Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
-The Book of Common Prayer
The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
–C.S. Lewis
In her excellent book, Glittering Vices, Rebecca DeYoung draws an analogy between character formation and sledding:
By way of an analogy, think of a winter sledding party, in which a group of people head out to smooth a path through freshly fallen snow. The first sled goes down slowly, carving out a rut. Other sleds follow, over and over, down the same path, smoothing and packing down the snow. After many trips a well-worn groove develops, a path out of which it is hard to steer. The groove enables sleds to stay aligned and on course, gliding rapidly, smoothly, and easily on their way. Character traits are like that: the first run down, which required some effort and tough going, gradually becomes a smooth track that one glides down without further intentional steering. Of course, a rider can always stick out a boot and throw the sled off course, usually damaging the track as well. So too we can act out of character, even after being ‘in the groove’ for a long time. In general, however, habits incline us swiftly, smoothly, and rapidly toward certain types of actions (DeYoung, 13-14).
Practicing the virtues is like sledding in that it tends to get easier the more we do it. Are there other ways that practicing the virtues is like sledding? Sure. Here are a few more:
1. Snow is a gift. You can’t make it snow. You wake up one morning, and there it is, waiting to be enjoyed. Practicing the virtues is similarly a form of grace. It happens within the larger context of Jesus’ completely sufficient life and death for us, and our continuing union with him, which is sheer gift and pure grace.
2. Sledding is (usually) enjoyable. There are tears, sometimes, especially when you’re sledding with little ones. But the overall endeavor is meant to be embraced and savored. In the same way, practicing the virtues is something we get to do. It’s not meant to be burdensome. It’s the way Jesus leads us into abundant life, by forming us into his likeness.
3. Sledding is more enjoyable, and easier, when you do it with others. Two children loaded into the same sled will make it further, faster, than one going alone. Same goes for practicing the virtues. We’re not meant to do this alone. Virtues are embodied in communities, and we need each other to grow into the likeness of Jesus.
4. Falling isn’t the end of the world. Maybe you don’t make it to the bottom of the hill. Maybe you veer off track and end up with a face full of snow. That’s okay, because you get up, or you’re helped up, and you get to try again. Falling and failing will be a regular experience for us as we pursue Jesus. But it’s not the end of the world, because your growth into Jesus’ likeness doesn’t depend, in the end, on your pursuit of Jesus; it depends on his pursuit of you. Our christlikeness is ultimately something that God has made himself responsible for. One day we will be like him, “because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
The Secrets of Virtue and Helping People Become More Virtuous, by Everett L. Worthington, Jr.
There are a few ideas important to living a life of virtue. This is also, in Christian circles, called spiritual development. I also draw implications for designing interventions to promote virtue.
Secret #1: Balance self-focus and other-focus. First, it isn’t all about me. It’s about others, but not totally about others. There is a sweet spot. The Greeks used the word eudaimonia to talk about virtue. It is about doing good for self and others. For the Greeks, though, one achieved great individual feats of virtue, and that was supposed to benefit the polis. I have found that actually we need to reverse the polarity. To have proper eudaimonia, we need to focus on others. We can rest assured that our survival instinct and natural self-interest (some Reformed theologians call this our fallen nature) will ensure that we have sufficient self-interest to provide a eudaimonic balance. An effective intervention will emphasize other-interest and will involve people using most of their time in focusing on doing positive things for others.
