Deadly Sins and Virtues
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
March 15, 2009
In this season of Lent between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, it is well for us to take the opportunity to reflect on vices we may have indulged and virtues we wish to cultivate. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear which are which; it depends to some extent on your point of view. Forrest Church illustrates:
You may be interested to know that the wolves have a different version of Little Red Riding Hood than we do. It's not all that surprising really. The meaning of a story and even its details change according to the perspective of the one who is telling it. This is true of everything from Custer's Last Stand to the four holy gospels. In any event, as a scholar might phrase it, here is the lupine redaction of the Riding Hood tale:
Once upon a time there was a good wolf, always helpful to others, always kind. One day, when walking through the woods on his morning constitutional, he encountered a little girl dressed all in red. At first he was frightened, because humans have a history of being cruel to wolves, but he overcame his fear and welcomed her to his part of the woods.
"Where are you going, little girl?" the kind wolf asked. "To my grandmother's house on the other side of the forest," the little girl replied. "My grandmother is very old and very ill, and I am taking her this picnic basket filled with treats to make her young and well again."
What a sweet little girl, thought the wolf to himself, yet so naive, so unschooled in the ways of the woods, which are the ways of life and death. The more he pondered this, the more worried he became. Perhaps he should have accompanied the little girl, not just to protect her from any who might wish her harm, but also gently to share with her a little of his wisdom, lest, as children often do, she should end up feeling in some way responsible when her grandmother died.
By this time the little girl had quite a head start. Nonetheless, the good wolf put down his walking stick and ran as fast as he could to the little girl's grandmother's house, taking a shortcut he knew, hoping perhaps to accompany the little girl home, during which time they could discuss these things at leisure.
When he arrived at the grandmother's house, the wolf knocked on her door, unsure as to whether or not the little girl had already arrived. There was no answer. He knocked again. Still no answer. The door was unlatched so he entered the cottage, only to discover the little girl's grandmother lying lifeless in her bed. She had no pulse and was not breathing. Desperately, he attempted artificial respiration, but to no avail. He could not resuscitate her.
Just then he heard the little girl singing sweetly in the distance as she approached the cottage. Determined to protect her from the shock of finding her grandmother dead, he had to think fast. Then it struck him. He had one chance, albeit a risky one. Though he had already enjoyed a good breakfast and was not hungry at all, he wolfed the old woman down, threw on her nightgown, and jumped under the covers.
Despite the wolf's best intentions, as so often happens everything went wrong that possibly could. To begin with, his disguise was far from perfect. When the little girl came in, her curiosity concerning her grandmother's appearance led her to ask a number of questions, about the length of her nose, for instance, and the depth of her voice, but when she commented upon the size of her grandmother's teeth and the wolf replied as sweetly as possible, "The better to eat with, my dear" (prejudice later added the "you"), the little girl recognized that this was not her grandmother at all, screamed, and ran from the cottage. The good wolf pursued her, trying to explain, but before he had the chance, a hunter leapt from the underbrush and shot him dead.
Very sad.
Wolves love to hear this story, I am told. Around the den at nighttime, when Daddy and Mommy tuck the cubs into bed, it is the one they usually ask to hear, even though they know it by heart. The moral never fails to move them. Even though the good wolf was killed, in a way he died for all wolves, for through the example of his life generations of wolves have been inspired to perform unself-regarding deeds of kindness.
Critics within the wolf community say this smacks of self-deception, but surely the tellers of tales can be forgiven for stretching the truth in their favor. After all, it's only human. There are always at least two sides to every story. The trouble really begins when these two sides, either literally or figuratively, are lined up against one another on a field of battle. Between the trenches the rhetoric of good versus evil is mirrored, one side's good being evil to the other, and vice versa. This might prove bewildering to an impartial observer, but there are no impartial observers.[1]
So much for wolves. We, on the other hand, are ordinary people. We rarely see ourselves aligned on the side of good in the field of battle against evil. Sometimes we long for such clear distinctions, a fight where lines are clearly drawn, an opportunity to stand up and fight against wrong and for right not matter the consequences to ourselves. Heroic sacrifice is noble and is the stuff of our daydreams and sometimes of our actions, especially when we are young. Perhaps you were born too late to fight in the Great War against Nazism and Japan and found yourself wishing you’d had the opportunity to serve in some self-sacrificing way. Ordinary life doesn’t have such clear lines, even if sometimes we wish it did, even if our leaders or pundits sometimes try to paint it that way. So we are left with ordinary virtues and vices, sins and triumphs.
