Seven Deadly Sins: Pride

Well, it's time for the last episode of Kay's (Perhaps We Learn) Seven Deadly Sins meme. Last but not least comes the sin of Pride.

Well it has probably become clear to anyone who has been following these posts that I can't mention the world sin without raising the specter of my poor old mother who meant so well and did so much harm. My mother was raised by crazy people who combined that craziness with extreme poverty and ignorance. She was remarkably whole considering where she came from. My mother's mother was something called a Free Methodist. This was a Pentecostal, everything-short-of-breathing-is-sin church. Laughing was a sin, dancing was a sin, movies were a sin... Everyone was going to hell but them. You might laugh now but you would cry in hell while they were serene in Heaven. I've often thought that churches like my grandmother's -I won't call it my mother's... she hated it. She sent her own children to church (a more normal church) but would not attend herself. She knew on one level how much she had been damaged by her experience... she simply didn't know how to fix it or how not to pass the damage along.

But back to pride. I grew up shame-based. Toxic shame was the air my mother breathed. If she had nursed me, it would have been in her mother's milk. If I were God, shame would be a sin and not pride. The depth of my mother's fear of pride was such that I grew up being ashamed of feeling good about myself. That was prideful and pride was a sin. How stupid is that? How wicked. All these things so many of us have been taught to worry about and be ashamed of are so petty and so distorted. The Church - or some aspects of the Church - have created a lose/lose world for many that is as wicked and ungodly as the world my grandmother's church created for my mother. In their world the God who so loved the world that he gave a son to it, so hates humanity that he wants us to be constantly judging ourselves, constantly afraid of not measuring up to absurd and basically arbitrary standards of "goodness" and virtue.

I actually think it's the height of pridefulness to think we're so important that God has nothing better to do with His/Her time than to monitor our every thought and breath in hopes of catching us in a mistake. I think it's the height of pridefulness to ascribe human pettiness to the deity. In my experience those who do this the most are also the most prone to pridefully put on a God robe and sit around judging others, to declare that god doesn't like fat people or pretty people or gay people or rich people or poor people or... people who believe something other than what they believe. I think it is the height of pridefulness to presume to know the mind of God.

So - in what I guess by my own definition is an act of pridefulness - I'm going to say that I think God ... well let me fix that... if I were God, I would want people to feel good about themselves. I'd like them to bake a cake or paint a picture and think it was great simply because they had put their heart and love into it. If I were God, I'd want me to wake up in the morning and look into the mirror and see beauty, not flaws. If I were God, I'd be looking for the good in every being and I'd want them to be doing that too.

In Christianity - the tradition I was raised in - Jesus tells us to love one another. Jesus tells us that God is Love. I believe that. I think Sin is a human invention that probably leaves the Deity shaking His/Her head in dismay.

So - hows this for hubris and pride - if I were God, here's what I'd say to anyone reading this.

I am a Loving God and you are part of my heart. I know that you will sometimes make mistakes and that you will sometimes behave badly. You are human and it's ok. I love you anyway. I do pay attention to the big stuff like wars and killing because that's one piece of my heart attacking another and it's quite painful. But there is nothing you can do or say or think that can stop me from loving you. I am God. God is LOVE. Relax. Live and be joyful. Let go of judging yourself or everyone else. Waste of energy. Waste of Love. If you want to know me, the quickest road is Love. Love yourself. Love each other. Love all of life. All this foolishness of worrying about Sin is just a distraction from your true purpose which is to Live and to BE Love.

So that's my rather prideful take on Pride.

Happy Passover, Happy Easter, Happy Anything Else you may be Celebrating!

The Seven Deadly Sins: Greed

Well, it's Friday and time for the sixth (I think) of Kay's (Perhaps We Learn) Seven Deadly Sins Meme. This week the subject is Greed.

