The Seven Deadly Sins:
Lust and Gluttony
18 March 2007
Today I am continuing my series of sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins with two lovely specimens: lust and gluttony. These two are related sins, springing from the normal desires of our embodied existence but prone to go awry very easily. In fact, in our society, both of them seem to be very prevalent, since on nearly any account, our sexual activity and our eating and drinking are almost completely out of control. This seems to be easier to see with eating and drinking, since we can attach financial costs to them in terms of health care and rehabilitation. And anything with a monetary price affixed to it has a kind of reality less tangible things do not have. Yet, there is a price being paid for a lack of control in our sexual lives, too. Human relationships in our society are not in good shape, and many of those relate to our sexuality.
So let’s begin with lust: an ambiguous word referring to a wide range of things. Unlike the words for some of the other sins, it can refer to the normal desire of which it is also the perversion—that is, it is the word for natural sexual desire as well as the word used to describe transgressive behaviour. The latter is becoming more difficult in our society, however, as we have nearly done away with all the boundaries regulating sexual behaviour, except taking advantage of children. Yet, it is not only children who are injured by sexual misbehaviour—that is, lust as a sin: adults are wounded, too. People still get hurt through lust. I saw a book in the bookstore last week with the title, Unhooking. It had to do with the price young women have paid for the hook-up culture of sex, detached from love and affection. Of course, we detached it from procreation, where it originally was rooted, at least a generation ago. Now sex is a kind of free-floating activity often tied to no particular purpose whatever, except transient pleasure. It appears to have mostly taken the place of dating amongst young adults. What has gone wrong?
Lust is a complicated business and I don’t have all the answers, but I am trying to explore the seven deadly sins with the help of Merton’s idea of the true and the false self, or, as St Paul would have said, “the old man and the new man,” or in our Epistle today commented: “in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new”. So let me try to bring this to bear on the discussion. First, though, let us begin with the fact that lust is rooted in the body. It is a biological urge we share with the beasts and some of our problems can be traced to a sheer excess of animal spirits. But, of course, we are more than animals, and our bodies are supposed to be under the control of our minds and spirits. That means, we must develop disciplines to keep the body functioning according to the choices made by the mind and spirit, if we are going to make a human use of our sexuality. Now, it is possible for the mind to go off track and allow too much liberty to the body. Sometimes the spirit has erred and imagined that it has no body at all; the result has been a mess of a different sort. Christianity went through a long time of this from late antiquity until well up into modern times, when there was hardly a good word to be said for sex. Christian spirituality tended to develop in monasteries rather than in households and parish churches—and that has often meant a strong prejudice against any kind of sexual expression. Things have been changing lately. Still, if lust were only a problem of educating the mind and channeling the body’s energy, we wouldn’t have such a hard time with sex. It would be like taming a wild animal and making it a useful servant for our domestic purposes—difficult sometimes, but manageable.
But there is another level (at least one more) where our sexual desires are powerful and this is more problematic. Lust, considered as a normal human drive or desire, has as its object more than procreation or even pleasure. It contains in itself the promise of mutual delight. When lust has fulfilled itself, two people are enjoying the intimacy of mutual desire fulfilled, a kind of joyous unity in which each takes delight in the delight of the other, almost more than, or equally as much as, their own pleasure. This brings sexual desire into the rich depths of human love and affection and now we are caught up into the varying abilities of people to love each other, to give of themselves, and to understand themselves and each other.
At this level we have to think about what it means to be the kind of person who can love another according to the promise of natural lust—in other words, what do I have to be in order to take delight and be a delight? What does deep mutuality require? Here is where Christians have long taught the necessity of marriage as the only place in which such mutualities can thrive. I won’t go on to argue this point, but I think we can say that a deep and satisfying account of Christian marriage in these terms has yet to be given—at least, I am not aware of one. Too often in the past, marriage has been thought of as a defense against sin—that is, sex was so ambiguous and dangerous and inherently sinful that only within marriage could you contain its sinfulness and that only just barely.
But we can see that it takes a mature person to be a good candidate for marriage and for the mutuality that intimacy requires—or at least a person of sufficient resolve that he or she can promise to do what it takes to become such a person. What if, instead of the pursuit of maturity, that is, at least partly, becoming the person God wants us to be, the true self that only He knows; what if, instead, we are in pursuit of that false self which really wants to exist and function outside the divine Mercy, away from the divine will? Remember: the false self doesn’t really exist except in our own minds. It is the projection of our fantasies and desires to be someone as measured by those external markers normally used in our society: success, physical attractiveness, money, sexual prowess, prestige. This externalized self doesn’t correspond with our own reality! Since this self is false, then what you get, when you pursue it, is the emptiness that results from a falsity right at the center of the personality. There will be a vacuity, a hollowness, where a fullness of the divine reality in one’s life ought to be. Nature, as you know from your high school science class, abhors a vacuum. Where there is one, it will tend to be filled with something, anything ready to hand. One of the things empty people fill their emptiness with is sex—sex without consideration for the needs and feelings of others, without a notion of proper boundaries, without a sense of the meaning of a whole human life, without even a proper consideration of who they themselves truly are.
If a person is haunted by a sense of unreality about himself—a very common experience in our society [note: Christopher Lasch’s book of several years ago:The Culture of Narcisism]—if he is stressed by over-work, to the point where he is out of touch with himself, he might well be tempted to find in sexual activity some kind of answer to his longings. The sensations aroused in sexual activity can make a person feel as if he were alive. When you look at the full range of human emotion and desire and passion and life and meaning, this seems rather pathetic, yet there are many authors who have made the point that our sexual lives as 21st century Americans are largely driven by this emptiness. That is, lust doesn’t even have much lust left in it!
