The Virtue in the Vice: Finding Seven Lively Virtues in the Seven Deadly Sins - Hardcover

Meyers, Robin R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0757302211 ISBN 13: 9780757302213

Publisher: Hci, 2004

Synopsis

One of America's most thoughtful ministers adds a startling new twist to the Seven Deadly Sins.

Our world is awash in false dichotomies: "You're either for us or against us, good or evil, 'born again' or 'left behind.'"

Virtue is virtue, and vice is vice, but is it really that simple? Are the rules of proper conduct that black and white?

With extraordinary clarity of thought and word, Dr. Robin Meyers argues that there are seven vital, life-affirming attributes everyone must embrace to lead a full life-and that in fact not only are these virtues not the opposite of evil, but that each is based on urges and instinct that are similar to the Seven Deadly Sins.

• Pride is a sin; Self-worth is essential to life.
• Envy is a sin; Emulation is essential to life.
• Anger is a sin; Righteous Indignation is essential to life.
• Lust is a sin; Holy Eros is essential to life.
• Gluttony is a sin; Communion is essential to life.
• Greed is a sin; Wanting Wisely is essential to life.
• Sloth is a sin; Contentment is essential to life.

This isn't a philosophical treatise (although after reading this book no reader will ever think about morality in the same way again). The Virtue in the Vice uses personal stories, pop culture examples, and anecdotes from both the contemporary world and the Bible to create a practical plan for living. This book will help people embrace the ambiguity of life and the moral clarity that comes with honoring their own rights and needs and those of their fellow man.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr. Robin R. Meyers is Senior Minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City and Professor of Speech and Rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. He is an author, a newspaper columnist, and an award-winning commentator for National Public Radio.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
Worthiness, not Pride

 

Pride goeth before the fall. No, pride guarantees it.
Anonymous

           

 
Once upon a forgotten morning, in some forgotten room, amidst the refuse of poverty and despair, a sixteen-year-old girl from Cincinnati, Ohio, gave birth to a little boy without a name. She meant to give him a name, of course, but she just hadn't gotten around to it. There was no father to consult. In fact, she wasn't sure who the father was.

The hospital nurse came around to fill out the paperwork and asked the mother, whose last name was Maddox, to tell her the name of the child. 'He ain't got no name,' she said.

'Well,' the nurse responded, 'we have to put something on the birth certificate.'
'Look, I'm tired,' the mother said. 'Can I go back to sleep now?'

So the nurse returned to her station, picked up a pen and wrote 'No Name' on his birth certificate. That's what she wrote on that precious piece of paper, that legal tender that proves we exist, that coveted document stamped with inky little feet that goes into the lockbox and is cherished for all time. That's how his life began, this little boy. He came into the world as No Name Maddox. When his teenage mother remarried, he became No Name Manson.
By the time he was nine or ten, No Name figured out that his mother was a prostitute. Nobody told him this, at least not in so many words. But at night he would lie in his bed and listen to the sounds of his mother entertaining her clients.

Sometimes she sounded happy. Other times she sounded frightened. So No Name confused the two of them, and he still thinks that fear and happiness are somehow connected. As soon as he was old enough to make it on his own, he disappeared into the underbelly of the world and stayed hidden for a long time.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, he surfaced, this time in the papers, on the West Coast. Only now he had a name, one that he had given himself and the press had passed along to the whole world: Charles.

Charles Manson. Running all over California, trying to kill his mother.

Whatever went wrong here had nothing to do with pride. Not in the Greek sense of hubris, not in the Christian sense of self-idolatry. The truth is that the mother of Charles Manson suffered from something much more common and much more deadly than excessive pride. She had a fatal case of worthlessness.

When the church fathers put together the world's most famous list of sins, the Seven Deadly Sins, pride always came first. It was considered the deadliest because it is the father of idolatry, and thus the mother of all other sins. The first sin for the Jews is first for a reason: 'You shall have no other gods before me.'  That commandment includes one of the foremost temptations of all: to worship ourselves.

The English synonyms for proud include arrogant, haughty, conceited, egocentric, narcissistic, insolent, presumptuous and vain. The Greeks called it hubris (thinking oneself superior to the gods), which led to our downfall (nemesis). Christians called it pride (thinking oneself independent of God or self-sufficient). Spinoza's definition may be the most precise: 'Pride is thinking more highly of oneself than is just, out of love for oneself.'

Described as a kind of deadly balloon, pride is an exaggeration of our own worth and power, and a thoroughgoing and often unconscious feeling of superiority to others. The well-known myth of Daedalus illustrates this idea. He was a master craftsman, and he made a pair of wings for himself and for his son Icarus, whose feathers were held together with wax. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high, lest the sun melt the wax. But Icarus ignored his father's advice and ascended toward the sun. The wax melted and Icarus plunged into the sea. To be proud, in the classic sense, is to be out of place in the order of things, and not to know one's proper relationship to God.

