Readings
12
The Disordered Soul
The living room of Alun’s little cottage, nestled in the shadow of the south Wales steelworks, was shrouded in gloom. A haze of cigarette smoke, acridly pungent, hung in the air; the faded yellow curtains were pulled across the windows, veiling the midday sunlight. Alun fussed around over a portable stove in the corner of the room, rustling up tea in a chipped brown pot while I sat in a worn, sagging armchair watching him. His eyes were bloodshot and tired, and a good few days’ growth of stubble hung on his cheeks, but Alun was in good humor. He was, for now, sober.
Alun had shown up at our church a few months earlier. He had started appearing at the midweek Eucharist, a short Tuesday morning service with a small but loyal congregation. It was obvious from the beginning that he was testing the waters. He was a large bear of a man whose slurred speech and pickled breath advertised his alcoholism wherever he went. He had recently moved into the area and, looking for friendship, had decided to try the church. Although he was more conspicuous among the dozen or so folks at the Tuesday Eucharist, it also felt a little less public and formal—easier, perhaps, for him to edge in.
The worshipers were elderly, quiet and somewhat conservative, but they were also good Christian people who took the gospel to heart. They embraced Alun. He became a regular fixture at the service—sometimes good and sober, occasionally badly hung over, only once or twice gently inebriated. A couple of members of the congregation took to visiting him at home from time to time. Others would look out for him in the high street, offering a warm greeting or suggesting that he join them for coffee.
I enjoyed visiting Alun. The house was often gloomy and dark; if he was recovering from a bender after falling off the wagon he couldn’t bear the bright sunlight. Cigarettes helped reduce the alcohol cravings, so the smell and smoke were a constant feature. But Alun, at his best, was warm, friendly, hospitable and a wealth of fascinating stories. Drinking was his one great vice and flaw, busily destroying an otherwise wonderful man.
And his alcoholism tortured him. As we sat together that lunchtime over tea, he described the battle that raged inside on a daily, hourly, even minute by minute basis. How he longed to break free, to get cleaned up, to find a job, a proper home, to live some kind of normal life—to stop screwing up and destroying himself. But the cravings were so brutal, so severe, so dominating; they gripped his body and shook him, tormented him. He hated living his life from drink to drink but felt powerless to overcome the addiction. His spirit was so, so willing, but the flesh was enslaved.
The apostle Paul understood Alun’s problem well. In his letter to the Romans he described Alun’s struggle perfectly—and ours too, if we are honest:
I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. . . . I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. (Rom 7:18-19, 21-23)
We are made to be holy, to live well. But our fallenness, the “sin that clings so closely” (Heb 12:1) has become hardwired into our bodies. It exerts a seemingly irresistible force over us that constantly drags us away from a life in communion with God. Under the influence of our disordered drives and desires we constantly make poor choices and act wrongly; over time those choices harden into behavioral habits that only serve to ingrain sin more firmly into our lives. Holiness eludes us.
Created to Love
The opening chapter of the Bible tells us that we are made “in the image of God” (Gen 1:27). Scholars and theologians have reflected for over two millennia about exactly what that might mean, but the apostle John, in his first letter, gives us an important insight into at least one significant implication. “God is love,” he writes, “and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 Jn 4:16). To bear the character of God is to have love hardwired into our essential nature. The more we are conformed to the character of God, the more perfectly loving we will become. We are created to love.
When God calls us to holiness, he roots that call in his own character: “Be holy,” he says to the Israelites, “for I am holy” (Lev 11:44). Holiness, then, cannot simply be an abstract purity of our interior nature—an unsullied conscience, free from guilt. Rather it is a summons to pure love, to be the kind of people who can develop good, deep, loving relationships, both with God and with other people, relationships that are safe and enriching for all concerned. Jesus certainly seems to understand the call in this way. In the first half of the Sermon on the Mount he addresses a series of issues which threaten to undermine the quality of loving relationships: anger, adultery, divorce, deception and revenge. He then pushes the boundaries of love further than any reasonable morality would seem to demand: “Love your enemies,” he says, “and pray for those who persecute you”; in this way, he says, you will “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:44, 48). Love, it seems, is the fulfillment of holiness.