Secret #2: Balance willpower and habit. It isn’t all about willpower, which are Herculean efforts at self-control of temptation or self-control that aims us at doing good. Those times are, properly employed, necessary for us to hit the sweet spot. Willpower is, as Baumeister and Tierney (2011) have shown, a limited resource. The more willpower we exert, the less we have available to place on other tasks that involve willpower. Thus, counting on willpower to have us make wise and self-controlled choices is not a good bet. We can sometimes sustain willpower-empowered choices enough to change our personality and make continual great choices for virtue and to subdue vice. But, the sweet spot is to employ that willpower to change our environment so that we don’t have to make willpower-empowered choices. Instead of a dieter keeping chocolate in a dish on the table and expecting himself or herself to resist the temptation to grab a few nibbles every time he or she passes (oh, wow, it’s gone), the dieter stores the chocolate out of sight. Or better, the dieter stores it out of sight in a place where he or she has to climb and inconvenience the self and exert energy to get it. Or better still, don’t buy chocolate, if chocolate is the temptation. That arranges things so that the dieter has to go to the store, purchase chocolate, get it home, and then eat it for it to do any harm. Far better to change to a more virtuous self is to change the environment so that one creates new habits. Creating a new habit is not easy, but it is possible with willpower. Exert the energy in making a new habit, and one can follow the habit with little decision-making energy each time one faces the decision point. A good intervention will spend most of the time creating good habits, and arranging the environment so that temptations are minimized.
Secret #3: Balance God’s part and my part. Third, spiritual formation is about a positive, mind of Christ, that God forms in us. It is not about focusing on me and the character traits that I intend to form to be more Christ-like. It is not totally without my effort. Both grace and works are in the Christian New Testament, but they are in the right order and in the right amounts. Just focusing on God’s changing of the person will not produce change. On the other hand, just focusing on being better, more virtuous, happier, or move loving, skilled, etc. is also doomed to partial success at best. God has done the hard part in Jesus’ sacrificial, other-oriented death on our behalf. I cannot please God apart from that, but if I love God, I want to please God. I want to work to please God. I have an important part in that balance. A good intervention will focus on affirming God’s role, but realizing that, other than prayer, we can’t influence God’s part. Thus, it will direct the person to focus on changing his or her own part.
Secret #4: Balance promoting the virtue and combatting the vice. We cannot just focus on promoting the virtue. Temptations to vice arise, and we have to be well-prepared to deal with those.
Secret #5: Before getting the person immersed in sensing his or her deficit, affirm the person to avoid defensiveness. People need to feel like they are decent people who are making themselves better rather than be shown that they are depraved and desperately needy people.
Secret #6: Balance focus on achieving goals and on doing the goal-directed tasks needed to get to the goal. Numerous studies have shown that people who strive after happiness tend to be self-focused on their own happiness and thus are less happy and fulfilled. Those who struggle to be loving and keep focusing on how loving I am, how to be more loving, etc. tend to have less success at being loving. There is certainly benefit to self and others in trying to be more loving. It is better than focusing on being hateful, and even better than focusing on being neutral and never having a loving thought. But, there seems to be a sweet spot, somewhere between focusing on neutrality and total self-focus and self-concern with one’s lovingkindness. We might suggest that one must try to be more loving, and trying is important at first (see point two), but the trying is not to try and keep focusing on me. It is to try to focus on the object of love—on God and on other people. Also, one must employ willpower (see point two) to defeat the natural person’s self-interested, self-aggrandizing, self-protective, self-absorbed tendencies when they arise. One must employ willpower to do the loving thing when doing the loving thing is hard. We employ the left prefrontal cortex to do the hard thing. That goes against the natural tendencies (fallen nature, natural person), so it requires great energy. However, one must do the loving thing by setting up the external environment, and the internal thought habits to focus on the right thing most of the time and fight temptations or pursue calls to duty the rest of the time. A good intervention will introduce the goal early, but will not make the guts of the intervention about getting to the goal. Rather, keep the goal in mind, but more in the periphery of the mind than at the forefront of the mind.
Secret #7: Plan and set small goals en route to the big goal. Make a plan that is concrete, that takes into consideration the above points, and that breaks your goal into discrete steps. But, commit yourself to the plan. Ironically, having a back-up plan in case you fail will weaken your resolve.
