Slide 1
The Sin of Anger/Wrath
Righteous Anger in the
Bible
The Nature of Righteous
Anger
Sinful Anger/Wrath
Forms of Anger/Wrath
To edit a people out of history is a thoroughgoing act of anger, another kind
of holocaust. A drug dealer who wants to expand his turf and so murders a
competitor; a businessman who ditches an uncouth wife when she impedes his
career . . .
A sheep rancher who poisons
another’s animals so that his flocks can use the wells unobstructed; a
professor who savages a colleague’s book to enhance her own standing in the
field; a country that goes to war to take a warm water port . . .
All of these acts of anger have a good deal in common. The self-defined self
and its goals are the absolute; the neighbor is diminished, merely an obstacle
to be removed.
God, who created human beings to live together in mutual joy and peace, is
himself just an obstruction.
—William S. Stafford
Dante’s Purgation of
Anger/Wrath
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The Sin of Sloth/Accidie
Sloth/Accidie
In the world [Sloth or Accidie] calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is
called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst
punishment. It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks
to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates
nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive
because there is nothing it would die for. . .
It is one of the favourite tricks of this Sin to dissemble itself under cover
of a whiffling activity of body. We think that if we are busily rushing
about and doing things, we cannot be suffering from Sloth. And besides,
violent activity seems to offer an escape from the horrors of Sloth . . .
So the other sins hasten to provide a cloak for Sloth: Gluttony offers a whirl
of dancing, dining, sports, and dashing very fast from place to place to gape
at beauty-spots; which when we get to them, we defile with vulgarity and waste
. . .
Covetousness rakes us out of bed at an early hour, in order that we may put pep
and hustle into our business: Envy sets us to gossip and scandal, to writing
cantankerous letters to the papers, and to the unearthing of secrets and the
scavenging of dustbins . . .
Wrath provides (very ingeniously) the argument that the only fitting activity
in a world so full of evildoers and evil demons is to curse loudly and
incessantly “Whatever brute and blackguard made the world”; while Lust provides
that round of dreary promiscuity that passes for bodily
vigour.
But these are all disguises for the empty heart and the empty brain and the
empty soul of Acedia.
—Dorothy L. Sayers
Forms of Sloth/Accidie
A nun would begin to feel a resistance toward God, a sort of resentful
tiredness. She would turn down opportunities to serve or to grow; occasions of
grace were ignored or declined . . .
She would turn inward but
not to God; she would pull back from relationships, not responding to love,
closing her eyes at light, in a spiritual analogue to
depression.
Her shrinking continued into final despair: the certainty of God’s rejection,
and her own rejection of any new possibility. One way or another, the end was
suicide . . .
A man in his forties, an effective lawyer, has a baby boy who is afflicted by
Downs’ Syndrome. Anyone would be vulnerable to depression under the burdens
that inevitably follow such a diagnosis . . .
Yet his wound is deeper. He
blames God; bitterness spreads. He goes to church, he stays on some committees,
he cares for his son; but in his heart he is certain that God cannot love him,
and his heart pulls back . . .
He goes through the motions of conventional piety until his funeral thirty
years later; motions are all they are, until he makes no further
motion.
He had died much earlier, of accidie.
—William S. Stafford
Dante’s Purgation of
Sloth/Accidie
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