Many years later, the great twelfth-century Dominican writer Thomas Aquinas picked up on this strand of biblical teaching and made the startling assertion that love was more than the goal of Christian perfection: it is the fundamental power behind the created order. Just as physicists probe subatomic structure to identify the basic forces and particles that make up this physical universe, so Aquinas probed to the depths of Christian theology to identify the driving energy behind creation itself. In the end, Aquinas argued, everything is grounded in love, since all creation reflects the character of the one who made it. He suggested that we are not only made to love, we are made of love. Everything we do is driven by this divine quality: all we can do is love.
But Aquinas had no illusions about the terrifying human capacity for sin. He wrote about the lethal power of sin, that “turning away from our last end which is God.” He came to see love as having the kind of awesome power we see in nuclear fusion. Well-ordered and directed to the right ends, love can transform lives, inseparably unite people with one another and God, and act as the harmonious and creative power that holds all creation in being. But misdirected—allowed to turn in on itself, allowed to run wildly on the heels of any and every desire of our misguided hearts—love can become a horrifyingly destructive force, tearing apart the world from under our feet. Love, rightly ordered, will be the foundation of the kingdom of God. But grotesquely disordered love, inordinate self-love, which swirls in on itself like a fierce tornado, has the capacity to shape tragedies like Auschwitz or the Rwandan genocide. Sin—love disordered—is horrific. But holiness—love rightly ordered—is life in all its abundance.
Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, discusses the root and origin of sin by comparing two biblical texts, one from the New Testament and the other from the deuterocanonical books. He notes first that Paul writes to Timothy: “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim 6:10). But alongside this he sets a line from the apocryphal book of Sirach which says, “pride is the beginning of all sin” (Sir 10:15). Whether or not we want to accept, with Aquinas, the authority of the deuterocanonical text, the point he makes from these verses fits well with the tenor of Scripture as a whole. The first, he says, describes the way in which we allow our hearts to turn to an inappropriate degree toward the beauty and richness of creation. But the second cuts to the deeper and more serious issue of the way we allow our eyes to be turned away from God himself in the first place. As Paul puts it so directly, “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25). Our hearts become increasingly holy as they are healed of these twin maladies: our excessive love for creation (fueled by disordered emotional desires), and misdirected love for ourselves (fueled by disordered emotional drives).
Love Misdirected
The most odious corruption of love within our souls takes place when we allow love to become inwardly directed and self-
absorbed. Such misdirected love bears fruit in three of the traditional seven “deadly” sins: envy, wrath and pride. We experience envy when we begrudge others their achievements, successes or possessions. Unlike avarice and greed, where we desire those goods for ourselves, envy is more personal and destructive. We are less concerned about securing our own good, and more obsessed with damaging the other person. Unable to value the other person as highly, or even more highly, than ourselves, the only solution when they pull ahead of us in the rat race is to pull them right back again. Envy breeds malice.
Wrath, on the other hand, often springs from frustration with others who seem to be holding us back from our own successes—however trivial those achievements might be. Every day on our roads we see wrath being played out, as drivers compete with one another to be a little faster, a little more cunning, a little better placed to take first place in the flashing river of steel. Who ever got angry when some courteous soul let them change lanes? But when one racer cuts in front of another, sparks will fly—sometimes quite literally, if people lose control of both their anger and their vehicles. When we place ourselves at the center of the universe it is terrifyingly easy to fall prey to rage at those who get in our way. Perhaps it is no accident that the ancient gods were often depicted flinging furious thunderbolts; we made them in our flawed image.
And then there is pride, the all-consuming black hole of the soul. The proud are often beyond envy and wrath (unless they are threatened by another equally as proud); they have already crafted their pedestal and have both feet firmly planted on it. Assured of their own infinite worth and significance they can often appear superficially kind and considerate of others—after all, what do a few polite words cost? But pride incapacitates our ability to love genuinely. The more certain we are of our own importance, our significance and greatness, the less able we are to walk in the footsteps of one who, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Phil 2:6-7).
These impulses are disorders of our emotional drives. The emotions that lay behind them are not in themselves wrong or evil—in fact, they are necessary if we are to be able to love well and fully. The ambition that lies behind envy is what also propels us to undertake monumental creative endeavors, risky business ventures, complex social projects and bold missionary endeavor. Anger, when not distorted into wrath, is the appropriate response demanded by sin, evil and injustice; think of Jesus furiously expelling the merchants from the temple (Jn 2:13-17). And to regard ourselves as creatures of great value and worth is simply to echo the declaration of God at creation: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen 1:31). It is when ambition, anger and a sense of personal worth (and other emotional drives such as courage) become disordered that they collapse into envy, wrath and pride; then they are not only unable to help us love God and others, they actively hinder and destroy love.