Once again the voices of my inner demons are all shouting at once. On the whole, I don't think of myself as a particularly greedy person. I don't think the world owes me abundance and I don't want anything at the expense of someone else's well being. The kind of greed we've seen on Wall Street and in big oil is beyond my comprehension. Greed for power - greed so intense that we would kill for it - is beyond my comprehension. The greed of insurance companies that choose profit over the life of fellow human being is disturbing to me. It enfuriates me. It makes me feel all righteous and judgmental, which isn't really a good quality. I try to avoid feeling judgment. But this is an area where I struggle with it. I can't imagine thinking I deserved a salary of $6 million or $20 million, no matter how wonderful I was, especially in a world where children are going hungry and without health care. I just can't imagine it. I'm not opposed to money, either. I'd love to be rich. I'd love everyone to be rich. I actually think there's enough abundance in the world that everyone COULD be rich. But I'm getting off topic. Greed. Greed is the issue today.

So anyway, I'm really clear that living off the fat of the land at the expense of others and while others go without is greed. Capital G GREED.

But I struggle with the question in my own life of what's greed and what's healthy longing. Anyone who has visited for any amount of time can probably guess that my mother's voice is about to surface. As I mentioned when I wrote about gluttony, my mother grew up destitute and abused. She was such a wounded soul. Born to uneducated parents in 1910, she had to fight her family to even finish high school. She married a brilliant man who grew up less poor, but not rich. He got his college education free by attending City College and as an actuary made pretty good money. He and my mother survived the Depression. I think it was a hard time for them, though they never talked much about the details of it... or if they did, I don't remember. But anyway, I grew up middle class and my mother spoiled me with one hand and then judged me for my good fortune with the other. I don't think it was her intention, but I felt guilty for everything I owned. My mother taught me that wanting anything was a form of consumate greed. I believed her and I learned for much of my life not to want anything or if I did to push that longing down and punish myself for it. During the brief time in my life when I had some money to spend, oh what a battle it was to give myself anything.

When I first got my own apartment, I borrowed money from my father so that I could put carpet in. Not lavish carpet, pretty cheap carpet in fact. You should have heard my mother on my greed and selfishness. But she had the same response if I said I was going to a movie or out to dinner with a friend. Irresponsible and selfish. That's how she saw me. It's how I saw myself even though part of me knew better. Did I have a right to have anything? What had I done to deserve pleasure?

But is that greed? Nowadays, living on Disability, the subject of greed has great power once again. Though I have healed/quieted my mother's voice in some ways, it is not totally still. I've mentioned before that I really want a new TV. I'm hoping the prices will go down to $300 or less for a 22" flat screen. But then the debate rises in my head. Do I have a right to want this? This winter I got help from HEAP to pay my fuel costs. I get a small amount of food stamps help each month. What right, then - if I eventually do it - do I have to buy myself something like a television. Granted, I live pretty modestly. I don't own a car. I don't drive, I don't smoke or drink, but I also get help from the rest of the country to live in my little house and to eat and be warm. How greedy is it for me to want something that is ultimately a luxury. I can rationalize that TV is my companionship in a life lived largely in isolation. I can say that I'm not looking to buy a 50" or a 60" with bells and whistles. Just a small flat screen slightly larger than the 15 year old TV I have now. Then there's the whole question of whether I deserve the help coming to me sometime this summer from Delaware Opportunities? What have I done to deserve such help? Is it greedy of me to accept this largesse when I'm sure there are other people out there - people with children even - who have as great or greater need? Do I have a right to want anything? Or even if I have the right to want it, do I have the right to HAVE it?

So is my greed any less than that of the businesses who pay their executives millions and make the public pay for them? I like to think so, but is it really? Or is it even greed? I admit to great confusion on the subject. Having worked most of my working life for non profit agencies at salaries that barely paid the rent, while I did work that was supposed to be done by my bosses and for which they were earning considerably higher salaries, I like to think I'd never take a golden parachute salary. But then nobody ever offered me one.

And I feel myself starting to go into spiral thinking. I'm getting ready to second guess my second guessing and then it's just all downhill from there. So I guess I'll leave the subject on this sort of incomplete note. Not going to go back and read it. Hope it makes sense. Now I have to go and tackle writing some wordzzles. Agggghhh!