The way back to an authentic expression of Christian sexuality, then, is through a rediscovery of the true self that God means us to be. Nothing can be real for us if we are not real ourselves. If our sexuality is to be what God intends it to be, then we will have to discover ourselves in Him and learn to manage our sexual lives under his direction. There will many issues to be worked out, to be sure. Genuine Christians may not always agree about every boundary line. But imagine what our world would be like if sex were no longer a surrogate activity for a sense of personal emptiness or boredom or frustration with life or the stress of exhaustion? Suppose that we took away from our interpersonal interactions any of the damaging effects of people trying to give some kind of reality to that false self they are trying to construct by seducing and taking emotional advantage of other people? What if we could relate to each other as men and women within the will and pleasure of the God who made us? That would be a prize worth having—one worth working for now within the Church!
It is easy to slip from this discussion of sex into a consideration of gluttony because we know and have been told in many ways over the last several decades that eating and drinking can also be driven by desires other than the mere pleasures associated with food and drink. Food and drink are natural requirements for our bodies, but human beings have long engaged in providing things to eat and drink that have little to do with purely necessary nutrition. Only humans feast, for example; animals merely eat. Only humans take delight in taste and texture and presentation. There are few delights in the whole world which measure up to a good meal shared with friends.
It is possible to take all this to excess, of course. One can become too concerned for the quality and presentation of one’s food. The desire to have good tasting food can be overdone and result in an obsession with new recipes or extravagant ingredients. I am not sure that this is gluttony so much as avarice—gluttony if one is obsessive about eating it, avarice if one is obsessive about showing it off. It is always dangerous to be obsessional: whether about food and drink or about sex or anything else. As a scholar of a past generation put it, God is supposed to be our only obsession.
But I think it is fair to say that our problems with food and drink these days are not so much the problems of people who like to feast too much or who are obsessional about the quality of their food or the vintage of their wine—such gourmands do, in fact, exist. I read of a man somewhere in New York who had a wine cellar with 65,000 bottles of the really good stuff! At the other end of the spectrum, there is ignorance about the meaning of real nutrition, so that people just consume junk food with no idea it is not good for them. However, the main problem with food and drink in our society is the problem of displacement—we are compensating for other problems by eating and drinking too much or too many of the wrong things. Just as with sex, this compensation has taken root in the habits of our bodies, and now we are addicted or at least habituated. It is difficult to change, as anyone who has tried to diet knows.
Of course, our cultural context is important, too. We have become more sedentary as our jobs take more mental than physical labor. We are busier and tend towards prepared and processed foods. We have succumbed to advertisements which tailor foods to our tastes and not to our nutrition. And there seems to be a race to see which restaurants can make the largest portions for the cheapest price. As we rush to eat a bite while doing something else, or watching TV while consuming a TV dinner or fast food, we lose sight of the food itself. One way to combat this devaluation of food is to learn a new gratitude for it. The productivity of the world is one of its greatest mysteries and most profound blessings. The way we produce and consume our food is threatening the natural abilities of this world—from the way we use chemicals in grain production to the inhumane ways we treat food animals, to the waste we throw back into the environment. If we eat food without gratitude or without thought, without giving thanks and without knowing where it comes from and what is in it, we don’t treat it with the respect it deserves. Perhaps by becoming more intentional we can eat and drink with more moderation and in healthier quantities with less detriment to the world and without gluttony.
But this isn’t the whole problem: we also know that people who eat too much often feel bad about themselves because they don’t measure up to what they thought they were supposed to be. People who drink too much beer or wine sometimes are trying to drown their frustrations with life as they have tried to live it. Food and drink are accessible to us in ways they were not to our ancestors and so we reach for the chips or the chocolate or the bottle when things don’t go well, until it becomes a habit ingrained in the body. Suddenly we find we are too big or too dependent on the bottle. Once the body has gotten used to something, it is extremely difficult to manage it. It usually takes a long, difficult process. But going on a diet or going to AA won’t be a final solution until a person begins to come to terms with what God wants him to be, to release his grip on the false self he couldn’t manage and to allow God to reveal to him the true self that only He knows. Something similar and more complicated is going on with regard to the eating disorders that affect so many people in our culture. People are plagued by false notions of themselves and eat or don’t eat to compensate. They are perhaps as much sinned against as sinners themselves, but again, part of their cure is to understand who they truly are in a deep relationship with God.
Lust and gluttony refer to two of those areas where dysfunctions of body and spirit overlap. A dysfunctional spirit or heart may be out of control, out of God’s control, that is, and compensate by indulging bodily appetites; or the body may be undisciplined and drag the spirit down. Christian wisdom does not deny the body its needs or its value, but keeps the body in its proper place. What that proper place is, is still open for serious discussion. Eating, drinking and sex are only part of the issues at stake. Our modern technology has opened up other serious problems, like abortion, stem cell research, fertility technology, genetic manipulation of human cells, and all of those end of life issues which relate to the question of how much effort do we put into keeping the body going when death is looming? In short, what is the proper place for the body? What kind of care do we owe it and how does the physical life correlate with the spiritual? We have not gotten these things completely right in the past. But we are not getting them right these days, either. We need a new and deeper discussion.
I hope this kind of sermon has been helpful to you. Next week I hope to conclude with the last two sins of the seven deadly list. Again, I invite your feedback.