We have been given various guidelines over the ages about how we should be conducting our lives, and each family teaches the rules of living in its own way. We have, for example, the Ten Commandments, foundational in our own religious tradition. Perhaps you memorized these growing up, as I did, and perhaps you did so in a shorthand form, something more closely approximating the traditional Jewish terminology, Ten Words: No other Gods, no idols, not swear, remember Sabbath, honor parents, not murder, no adultery, not steal, not lie, not covet. Some of these prohibitions are a little hard to convey to children – how do you translate no adultery, for example? – but others are crystal clear: no lying and no stealing, for example.
I remember vividly the first time I was caught in the open breaking one of the commandments: My parents, grandparents, brother and I often visited my great-grandmother and Aunt Mildred & Uncle Merlin on Sunday afternoons after church. One day when I was seven, maybe eight, I was wandering around in their mysterious and beckoning upstairs and I was strangely drawn to their wind-up alarm clocks. I managed to sneak two of them out to the car, hide them under the seat, and after we’d gotten home, conceal them in our playhouse outdoors. There weren’t many suspects in the case and it was quickly solved, and so the next morning we returned to bring back the clocks, which they needed to get up in the morning and milk their cows. My aunt Mildred gently sat me down on the side steps, indicated how much she loved and cared for me, and then asked me if I remembered the Ten Commandments. I was pretty good at it on the whole, and probably got through eight or so, all of which seemed wonderfully abstract and nothing the I might be capable ever in my life, but I had a very hard time choking out the troublesome eighth commandment which I had just flagrantly broken, “not steal.” I had no idea what the punishment for violating one of the Ten Commandments might be, but fortunately my aunt, faithful Methodist as she was, believed in forgiveness and extended her forgiveness to me and assured me that God would also forgive. There were no threats of hellfire in that case, and I realized later that she was something of a closet Universalist in believing that God is Love first and foremost, anxious to correct and bring back to rightness much more than to punish. I’m glad Aunt Mildred was there to get me through my first tangle with the Commandments.
Maybe you had trouble with some of the others, or maybe you wondered how seriously you should take them if swearing – taking the Name of the Lord thy God in vain – ranked right up there with murder. Maybe you had to wrack your conscience to come up with sins you should be taking into the confessional.
The trouble with the Ten, of course, is that they don’t give a lot of detail about the stuff of our daily living. It is possible to elaborate them, of course, to build a fence around each of these, as it were, as Jesus did when he said in his Sermon on the Mount, [NRS Matthew 5:27] "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Some families like mine enforced strict behavioral rules on themselves and their children to ensure that no one got started on the wrong foot: no dancing, no card playing, no smoking or drinking, no movies or TV; some of those have clearly proven prudent rules of living – no drinking or smoking, for example, even if the prohibition may sometimes have encouraged defiance; some like strictly limiting TV time for children are clearly good choices in any family. Having never been tempted by gambling, I’m a little sorry that I never learned how to play cards when I was a kid; it’s a little pleasure that in retrospect seems perfectly harmless, though it is certainly unwise to encourage a taste for gambling, whether at cards or on the stock market.
The season of Lent has historically been an opportunity to take time to examine our consciences and consider how were have balanced our lives as between the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Virtues. The Sins are classically Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, and Sloth. The Virtues have been variously named, often as the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, courage, justice and the theological virtues as named by the Apostle Paul, faith, hope and love. If only it were easy to shun the wrong and choose the right, to know at any given moment what decision to make in order deny the temptation of the vices and cultivate and honor the virtues which we can see contribute to lives of goodness and decency lived around us. But as the story from The Name of the Rose in our reading this morning and the story of the wolfs’ version of Little Red Riding Hood suggest, it can be very easy to disguise in virtue the vice which tempts us, and there is no neutral observer to tell us unfailingly which is which. One of the interesting reactions from victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme that came out this past week as he was being sentenced was that the victims regarded themselves as virtuous for having settled for a return of only 10% per year while others were greedily gaining far more in the stock market. They came to see themselves as special, enlightened, and restrained in comparison to the others who were indulgent and foolish.
Then there are times when we do what we did not intend to do for reasons we don’t understand. As Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans, [7:19] “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” We can speak of unconscious motivations, or carelessness, of bad habits learned and not renounced, but we all, surely, recognize that we fall short of what we wish and dream we could be, our highest ideals.