Other Deadly Sins Posts:
Lust
Gluttony
Sloth
Wrath
Envy

Seven Deadly Sins: Envy

Well, it's Friday morning and time for Kay's (Perhaps We Learn) Seven Deadly Sins meme. This week's sin is envy. Oh, dear. I was feeling pretty smug about my relationship to envy and jealousy... until I checked the definition which reads: a feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another's advantages, success, possessions, etc. Ok, so I'm not quite so above it as I thought I was. But I would like to rationalize a little... or maybe I am, I guess it depends to some extent on how you read that definition.

I think there are two kinds/levels of envy - I'll call them banal and toxic for want of any better terms. Banal envy involves craving what someone else has without resenting them for it. I'm not sure I think that's particularly "sinful," perhaps because I indulge in it quite a bit and I'd rather not think ill of myself for doing so. What I think of as true or toxic envy not only craves what someone else has but wishes they didn't have it and resents their good fortune.

I'm more than capable of coveting cool things other people have. Last year my friend Nate got himself a camera with zillions of pixels and a 15x zoom. This was shortly before Tara Grace (bless her) smashed my zoomless, pixel-poor antique digital camera into a million pieces. I SOOOO wanted one like Nate's. I coveted pixels and zoom and I coveted them badly. Until I saw Nate's new camera, I had wished vaguely for a nicer camera but it hadn't been a big partof my consciousness. But once I actually saw what zooming could do and the quality that extra pixels gave a picture, my desire got pretty obsessive. I kidded Nate a lot about how jealous I was. And I confess with no shame to being almost (almost?) euphoric when Tara broke my camera so that I could rationalize spending money I didn't really have on a cool new camera. I've had so much joy from that camera.... sometimes foolishness isn't so foolish. I'm grateful that Nate created that envy in me and that it led to something which has expanded the way I see the world and opened up a whole new world of creativity to me. It doesn't feel sinful (negative) to me. Religious zealots might tell me to pack my bags for Hell, but I got joy in Nate having the camera, I enjoyed my envy and I LOVE my camera. Part of why I feel so adamant about this is probably because I was raised to feel guilty if I wanted anything. It has taken a lot of work to rejoice in my desires and hopes. I don't always manage it, but this was one case where - after a lot of back and forth about whether I could afford it and a lot of angst about getting it for myself and a certain amount of guilt about wanting it so badly, joy has won. But back to the topic of envy.

What I think of as real envy (toxic envy), she rationalized, is resenting what another person has. That, I'm not prone to. I was thrilled that Nate got his camera. I was happy for him. If I had my druthers, everybody who wants one would have a good camera. In fact that's one of my fantasies for when I win the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. A photo program for some of the local schools which would give kids who were interested a good camera and teach them how to use it creatively.

True or Toxic Envy to me involves not just a coveting of what someone else has but a resenting that they have it and/or desiring that you have it instead of them. Envy in it's most toxic form assumes that the universe is small and stingy and doesn't have enough for everyone. Envy in it's toxic form is ugly and reflects a sense that your worth is based on what you have or what your job title is or some other false definition. Envy in it's most toxic form resents someone else's success or happiness. I think that kind of envy has to be terribly painful and it fits my definition of sin (separation from God) because it means you are disconnected from your own inherent goodness and worth and from God/the Universe's abundant Love.

I have a profound belief in the power of gratitude. People like Louise Haye, Wayne Dyer and the Abraham-Hicks people, most modern mystics, all talk about the power of attraction. In other words ... we bring to us what we focus on. Serge Kahili King, who teaches Hawiian mysticism, expreses it this way: "Energy flows where attention goes." Using this theory, the toxic form of envy is not only ugly and unpleasant, it's counter-productive. In toxic envy you are focused on what you don't have.... and you continue to draw not having to you. And it's just an unpleasant way to live.

