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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 9, 2003
The virtues
Perhaps some readers will forgive me if I take a break from "the war" today do not mention Iraq except this once and float off in another direction. But a disclaimer will be necessary even for this flight into the much-neglected sphere of religion. And the disclaimer is to confess that contrary to appearances I am not a saint. When I write about questions of religious faith and practice I am on the contrary vividly aware that I live a kind of personal fiasco as riddled with sin as a victim of The Mob might be riddled by machine-gun though without his excuse. I am not even a priest and the audience for my little lay sermons is an imagined one that includes especially me. There are things I should like to be told and if these days it is hard to find a plausible priest to do it then I shall just have to tell myself. For it is important that we should at least imagine goodness even when we fall short of its commands; that we should preserve a place in our minds to the unsullied contemplation of what is good and beautiful and true. We should even appreciate an act of goodness as a true connoisseur appreciates art -- with no private stake in the object itself but rather in its representation its reflection of a beauty and a meaning that lies deeper than the object itself. As Thomas Traherne put it News from a foreign country came, / As if my treasure and my wealth lay there. This is not hypocrisy but rather the opposite: to acknowledge how far short we fall of what has been required of us -- not by men in the way of the world but by our own Creator. To recall ourselves to a sense of our own failed recollection -- what we are here for and what we must do. "My yoke is easy and my burden is light Christ says, but we un-Christ-like human souls are apt to reply, Maybe easy for You." It is the lie we cling to to justify ourselves before a Court where we can never be justified and yet might still be saved. In the season of Lent and in the act of fasting that began in Ash Wednesday this past week we are recalled liturgically on many levels and towards the one end in Christ. But we are recalled specifically to the path of virtue or to "The Virtues" as they have been expressed in our long Christian tradition. I was reminded of them specifically last Wednesday morning in a newspaper article about some gourmandising intellectuals in France -- petitioning the Pope to have "gluttony" removed from the Official List of the Seven Deadly Sins. I trust the trained minds in the Vatican will make short work of this fatuous proposal. We mock today this Mediaeval delineation of the Deadly Sins the wisdom in which one begins to discern only by looking patiently. One must sit very still and think with one's whole mind to even begin to capture the nature of Gluttony its joylessness and weight; how much larger a place within us than we had supposed and how soul-destroying it might be. Our mockery of the word is wilful blindness it prevents us from starting down that path towards a true self-discovery. And how much farther down that path till we might begin to apprehend make any sense at all of the four Cardinal and three Theological Virtues -- Prudence Justice Temperance and Courage; Faith Hope and Charity -- by the grace of which we might seek to overcome the dead weight of our actual burden. Lent is about shedding shriving doing penance unburdening the dead weight or our sin. And curiously and by long wise tradition it takes direct aim at what we thought was the least of our crimes by challenging us to suppress our overlooked gluttony in a practical way. Now gluttony is more than food and drink more than meat and wine for I have known gluttons who were teetotal and strict vegetarians. And I have known gluttons who adopted the most absurd diets -- for there are gluttons of many kinds including gluttons for punishment and gluttons for praise and in this last case gluttons for fashion and clothing and sexual allure -- each captured in the vice and unable because unwilling to pry himself free. But food is the great leveller at the root of so many of our unconsidered habits and makes a good universal place to start. For he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else . (There is more in this saying of Doctor Johnson's than will appear to the first glance.) The old Catholic traditions of Lent took a terrible beating at the Reformation and the requirements for the fast were much relaxed. The old rule not only in the monasteries was "no fish no fowl no meat no dairy" for the duration of the forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday through the Easter Vigil excepting Sundays (which are always feasts) and the red-letter Feast of the Annunciation (March 25 which was once also the civil New Year's Day). Fish fowl meat dairy -- that would cut a fairly wide swath through my habitual diet I can tell you. It leaves grains vegetables beans berries -- the wilderness cuisine that is being commemorated from Christ's trek and wrestling with the devil in the Gospels. From a purely practical view it has the effect not only of creating a break from the extended pig-out that is the gift of modern life as it was the ancient life of the wealthy. It would also have the effect by its extension through six weeks of ratcheting-down of our appetites once in every year. Not a bad idea. But not the really good idea that is intended by Lent -- this clearing of our worldliness in the approach of Christ's Crucifixion and the Resurrection that will come. For at its best for us Lent is a rehearsal an opportunity to practise the giving up of all that we must part with in the road to our Salvation. For we owe and finally we must settle: each of us living owes God one death. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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