The reality is that we live in a world of ambiguity, of uncertainty, of difficult decisions where the specific rules and all their elaborations may not be enough to bring us to a decision about what exactly we ought to do now. Lent is a season to reflect and to resolve, but it is also a period when we are most aware of the contrast between our highest ideals – the perfection of goodness in heaven, if you will – and the temptations and shortcomings which thwart them, which we could see if we were inclined to mythic representations as the blandishments of evil. We are in fact suspended between, living in a world which the ancients identified with Purgatory, the state of being between the highest in the lowest. Perhaps it would not be amiss on the occasion of the St. Patrick’s Parade today to recount a story Forrest Church tells about St. Patrick’s introduction to Purgatory:
Legend has it that when St. Patrick visited County Donegal, Ireland, brandishing a muscular gospel well suited to vanquish the tired remnants of a once thriving Druidical cultus, Christ appeared to him in a vision. Among those places holy to the Druids was a dark cave on the tiny island of Lough Derg. Rumored to be the mouth of hell, an altar-place for dark priestcraft worked by Druid elders in the ancient days, no one dared to approach this cave.
"Go there," Christ said to Patrick. "Enter the cave. Then return to the people with word of what you've seen. Great wonders will be revealed to you."
His followers valiantly tried to dissuade Patrick from accepting Christ's dare. Druidical lore had it that anyone who entered the mouth of hell would not return. Even newly baptized Christians, protected by the seal of Christ, lacked the temerity to test their faith against the spell of Druid magic. But Patrick would not be moved. He perceived correctly that this single act of valor, itself a reenactment of the victories of Yahweh over the priests of Baal, would do more to remove the veil of superstition than a thousand sermons.
He set sail at nightfall for Lough Derg to enter the mouth of hell.
All night long Patrick crouched in a damp, cold chamber deep within the cave. Just before daybreak his eyes opened upon a miraculous sight: the torments of hell and the ecstasy of heaven juxtaposed in a single image…. "God showed him the places of Purgatory," [it was said].
…The truth revealed in this [perhaps apocryphal] legend is that purgatory isn't someplace halfway between hell and heaven. It is heaven and hell at once.[2]
Heaven and hell at once, and precisely here, where we live our lives, here on earth where we are, as it were, suspended in the middle between birth and death, between right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice, heaven and hell.
I have introduced a great deal of ambiguity here, and I don’t want to leave without offering a way through the uncertainty we all face in our lives. I’m afraid we can’t ever be certain as we live our lives that we have chosen for the best on every occasion, but the story we told the children this morning gives us perhaps the most certain guide we can find in this life.
We easily remember the maxim “Love your neighbor as yourself” and we remember clearly another expression of the same maxim as expressed by Jesus, “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.” We can find this theme in most religious traditions as the Golden Rule: “Do not do to another what is hateful to yourself” is another way of putting it, for example.
But the story of the Good Samaritan comes in the context of a discussion about the Law of Moses, and the lawyer who questioned Jesus correctly summarizes the law in this way: [NRS Luke 10:27] "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." This formulation is found in the teaching of other rabbis at the time of Jesus, but it has come to us through the Gospel of Luke. We remember most clearly the second part of the summary, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but I think the first part is at least as important, though I must confess I’ve often puzzled over how to understand and experience such love toward God.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.” I confess I struggle with how to take this and understand it and apply it, but I think our consideration this morning of the ambiguity of moral action provides a context which makes it clearer. It’s very easy for us to adopt a self-interested stance in deciding how to act, who to help, who to ignore – as indeed we must in living our lives, protecting what is precious, even in loving one neighbor in particular given that none of us can in fact rescue every single one of our neighbors in the whole world. Instead, it seems to me, we are called to adopt a God’s-eye view, a view of the world and our role in it that insofar as possible rises above our own particular interests, desires, preconceptions, even our sense of our own virtue to find what in particular we are here to do at this moment, whether to turn aside and help the stranger bleeding on the roadside, or to support our church, our neighborhood, friends in time of need and suffering, or just to raise our children to follow in the same path of righteousness so that they too can experience wholeness in their lives as they navigate the shoals that we face as their parents and grandparents.
If we take that path, then the fires of Purgatory become not punitive but purgative, burning away the temptations that pull us down toward the wrong and opening our eyes to opportunities to stand on the side of right, not righteously but humbly, all too aware of our limitations but always looking higher, daring more, seeing more clearly the path laid before us so that we can more and more “love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all our mind; and our neighbor as ourselves.”
Amen.