I think I've always been prone to gratitude and being positive, but some years back when I was at one of my lowest points - I was out of work, out of pension, living under the power of a stingy and mean-spirited landlord, not yet ready to face the truth of how disabled I was or willing to reach out for help... my life was a real mess - I came across an essay called Thank You for Everything that had a powerful impact on me. It was written by a man named Alan Cohen and talked about a mantra taught to him by a wise teacher. It goes "Thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever." I practiced it constantly. The worse things got the more I gave thanks for them. Two strange things happened. First, when I gave thanks for something - even if I didn't quite mean it - my attitude changed. I found I didn't feel so bad about it. Secondly, my life began to shift. I dont' know if it's true or not, but I think that when we give gratitude for even things that seem like disasters, it opens a path for the Universe to be creatively generous, to move beyond. Resenting our situation, wallowing in us, glues it to us and us to it. Which sort of brings me back to envy... (I know, I digressed. I always digress. I can't help myself.) Anyway, oddly, I think Toxic Envy really is among the most destructive emotional states we can experience. It carries within it a bit of many of the other sins: lust for what other s have, anger that they have it, greed, pride (inverse pride, maybe, but pride). It's ugly and in it's toxic form can eat away at your spirit and your joy.

That said, I think we should be careful not to confuse toxic envy with a joyful love of life, with seeing something wonderful that someone else has and wanting to have it too, not to lessen them or with resentment of them, but for the joy and delight of expanding your own world and life.

So that's my thoughts on envy. I don't know if I've made any sense or not. Not going to go back an reread, just hope that there's a coherent thought or two here and there.

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On another note: Tomorrow from 8:30 to 9:30 you might want to participate in something called "Earth Hour," an effort to focus on global warming. For one hour, you are asked to take the simple step of turning your lights off. That's it. Save an hours worth of energy... multiplied by hopefully a million other people around the world. Not much of a sacrifice and good food for thought.

Seven Deadly Sins: Wrath/Anger Part 1

I missed week two of the Kay's Seven Deadly Sins Meme. The sin was Wrath - which the dictionary defines as "vengeful anger." Given how much vengeful anger is floating around in the world these days, I just kind of hate to have missed that one, so I'm going to post something now even though I'm two weeks late doing so.

I have a lot to say - or at least a lot of opinions and thoughts - on this subject. So much so that I got stuck chasing my tail yesterday when I tried to write this. Probably most of what I want to say is about plain and simple anger, but given events of the times, I think I also want to talk about vengeful anger. Plain ordinary old anger is - despite what most of us are taught - often a healthy response to events around us, but vengeful anger I think is truly "sinful." It is destructive to the well being of all parties.

Vengeful anger (and greed and power lust and dishonesty) is what took us into Iraq. Vengeful anger is what blew up the World Trade Centers. Vengeful anger is what keeps Israelis and Palestinians justifying the continuous drawing of one another's blood. Vengeful anger is what keeps the death penalty in place and allows our society to kill other - often innocent - human beings in the name of justice.

The worst thing about vengeful anger is that it seldom accomplishes much except to breed more misery. Each vengeful act in the Middle East provokes another and the blood of innocents is shed more richly than that of the so-called "guilty" on either side.

Right now in this country around the issue of the economy there is a lot of vengeful anger stewing. I'm not immune to it myself. I didn't have any money for Bernie Madoff to steal but I'm thrilled and delighted to see someone who has harmed so many and lived lavishly on their money - in jail. I have always found golden parachutes and million dollar bonuses offensive and obscene even when they were spending what was allegedly "corporate money." That corporate money, we now know, was really pretty much really high class sleight-of-hand theft... but now it's tax payer's money. The same tax payers who are losing their homes and their jobs. And boy, oh boy vengeance sounds so sweet. Throw them all out on the street. Write laws that violate our constitution and the nature of our law.... It all feels good for a few minutes. But it doesn't solve the problems and it makes everything too simple. One of the really annoying (and wonderful) things about life is (to me) that it is NEVER simple.

Right now we, as a nation, are frightened and feeling very helpless. The constant prattling of ignorant and semi ignorant people who are paid to entertain us with their opinions feeds our anxiety with half truths, truth mixed with lies, truth mixed with ignorance, pure ignorance, pure lies.... It leaves my head spinning. No wonder we all feel crazy! If I had any sense, I'd turn my TV off.... but I can't seem to get myself to do it... But back to the topic at hand.