In the face of this, Christians insist on a simple truth which is strikingly countercultural in our contemporary society, obsessed as it is with self-realization and self-regard: we are not here to love ourselves.
Now that needs some qualification, of course. It is not that we Christians are called to hate ourselves. The loathing which some people experience when they look in the mirror is neither natural nor healthy. But contrary to the way many preachers and writers have come to interpret Christ’s teaching on the great commandments, the call to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:39)
does not imply that our first task is to learn self-love. The twelfth-
century Cistercian writer Bernard of Clairvaux had a clearer picture. In his short but brilliant work On Loving God, he argued that love at its least perfected is inwardly focused, seeking only its own good. And this self-love is not true love at all, merely what happens to the capacity to love when it is corrupted into pride and vanity. As grace begins to reorder our hearts, though, some of that love starts to turn outward, toward God (and our neighbor), drawing us beyond ourselves—even if initially only because of the selfish benefits we can derive from others. A yet more well-ordered heart is able to love God and others for their own sake. And finally, says Bernard, we then truly learn what it means to love ourselves: to be grateful for the gift of ourselves, the only thing we truly have to offer to God and those around us, to express love. Growth in holiness ends in a proper love of self by turning outward to others, not by turning inward on ourselves.
The hallmark of holiness, this constant turning toward others in constant acts of humility and service, is a strikingly obvious characteristic of Jesus. Perhaps the most compelling example occurs on the night of the Last Supper. The apostle John tells us that Jesus, fully aware of his divine origins and significance, was seeking a way to love his disciples “to the end” (Jn 13:1—an equally accurate translation of the Greek could be “to the utmost”). So he stripped off his outer garment and proceeded to perform the work of the lowest, most menial slave: washing the filthy, dirt-crusted feet of those around him. The disciples are shocked and appalled, so much so that Peter is embarrassed for Jesus and tries to refuse. But Jesus persists, teaching them what holiness toward others might mean—and calling them to love one another to exactly the same degree.
Excessive Love
Aquinas, continuing to analyze the effects of sin on the human heart, just as a doctor carefully diagnoses the sick patient, turned from our misdirected drives to our inappropriate desires, the excessive love for creation which is the root of so many kinds of evil. Here is a love that at least looks beyond ourselves, he suggests—but which is nevertheless disordered, since it is not fully turned toward “our last end, which is God.” This is love which places the creation above the Creator.
Again, it might help to clarify. The Christian tradition resists the idea that material creation in itself is bad, evil or corrupt. Genesis tells us repeatedly that as God called the various elements of creation into being, he “saw that it was good” (Gen 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). As we noted above, human beings delighted him so fully that after their creation he went further, proclaiming the newly formed universe “very good” (Gen 1:31). There are certainly no grounds in Scripture for a religion that delights in the spiritual while denigrating the physical world. The dust from which the sons and daughters of God are made is both very physical and very wonderful.
But it is possible for us to delight in the material creation to an inordinate degree, in ways that are good neither for us, for others or for the wider world—and which certainly draw us away from any depth of intimacy with God. Classically Christians have spoken of three cardinal sins that afflict us in this way: gluttony (an inordinate appetite for food), avarice (an unbalanced desire for wealth), and lust (a disordered love of sexual pleasure).
As with our drives, we need to notice that each of these disordered desires is rooted in an entirely appropriate and necessary emotion. Our appetites for food, material possessions and sexual delight are gifts from God, as are the pleasures which satisfy them. Christian disciplines such as fasting, simplicity and celibacy should not blind us to this essential fact. We do not practice self-denial because food, wealth and sex are somehow intrinsically tainted. Good, orthodox Christian theology celebrates the material world, placing tremendous value on it—which is precisely why acts of self-denial can be an effective sacrificial offering to God. The point of fasting is not that food makes us less pious, but that seeking God with a stronger desire than our appetite for food satisfies a spiritual hunger.
