stays unwell. But, if we feed it with things that are good for the human soul, then our soul starts regaining its health, getting stronger, and feeling more vital and alive. Rebecca DeYoung uses a very helpful image in his book, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, to help people understand how the human soul is formed. She describes it this way. “When you first go down a hill and you’re sledding, you have to break through all that fluffy, piled-up snow, and the sled goes slowly, and you have to push it forward. But the second or third time you slide down the hill, then you get a track and you wear a groove, and it becomes icy with repeated use. And all of a sudden, it’s very hard to slide out of the track, and once you’re tipping a little bit out of it, the track will sort of groove you back down the hill at lightning speed. And that’s one picture for the way in which individual choices become cumulative in our character” (https://teddyray.com/deadly-sins/). This is a wonderful image of how spiritual formation naturally happens. We develop patterns of living and these patterns form a groove in our soul that shapes how we live. The deeper the groove, the more this grove shapes how we live our lives. When we experience trauma or a deadly experience, a large groove forms immediately that then shapes the path our sled takes down the hill. Deyoung goes on to note that these grooves work both ways. “These grooves can take you down the wrong path and these grooves can take you down the right path” (https://teddyray.com/deadly-sins/). Seen through this lens of deadly sins and holy virtues, spiritual formation is not about just teaching children and ourselves about God, Jesus, and Spirit and all the key stories in the Bible. Spiritual Formation involves also getting people to contemplate their practice of life and paying attention to where their grooves are, and work at transforming those grooves that are not driven by the fruits of God’s spirit or the holy virtues. This is the major purpose of spiritual practices. Through spiritual practices, you soon discover the dominant grooves in your life, and whether these grooves nurture life for you or do the very opposite, gradually suck life from you like a disease or illness and weaken your soul and spirit. Furthermore, these spiritual practices support you in developing more healthier grooves in your life when you realize how a certain groove is hurting your life. Often spiritual practices are done with the same expectation that we have with medicine. We are sick. We go to a doctor and get a prescription. We take the medicine. And bingo, within a day or so, we start feeling better. Spiritual practices do not work like that. Instead, the purpose of spiritual practices is to open your soul and put you in a place of surrender and waiting. It is only in this place of surrender that God’s grace can emerge. In this place of waiting and prayerfulness, you notice all the dynamics happening in your soul. At first, you will especially notice the dynamics tied to the deadly sin or the deadly experience you are wrestling with, the groove where your soul wants to go. For example, if you practice fasting, you will soon experience all the mental chatter and temptations around food connected to the deadly sin of gluttony and its roots. But spiritual practices not only help you become aware of the deadly experiences you are wrestling with. You also become aware of the dynamics of God’s spirit and grace ministering to you. Let me give an example to illustrate.
If you practice the spiritual practice of centering prayer, you will notice quickly how noisy and persistent your mind is with thinking and how boring your mind thinks silence is. This dynamic is called ‘monkey mind’ and there is lots written about it. The awareness itself is a fruit of God’s spirit. Through that awareness, you discover how deep the groove is around your mind being busy. Eventually, that will make you curious, another aspect of God’s spirit. You may ask yourself, “Why is my mind so busy because when I was young as a baby, it was not. It was quiet.” You begin to realize that all of this mental chatter is a coping pattern, a deep grove, that keeps you from actually feeling deeply and experiencing life. This insight is the spiritual fruit of truth. Seeing this pattern, you begin to long more deeply for a mind that can be quiet, and this longing makes you more determined with your practice of centering prayer. This longing and determination are both fruits of God’s spirit. Eventually, through repeatedly practicing the spiritual practice of centering prayer, you begin to experience short moments when your mind is quiet, and in those brief moments, you will notice your soul relaxing briefly…becoming more settled, more peaceful and calm…more fruits of God’s spirit. And onward the transforming process goes. What I have just described is the gift of doing spiritual practices regularly. As you allow God’s spirit to minister to you in this way, the dynamics of the deadly sin, and the deadly experiences underneath it, lessen allowing you to have more and longer moments of the different aspects of God’s spirit in your life. Questions to Ponder:
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