There is an instinct in this situation to want revenge. Let those companies fail. Throw the bums out on the street. Fire them all. I have those same instincts, but at the same time I also believe that the complexity of the world economy is so far beyond my ability to comprehend that we need people who understand it - even if they have behaved badly - to help fix what they broke. It may piss me off, but who am I shooting in the foot if short-term gratification of quick punishment tanks the world economy? I think there will still be time to punish them later and to write good laws that put limits on the golden parachute life.

But I've wandered off from the topic again. Sorry. Vengeful wrath is kind of like the instant gratification form of anger and reparation. My first therapist once said to me. "We become the thing we hate." It took me a while to comprehend what he meant, but I think it's one of the truest and wisest things I ever heard. Vengeance is about hate. Hate is always destructive and as destructive to the hater as the hatee. I think we usually move to the desire for vengeance when we feel helpless and frightened. Maybe it makes us feel better for a few minutes but it doesn't solve the problem and usually makes it worse... which makes us want more vengeance... and it goes on and on.

I don't know how much sense I'm making here. I do think there is a place for holding people accountable, for asking for, if not retribution, at least responsiblity and an appropriate punishment.

Digressing again. Sort of anyway... As anyone who has visited here for any amount of time knows, I have a lot of anger about the actions of the previous administration and many things which I consider to be crimes committed under the aegis of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I believe that these men and their administration should be held accountable for actions which caused great harm to the nation and the world. I know some think this is vengeful on my part. I'm human and there is a bit of vengefulness in my wanting to see these men go to jail or at the least go on trial. I think it would be vengeance if I wanted them murdered, hung from the highest tree, boiled in oil. I don't want that. I don't even want them thrown in jail without a trial (that would be poetic justice maybe, but it would be vengeance and not helpful). I want the Bush administration held accountable because they represented me and the country I love and launched a war that didn't have to be fought and violated the letter and the spirit of our laws on multiple fronts here at home. If these things are true - and a trial can help decide that - they - and we as a nation - should be held accountable. Asking for accountability isn't vengeance. It's about healing our own national soul.

I guess I bring this up because I think vengeance - rash, usually physically or emotionally violent - is inherently destructive. One of the few "sins" I think is genuinely sinful, wicked, evil, bad, not good, self-destructive, other-destructive, and genuinely not helpful. In the end, finding peaceful, constructive, thoughtful, comprehensive ways to hold people accountable for their actions is more effective. It may not carry the adreneline rush that rage does, but it can lead to real change instead of repeated craziness.

So that's my rambling for today on - sort of - the subject of wrath. At sometime over the next few days, I want to try to write something about anger because I have a whole theory about anger that I love sharing with anyone who will listen. Just have to get my act together to write it down.

I hope you have a wonderful, peaceful day, free of angst and wrath.


Deadly sins posts:

Lust
Gluttony
Sloth
Wrath Part 1

Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth

Well it's Friday and for the Lenten Season Kay over at Perhaps we Learn is hosting a meme on the 7 deadly sins. This week our topic is sloth. I missed week #2 (Wrath) a couple of weeks ago and because it seems timely, I had thought about writing about anger too. But this is already long so maybe I'll try to do wrath tomorrow or Sunday instead.

It's funny that this week is about sloth because right now my body and I are at war with daylight savings time. I seem to be making a slower than usual recovery from the shift. Well, I'm really not recovering. I've backslid about 30 minutes on my going to bed at a more normal hour rule and I'm getting up a half hour later. And this makes me feel very cranky and tired. I need to get over it, but for some reason even when I get to bed at the "right" time, I don't want to get up in the morning and my mornings are starting late and it's just very irritating and makes me feel bad about myself, makes me feel - you guessed it - LAZY! Lucky for me I don't have to go to work, although if I did, I'd probably have gotten over this by now. I think daylight savings time is just silly.