The deadly sin of pride is self-consumptive, feeding on itself but never satisfied. Mental health professionals have actually taken the sin of pride to another level, calling it the basis of most emotional distress. A neurotic is by definition someone who is completely preoccupied with himself. The neurotic's navel is the center of the universe, and to look outside oneself is to look into a mirror.

But if pride goeth before the fall, as we all learned in Sunday school, then what happens when there's no pride at all? The problem with Ms. Manson wasn't too much pride, but none whatsoever. The only excess here is self-loathing. The only demon is a wretched feeling of inferiority. Instead of thinking too highly of herself, this mother proved that your children can actually inherit worthlessness. It can be passed down like blue eyes or dark hair. Worthlessness can curdle the cradle.
What's more, if you combine worthlessness with anger, you may end up with a psychopath. When Charles Manson's followers sliced open the belly of a pregnant Sharon Tate, he took the ultimate revenge against the power and peril of the womb. Perhaps at some psychotic level he was asking, How dare women give birth to their sin? How dare they make money by ignoring their own dignity, and then abandon their mistakes like collateral damage?

No, the problem here isn't too much pride. With all due respect to the church I serve and love, we are far more adept at warning the would-be sinner about what is deadly than we are at encouraging the would-be saint about what is virtuous. What's more, we aren't that all honest about the close and sometimes insidious relationship between the two. We know how to condemn depravity, and the feeling can be rather delicious. But we are amateurs at building up, at binding up, at peeling back the shame to find the child of God.

How many sermons on the Prodigal Son, for example, have been mostly spent describing what sort of activity constitutes loose living in a far country? Yes, yes―we all know it's Las Vegas. But by the time the sermon runs out of lurid gas, hardly an ounce of energy is left for the real miracle: the loving father. He is the one who, in his old age and on fragile bones, runs to meet the son who has disgraced him. The son was 'lost, but is now found,' was 'dead, but is now alive.' Without so much as a 'Do you know how disappointed your mother and I feel?' he embraces the boy, who still smells of cheap perfume and pig slops.
So often in the church we are told, again and again, not to think too highly of ourselves. So we become walking, talking apologies for our poor miserable selves―and we think this pleases God. We stand around counting our shoelaces, refusing to take credit for anything because, after all, 'We must be humble.' This approach produces a lot of false humility, but very little in the way of healthy self-regard. We know the dangers of being in love with ourselves, but ­something else is just as bad. After twenty-five years in the ministry, I've discovered that most people don't even like themselves.

When it comes to the difference between virtue and vice, part of the problem is a language problem. We no longer use the word 'pride' in its medieval context to refer to the idolatry of self, which is a sin indeed. Today  'pride' is used interchangeably with 'self-esteem.' This rather pliable term is synonymous with 'feeling good about ourselves,' regardless of whether we have anything much to feel good about.

When we call pride a sin today we often confuse people, because in the current vernacular 'pride' often means self-confidence. We tell our kids to 'take pride in your work,' and be 'proud of yourself.' When my kids were in junior high school, an assistant principal would come on the intercom every morning and exhort everyone to be filled with what he called 'that Wildcat pride!' I was never exactly sure what that was, but felt fairly certain that a proud wildcat (as opposed to a humble one) did not push, shove, deface his locker or use profanity.

So in a semantic switch of sorts, pride, self-esteem and self-respect got all mixed up together in a kind of psycho­linguistic soup. Modern therapeutic movements, which reached their zenith in the '70s, but whose conception of personal growth continue to this day, played fast and
loose with the word 'pride.' Personal growth was often ­indistinguishable from self-indulgence. As for the people we hurt in the process of radical self-actualization, they would 'get over it' as soon as they felt, you guessed it, 'better about ­themselves.'

What's more, feelings of guilt or despair are no longer interpreted as messages from God, signs to be read or marks of a lost covenant. They are merely temporary manifestations of low self-esteem. The higher our self-esteem becomes, the more insulated we become from the pain of broken relationships. Equipped with this bogus notion of self-esteem, a whole generation was taught to build the equivalent of psychic moats around our souls. Then we filled them with talking alligators whose language of choice is psychobabble. If I hear what you are saying, it sounds like an attempt, which I reject, to allow me to be me.
When I was in college, the reigning platitude was something I now consider to be a disaster: 'I'm OK, You're OK.' William Sloane Coffin Jr. may have been more on target, however, and expressed a more profound religious truth when he said, 'I'm not okay; you're not okay; but it's okay.'

