Thoughts on Things: Oh, Those Deadly Sins

There are seven of them, but we won't discuss all of them today. They are best assimilated if taken in small doses.

 

Sloth. When I was little my mother called me "Queenie" because she saw me as a slacker. It is true that I took every opportunity to hide myself away with a book. I much preferred reading to housework. In fact, I still do. One of my sisters told me years ago that when she was little she decided that she would never sit and read while someone else was working. She had seen me in action (in inaction, more precisely) and vowed to be different. Apparently it never bothered me to have other people vacuuming around my feet as long as I could still remain immersed in a book. My family certainly considered me lazy.

 

Was I? I suppose so. Who wants to work? But I think part of me (I can think this now; I couldn't think it then) simply had to get away from that noisy family. There was no place in the house where I could be alone. The only way I could justify slipping away into my private self was by reading, feeding my imagination with story after story. I wasn't so much looking to escape "work" as I was looking to escape. 

 

Gluttony. Oh yeah, I can do this one. It isn't that I overeat, really, though I've been known to do that. More precisely, my life revolves around food.

 

St. Thomas Aquinas would have something to say about me. He maintained that there are five ways to commit gluttony: by eating too much ('nuff said). By eating too soon (lunch at 11:10, anyone?). By eating too expensively. By eating too eagerly (mea culpa). And by eating too fastidiously (I'm sorry, I eat only organically grown foods. Oh, I'm not eating wheat these days. Are these organically grown bananas? Does that custard have milk in it?).

 

Can you have a life of the spirit if you're concerned mainly with the stomach? Would I rather eat than pray? Probably. So I try to do as the Buddhists do: when I eat, I eat. When I pray, I pray. That way, eating itself becomes a form of attention that verges on (is?) prayer. Attend to what you do.

 

Of course, I don't really do that, either. My favorite thing is to read while I eat. I keep trying to wean myself from it, but I love it so much. If I'm eating alone I always read. If I'm eating with my husband, we have a rule that we can't read at dinner, but we can read at breakfast and lunch.  Maybe I can assert that what I love is reading-while-eating, and I can attend to THAT: to reading-while-eating. I do that sometimes, taking my mind off the book and thinking how much I'm enjoying eating and reading at the same time.

 

My mother's "little friend" Irma was the 5-foot-tall dynamo who mothered the Crosby clan. Their five children matched our own five (until our beautiful Mary Eileen came along a little later, making us six). At our annual joint Christmas-Eve get-togethers, the Johnsons (us) and the Crosbys always feasted, though meatlessly, as required by Church rules. And at the end of the meal, Irma would always say, "I have committed the sin of gluttony."

 

There are five other deadly sins. Are they Grumpy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful, and Doc? No, nothing so benign. They're more like Anger, Avarice, and Lust—sins you can really get your teeth into. Like gluttony, in fact.   

 

Copyright 2007 Ann Tudor
www.anntudor.ca