But back to the topic at hand. Sloth. All this not getting up on time makes me feel an extra level of slothfulness. I already battle with the inner voices that tell me I'm lazy. It's another area in which I can't entirely tell truth from internalized fiction. There's a lot that needs to be done around my house that isn't getting done. I like to think this is because I'm not physically capable of it, but the voices in my head tend to think otherwise. Truth probably lies in the middle. I could do more. But I get discouraged because it's so difficult. (Laziness, the voices mutter.) In the end, I guess I come to the same opinion about laziness as I do with all the "sins." I think the greatest harm of the whole sin thing is that it is a systematic way of making us feel bad about ourselves. Hard work (the opposite of laziness we are taught) is a virtue. And sometimes it is. But is it always? Is running on a relentless treadmill of "doing something" really good for us or for society? I think it depends on what that effort is directed towards. And even directed towards the most noble cause, if work consumes every thought and moment, I'm not sure it's a virtue. Life needs warmth and joy and our bodies and our spirits need rest and tenderness and compassion. So many of us have internal voices that try and lash us into so-called virtue by beating us up about how wicked we are. I don't think that ever works really. I don't know the statistics, but I'm guessing that most slave laborers die/died young. Brutality - whether physical or emotional - is not a good motivator. The voices in my head - in the heads of too many of us - are often brutal indeed.

It's always interesting to me when I write things and have a revelation in the process. All the talk about slave labor and motivation made me think about perfectionism. I've probably shared this before, but one of the funniest therapy sessions I ever had was when Dr. Jim told me I was a perfectionist. "That's absurd," I responded. "I never do anything right." He just laughed at me and it slowly dawned on me that perhaps I was a perfectionist. (Perfections who read that and don't get the joke... read it again and think about it.) Doing your best is a virtue. Striving to mete some mythical and idealized vision of perfection (and of course in true perfectionism the bar continues to move so that you can never reach it) is just self destructive. No matter how beautiful your work of art you will find reason to fault it, no matter how clean your house is, you will see only the tiny spot of dust you missed or the slip cover you don't like or... And no matter how hard you work you will deem yourself lazy or inept because you didn't do more.

That said, I get as irritated as the next person at people who are disrespectful of other's time and feelings: the clerk in a store who is doing nothing and leaves you standing for 15 minutes or simply ignores you into submission. But the kinds of laziness that I'd qualify as "sinful" (if I believed in sin) are things like a doctor who thinks listening to his/her patients is too much of an ordeal to be born. Or someone who is too busy with his/her own life to spend a half hour listening to a friend in need. Or a dog "owner" who substitutes a chain in the back yard for attention and exercise for their four-legged companions. That kind of emotional laziness bothers me more than anything.

Still, I think we need to put the whole concept of sin into a box and put that box onto a high shelf where it can collect dust and be forgotten. I personally believe that God is LOVE. Love does not judge, particularly petty things like your weight or what time you get up in the morning or how clean you keep your house. God/LOVE has better things to do. All we can do in this life is our best and be kind to ourselves and each other.

Wicked woman that I am, I say "be lazy sometimes." Not always. But a healthy life is about balance. Work hard and rest easy. Not sure I've made a lot of sense here, but I'm not going to read it over because then I might have to rewrite it and I'm way to lazy to do that.


Deadly sins posts:

Lust
Gluttony
Sloth

Sin of the Week: Gluttony

Well, I wonder why I keep forgetting about Kay's Seven Deadly Sins meme. Hmmm... could it have anything to do with the fact that this week's deadly sin is GLUTTONY -- my very favorite and worst and most perpetual of all the sins. Hmmm... I wonder....

I don't want to talk about gluttony. It's a really painful subject and one that I don't have my head screwed on right about. At risk of hawking my own writing (a tragic glutton for readers as well), like the confusion I wrote about earlier this week. The issue of gluttony - which connects directly for me to the issue of weight - is another area in which my mother poisoned my ability to think rationally. My mother started obsessing about my weight almost as soon as I popped out of the womb from what I hear. Well, that's probably (possibly) a bit unfair. The story goes that the doctor gave her the wrong formula and when I was around three months old or so, I got very chubby and broke out in boils... and after that my mother worried about my weight forever. She saw me always as hideously fat and so even before I became hideously fat, I saw myself the same way. Years later in therapy, Dr. Jim asked me to bring photos of myself when I was younger. He saw a normal kid. I saw a little fatty. Oddly even when I was relatively slender, I FELT obese. Now, when I truly am obese, except for the fact that I can't wear cool clothes any more and my knees are peeved at me, not much has changed in how I see myself. The universe has simply opened it's benificent arms and helped me unite my belief about myself with reality. Unfortunately.