It’s fascinating to see the way Jesus engaged with the material world, maintaining a perfectly balanced position: enjoying creation, but not allowing his appetites to take control. Jesus fasted, but he also celebrated at the wedding at Cana, feasted with the Pharisees and multiplied a handful of loaves to feed a crowd of thousands. He lived in great simplicity yet moved easily among the wealthy and encouraged his disciples to accept the gifts offered by benefactors; we know the disciples kept a purse for making gifts to the poor (a responsibility entrusted to Judas, who was sadly blinded by his avarice). Although he was celibate, Jesus was more willing than most in his culture to be surrounded by (and touched by) women and men, and he clearly had no difficulty forming intimate relationships with people of both sexes—think of the apparent depth of his friendship with both Peter and Mary Magdalene. His emotional desires were always well-ordered and appropriate—and they made it easier, not harder, for him to express love.
Lukewarm Love
The last major barrier to holiness which we face is the cooling of our ardor for God. The Christian tradition has often spoken of this as the spiritual malady of sloth, a translation of the Greek word ake4dia (sometimes written in its Latinate form, accidie). We tend to think of sloth as a very minor issue, little more than oversleeping on a sunny Saturday morning or failing to file our tax returns on time. But for Christians that word has always had a much more pointed meaning: it is the failure to maintain an attentive and passionate love for God, a neglect of the greatest commandment: “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mt 22:37).
The early desert Christians of Egypt spoke of ake4dia in vivid and concrete terms as the “noonday demon.” Picture the monk in his cell, they would say. As the sun rises, so the monk rises filled with enthusiasm for the new day. Psalms are sung and prayers are recited. The day’s work begins. Throughout the morning, the monk remains fervent and attentive to God. But as the burning sun rises high into the sky, time seems to slow. Energy levels drop. Evening seems so far away, and both work and prayer become unbearably tedious. The monk becomes listless and restless. The pursuit of God comes to an exhausted halt.
This is a beautiful metaphor of the Christian life as a whole, compressed into a single day. Following Christ is a long-haul proposition. It is easy to begin with tremendous enthusiasm, only to find after a number of years that our piety has become a familiar habit and our devotion rote. Church no longer inspires us. Our prayers and Bible readings are dutiful, but not life changing. And at this point it is very easy to allow our white-hot passion for God to cool into a more comfortable glowing ember. This is neither love misdirected nor love to excess. It is love gone cold and dry. It is dangerously easy to let love sleep.
The Cardinal Sins
Aquinas was, of course, drawing heavily on the ancient Christian tradition of the seven “deadly” sins: envy, wrath, pride, gluttony, avarice, lust and sloth. Theologians more commonly call them the “cardinal” sins; the Latin word cardinalis was used to describe the hinge on a door. And that is the character of these seven vices; they are not some arbitrary collection of sins pulled from the whole range of human behavior—they are the “hinge” sins which open the door to every other distortion of love in our lives.
Envy, wrath and pride are misdirected love. Gluttony, avarice and lust are excessive love. Sloth is lukewarm love. But despite all that, they are still love. Horrifically distorted, repulsively corrupted love—but yet love. Because in the end evil cannot overcome what God has made, and it cannot produce anything new. It depraves, it distorts, it demeans. But it cannot destroy, and it cannot create.
And what has become defaced and diseased can be cleansed and healed. Although the image of God within us—the capacity to love as God loves—has been disfigured by sin, it can never be entirely erased. And God, by grace, is restoring that loving nature in each of us whose lives are hidden in Christ. As the apostle John writes, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2, emphasis added). Within us fallen people, love has been corrupted. But within us redeemed people, love is being made whole.
Readings
Each of this week’s readings gives us the opportunity to reflect on love: the loving character of God, our call to live as those made in the image of God, and the effect of sin as it distorts love within us.
As you read, pray, meditate and journal on these readings allow yourself to be drawn beyond simple analysis of the text and its ideas (although this is the crucial first step in our reading). Thomas à Kempis once wrote, “I would rather feel contrition than define the word.” Similarly, it is more important for us to be able to enter into and experience the loving nature of God—and the image of God within us, both in its corrupted state and as God is healing it—than to be able to explain it.
Day 1
1 John 4:7-12
(God’s character is love)
Day 2
Matthew 5:38-48
(the call to love)
Day 3
Matthew 5:17-20
(Jesus fulfills the law of love)
Day 4
Matthew 22:34-40
(the greatest commandment)
Day 5
Romans 6:1-11
(dead to sin, alive to God)
Day 6
Galatians 5:16-26
(the fruit of the Spirit)
Day 7
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
(the greatest gift is love)