Secret #8: Start soon and track your progress. It is tempting to wait until New Year’s Day to start, or the beginning of a month to start, or Monday to start. But you’ll succeed best it you make a clear plan, announce your intensions to people who are important to you, and to an accountability partner if two of you are intending to change, and then just set the date and begin. Importantly, track your progress. How often? You know yourself best. Some people, for example, on weight loss programs like to weigh every morning. Others do so every few days or once a week. Do what you know is likely to work for you. But keep track so you can see your progress when you do change and so you can get back on track relatively quickly when you aren’t making the progress you’d like.
Secret #9: Habits can’t do it all. While habits can help you conserve your willpower so that you can cope better with immediate temptations, you still have to cope with many temptations. We rely on God’s help as well as self- control to get us through temptations. Scripture says we won’t be tempted past our ability to resist. It says to face Satan and he will flee. So, God will fight some of the battles for us, but we have to do our part. Habits help us avoid many temptations, but when we face a temptation, we must deal with the internal desire through willpower. So, it is important to build habits but conserve your willpower to deal with inevitable temptations to depart from your habit.
Secret #10: Rehearsing a script of how to deal with a temptation can prepare us ahead of time to deal with the temptation. Solving problems is hard work. Hard work depletes our willpower. So if we can create a script that has been rehearsed, that will take less energy than applying our willpower to what seems like a novel situation requiring problem-solving.
Secret #11: Make it memorable. Use acrostics, repetition, times of reflection anew (not just a routine habit), and reminders to keep the intervention memorable. If you are doing a program to change, try to name the steps and remember those names.
Secret #12: Make it concrete; make change “sensible.” Don’t just depend on talk. Involve materials, body and movements in space, cues in the naturally occurring environment, arts, reading, and technology. That is, make change able to be sensed, or “sensible.” Different modalities of change are important. They not only appeal to different people with different learning styles, but they also provide a huge number of cues to do the right thing or not do the wrong thing.
Ev Worthington is a professor of psychology at VCU and an elder at Christ Presbyterian Church.
Once there was a man named Evagrius who lived a long time ago in Egypt. He and a group of his friends were very committed to Jesus and they longed to live holy lives free from sin. So they decided to move out into the desert and live in primitive lodgings so they could get far away from the temptations and wickedness of the world and be closer to God. It was a noble idea.
But what do you suppose they found? Unfortunately, the evil they were trying to escape came along with them, carried in the tightly sealed containers of their own hearts. In this isolated, pure ascetic community, Evagrius and his friends discovered the darkness of their own sinful desires and inclinations. They couldn’t get away from what was “out there,” because they discovered it was “in here.” It was Evagrius who first wrote about the “Seven Deadly Sins,” which would go on to be a formative way the church has thought about sin for 1500 years.
We are leaving the season of Christmas and Ephiphany and entering into the season of Lent. Lent is the period of the year in which we prepare to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ at Good Friday and Easter. Traditionally, Lent is also a time that we especially focus on examining our hearts, confessing our sins, and reflecting on the significance of Jesus’ death for us. Think of it as sort of “Spring cleaning” of the soul; you need to sweep and clean all year round, but you might have a concentrated focus on deep cleaning at special times of the year.
Our churches are spending Lent examining the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony and Lust. A couple of factors make this traditional accounting of sins “deadly.” One is that our society has tended to glamorize these sins and even made them into virtues. But the other thing that makes them so deadly is how unspectacular they are. These are not horrible and outlandish sins of maniacs as portrayed in the movie “Seven.” These are incredibly ordinary, pervasive propensities that are so rooted in our nature that we tend to not even notice them. Or if we do, we may rationalize them, such as calling pride “ambition” or gluttony “a deserved reward” or envy “healthy competition.” These sins are the roots of so many other distortions that prevent us from living as the people Jesus died to make us become.
We talk a lot about how we are on mission with Jesus led by the Spirit. That is indeed true. But Jesus is also on a mission to us. But let’s slow down a bit during Lent and let him do some surgery on our souls. Let’s ask him what darkness may be hiding in our hearts that we may be ignoring or rationalizing. And let’s open ourselves up to his transforming love.
7 Deadly Sins 