But I digress. Eating was a criminal activity in my childhood. My mother was a pretty good cook. I think it was an area where she was able to express her love. She always prepared way too much and then watched every bite I took and made me feel bad for eating. I don't know if I was a glutton. I felt like one, though. I was not (I have to remind myself) obese as a child, as a young adult, or even into my 30s and 40s. Weight was always an issue. I was quite slim in my 20s and early 30s. I'm not sure when I began to gain the weight that shames me even in the privacy of the home I seldom venture out of. After I injured my legs it got worse. But again I digress. This subject sends me into a spiral of circular and insane thinking. Because along with feeling obese even when I wasn't, I was made to feel like a glutton. Hunger is normal but not in my brain. In my brain it's a criminal/sinful activity.

My mother didn't limit her assessment of my sins to just food. She grew up in a very abusive and profoundly destitute home, the 2nd oldest of 8 siblings. She was beaten. She was used as cheap labor. She was sent out to work at the age of 8. Perhaps worst of all, she was neglected in other ways so that she almost died on more than one occasion from medical neglect. She saw me as profoundly spoiled. That I had anything I think angered her on some level and that I sometimes wanted more ... well that was wickedness of the highest order. I grew up believing that wanting - that any kind of desire - was a form of gluttony. I've put a lot of work into shifting that belief. I still struggle with it, but I don't punish myself any more (not as often or as much anyway) when I buy something for myself or when something is given to me. Still, it was only two years ago that I caught myself worrying that my neighbors might hate me and think I was rich because UPS delivered a package to me... or because I got my house painted. I had to work through it - ask myself if I thought those kinds of things when they got deliveries - in order to grasp the utter insanity of my thinking.

So what is gluttony? Eating two pieces of pie? Wanting a new TV that you can't afford? Or is it bilking thousands of people out of billions of dollars. Or is it feeling entitled to a five million dollar bonus for screwing up the lives of half the human race and being baffled when people resent it. Realistically, I'd say it's those latter behaviors that are gluttony. But some days I'm not sure. How sad is that.

I'm just spewing out whatever comes off my fingers here and I'm not going to go back and proofread because if I do, I'll be humiliated and I won't post it.

The best and wisest pastor I ever encountered once had a conversation with me - or maybe it was a sermon he gave - about the meaning of sin. He defined it as "separation from God." I always thought that made more sense than all the nitpicking of petty crimes that so often engages the minds of religious people. I often think that our obsession with viewing ourselves as criminals is one of the things that TRULY separates us from God. God, to me, is pure Love. He/She/It could care less if I'm fat or even greedy or if I lose my temper when I'm tired. Even if I don't approve of or love myself... even if my mother didn't... God loves me all the time simply because that's who/what God is. Sins, I think, are a human invention. The only thing that's truly sinful in my view is being unloving, because being unloving disconnects you from LOVE (though even that doesn't disconnect LOVE from you).

And that's my rambling thoughts on gluttony and other semi-related stuff.

Happy Saturday. Eat hearty and be a glutton for the joy of living. I think God likes that. (Of course, I could be wrong.)

Twofer:Rising from the Ashes and Lust (Sin of the Week)

There ARE signs of SPRING! There are!