Now, as always, the question remains: Where are we in this limbo between virtue and vice? We know that thinking too highly of ourselves is a sin, but so is not thinking highly enough. As my friend the rabbi put it, 'A man who does not love himself will make a casualty of the neighbor sooner or later.'

Perhaps the real truth is that the excessively proud person is really not in love with himself at all, at least not in a healthy way, but actually suffers from the opposite malady. My experience with people who seem puffed up with pride is that in fact they are excessively insecure. They are self-obsessed because they are still trying to prove something. They look down on other people because they have never really looked up to themselves. Hence, both hubris and insecurity are born of the same deficiency. We do not feel worthy.

Could the reason have something to do with homelessness? No matter how well sheltered we are, too many of us are spiritually homeless. We do not know where we came from, where we are going or to Whom we belong. We are named by our parents, but feel no kinship to the larger human family. We struggle to achieve recognition, but fail to recognize our own true identity. We live to be looked at and liked, instead of to be seen and loved.

In the meantime, the peace we so desperately want eludes us, because we are not at peace with ourselves. Moreover, despite all the proclamations to the contrary, a culture that claims to be peace-loving is not helping us. The truth is that American culture is not Christian. It is profoundly Roman. We worship perfection and power, and thus hate our imperfect lives and feel powerless in the face of impossible standards. These imperfections torment us, and our obsession with self-improvement leaves little time or energy for meaningful relationships. Beauty becomes form, not truth, and God becomes the ultimate critic. Then one day we look into the mirror and discover that by the impossible standards of the day, we are not the apple of anyone's eye.

Perhaps in our secularized pursuit of fulfillment we have struck an impossible bargain with ourselves. While the authentic language of religion tells us that we are as we relate, our society tells us that we are as we accumulate. What's more, when it comes to personal security, real or emotional, we are as we insulate. Just consider the explosion of walled neighborhoods, and tinted glass and the promise of safe passage through the corridors of privilege.

No wonder we are so unhappy. We are both estranged from others and unacquainted with ourselves! What looks like excessive pride is often just a form of compensation. Perhaps the 'world is too much with us,' as Wordsworth wrote, in part because we are on such unfriendly terms with ourselves. We 'lay waste to our powers' because our souls lie wasted.

A noted theologian once said that there is no way to modulate the human voice in such a way that a whine becomes acceptable to God. But the whiners are everywhere. Excuse me for being such a constant disappointment, we say, but we were born for it. We are experts at qualifying accomplishment and second-guessing compliments. We are like possums, which as far as I can tell are embarrassed to be alive.

Is our pride born of spiritual amnesia? That is, have we forgotten the first premise of faith, which goes by the Latin phrase Imago Dei―made in the image of God? According to the Ephesians letter we are 'God's masterpiece.' We did not make ourselves, and so we can only be thankful for the gift of our lives. Gratitude, not belief, should be the first religious impulse. We are the mysterious intention of a mysterious Intentionality. God is in our DNA.

e. e. cummings tried to say this with his strategically jumbled poetry―that adoration is a child of faith, and both have their roots in wonder:

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any―lifted from the now
of all nothing―human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

When the church warns us against the deadly sin of pride, we may be treating the symptom, but not the disease. What if more sin is born of self-loathing than self-aggrandizement? And what if the latter is really born of the former?

How strange to think that the answer to the deadly sin of pride might simply be a more authentic and natural love of self! As much as we might like a simpler approach to virtue and vice, the truth is that we can't just wad up sin and throw it in the trash, hoping to write about virtue on a clean sheet of paper. The virtue is in the vice, just as the vice is in the virtue. Sooner or later, we will have to dig sin back out of the trash, unfold it carefully, smooth it out on the desk of our minds and start writing something different on this badly wrinkled page.

If pride is always the first of the Seven Deadly Sins, then our first move in the search for Seven Lively Virtues is to strike the word pride and write in its place not self-esteem, but WORTHINESS. This was pride's given name, long before she developed doubts about her aging face in the mirror and started painting it.
Loving oneself is not the same thing as being in love with oneself. There is nothing to prove, because worthiness cannot be earned. It can only be recognized. Worthiness is a gift―not a derivative of being, but a constituent of it. Worthiness springs from creation itself.

Years ago, I was traveling to an academic meeting in the South. I stopped for breakfast at a small diner. When my order came, there was a small, milky-colored, grainy-looking pile of mush on one side of the plate. 'What's that?' I asked the waitress.

'Them's grits,' she said.
'But I didn't order grits,' I said.
'You don't have to,' she replied. 'They just come.'
That's the way...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hci
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0757302211
• ISBN 13: 9780757302213
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 201