Well, I'm not sure I'm 100% back but I think I'm ready to give it a shot again. It doesn't hurt that there are several big splotches of green outside my window and that the back roof snow is dripping like it might finally come down. It also doesn't hurt that I had pretty awesomely exciting news yesterday. Last summer (courtesy of the great tree tragedy) I applied for and received a grant from a place called Delaware Opportunities as part of something called their "Access" program. I had wanted help making it easier/possible to come and go through my front door. At the moment it's about a 3 and a half foot drop to a narrow log. I can do it (or I could a couple of years ago which is the last time I tried), but it's not easy and it's even difficult for delivery people and friends. Anyway, the kind gentleman who does site inspections and supervises the process came yesterday and it turns out I'm not just getting a new accessible entry - I'm getting a walk-in shower, a taller ADA (Americans With Disabilities) approved toilet and a sink to go with it. They're also going to move my washing machine from where it is now into my kitchen which means I'll be able to use it. How cool is that! So it's kind of like Christmas on steroids here. With paper work, bids and approvals, it will all happen anywhere between May and September. Yippee! Of course now I can sit around being anxious about who's coming and how I'll manage the cats and will it all be ok, but.... it's pretty exciting.

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On another front, Kay, over at Perhaps We Learn has decided to try her hand at a meme and is offering a Friday sin a week for the Lenten Season. She is starting us out with Lust of all things, which is a tough one for me.... but I'll give it a try.

Lust is not my best sin. When I hear the world lust, I think about sex which immediately throws me into a state of complete panic. I may have mentioned that my mother was a little crazy in some ways. She was raised by crazy people and she passed the crazy along. Not on purpose. She couldn't help it. When her father found her talking and laughing with a friend of one of her brothers, he called her a whore and refused to speak with her for several months until he needed his shop cleaned at which point he deigned to converse with her again. She didn't mean to pass this kind of twistedness on; she simply couldn't help it. The fact that I had a body made me a threat. I was pathologically naive and innocent. Really. I thought kissing was sex. I didn't know that men had penis's or that I had a vagina. In my twenties I thought kissing was sex and when I finally achieved my first kiss was terrified of getting pregnant and mortified at my immorality. I was one screwed up kid. Over the years I've come to know that I'm not stupid, so the fact that I could grow up even in the 50s and be that out of the reality loop says there was something really messed up going on with me. But anyway... back to lust. When your mere existence makes your mother think you are promiscuous, when you live in a world with no touch, when anything that might make you even modestly attractive to the other sex is viewed as whorish, it gets really confusing to know what's what. In my world thinking some guy was cute was the virtual equivalent of having ripped my clothes off and hopped into bed. I was so afraid of being lustful or promiscuous that I don't think I actually got as far as lust very often. Not that it never happened and not that I never acted on it, but I was so messed up (and probably still am) that I never got to enjoy it. And that is truly sad.

All of this tempts me onto my soap box about how Americans as a society are really screwed up about sex. We give kids such a mixed message. In soap operas, sit coms and movies, people hop in and out of bed with reckless abandon, little or no shame and lots of guilt and ill consequences. This at the same time a large segment of our society is proposing abstinence mixed with ignorance, a sure-fire prescription for STDs and unwanted pregnancies. We ask our kids to do as we say, not as we do. In a society supposedly as prudish as ours, one of the most popular TV shows is Desperate Housewives in which (I have not watched the show, though from bits and pieces I've seen/heard, I can tell that the writing is really good) one of the women has sex with a young teen age boy. There's little outrage about that, though in real life, we'd send her to prison. Anyway.... We are a society that glamorizes lust and sex out of one side of our mouths while conveying to our children out of the other side that it's a "bad" thing for them to be interested in. Hmmm... I wonder why kids like Bristol Palin get pregnant.

So this is a lot of verbiage that doesn't say much. Lust isn't a big issue for me these days. I never leave the house and I don't know any straight men. I will say that if I were going to lust after someone, the actor Mark Harmon who plays Jethro Gibbs on NCIS or George Clooney are the kind of men I would lust after. Or does the fact that I can say that mean that I DO maybe have a little lust left in me? On a less sexual front, I lust after a new TV, new flooring for my kitchen and a new sofa.... but maybe that's a sin for another week.

That's it for the moment. I wrote my 10-word and mini wordzzles a couple of days ago and they are incredibly boring. Hoping my new found spirit of life applies to my imagination too and will grant me some inspiration for the mega. I'll try to post them by 6:30 at the latest.

I've missed everyone. Will try to pop around and catch up on what you've been up to, though I may pace myself and do it over the next couple of days.