Eight Ways We Go Astray

Not just a danger at the holidays or the local “all-you-can-eat” buffet. For Evagrius, gluttony actually leads us to be overly concerned about our physical wellbeing. It tempts us to drastically reduce or completely give up fasting and other ascetical practices for fear of adversely affecting, or even ruining, our health. Gluttony also makes us short-sighted and prevents us from seeing God and truth clearly. If we find ourselves taking more food than we need to feel satisfied, thinking a lot about food outside of mealtime, or are overly choosy at mealtime, we are likely under the influence of gluttony.

Remedy: We need to get to know and learn to be satisfied with what our bodies actually need (and that’s a lot less than we think). While there are times to celebrate and have a feast, we will enjoy the feasts more if we learn to get by the rest of the time with simpler, and substantially less, food and drink.

The opposite of love, lust is “seeking bodies.” This is not just about sex – it’s about using people to make ourselves feel good. Lust blinds our mind’s eye and keeps us from seeing God and truth. When we try to pray while under the spell of lust, we can’t and then acedia follows.

Remedy: Gluttony and lust often go hand-in-hand. When our bodies have plenty of food and drink, we begin to look to satisfy other needs and desires. To help prevent lust, fast regularly and exercise or engage in manual labor. Other tips: control the imagination and guard what you feed it (what you see and hear).

Avarice afflicts a person with fear of insecurity, of a lengthy old age and the inability to work, so instead of trusting in God’s providence for the tomorrows of our life, we start collecting and hoarding more than we should for a “rainy day.”

Remedy: We need to increase our faith that God will provide for our actual needs of tomorrow (not necessarily our wants or desires). Give generously to others, even from your need. God will not be outdone in giving.

The thought of sadness comes upon us when we don’t have what we want. Certain thoughts bring up memories of past “good times”, perhaps thoughts of childhood or school days. If we don’t resist this walk down memory lane, we pour ourselves into past pleasures, only to “wake up” and realize it’s gone and life is no longer as it once was. Our souls are left in sadness to the degree we pursued our memories.

Remedy: Flee attachment to earthly pleasures. Because all things in our earthly life are passing, attachment to them only becomes a trap for us and keeps us from God in this present moment.

Sometimes sadness brings a friend, anger. Anger also tends to follow pride. It is the fiercest passion and constantly irritates the soul over wrongs inflicted upon it, either real or imagined. In our quiet, prayerful moments, it flashes up the memory of the offending person or event and keeps us boiling. If it is allowed to persist, it becomes indignation, disturbs our sleep, causes physical illness and gives us illusions of continued attacks – we begin to see all actions as threats against us.

Remedy: Practice almsgiving and meekness. Images of a frightful kind come from anger, which disturb our sleep and makes us weak the next day, so don’t let the sun go down on your wrath: forgive.

Acedia is what the Desert Fathers called “the noonday demon.” It causes the most serious trouble of all because it hits us in the middle of our prayers and good works and makes us restless. We become bored with spiritual things – with Mass, with prayer, with spiritual reading. We check our watches for the fiftieth time, yawn and look out the window for a distraction, any distraction. Acedia tempts us to give up what we are doing and move to more exciting, greener pastures.

Remedy: Give yourself a motivating pep talk: “why so downcast, o my soul? Why groan within me? Hope in God, I will praise Him still, my savior and my God!” Stand firm, be patient, and be brave. The good news is that if we persevere in resisting acedia, no other evil thoughts immediately follow – only deep peace and joy.

Vainglory is subtle and can grow in even the most virtuous souls. It leads a person to desire praise from men for their good deeds, to make their works known publicly and causes all kinds of daydreams and fantasies. As vainglory finishes its work, pride or sadness often swoop in. Or, we come crashing down by falling into a baser temptation, such as lust.

Remedy: Because it poisons even good works, vainglory is extremely difficult to detect and overcome. However, vainglory can be driven away by nearly all the other Eight. This is because most of us won’t take pride in falling into one of the other Eight. However, be on guard: once the other Eight are defeated, vainglory will come back to tell us how well we did and tempt us to publicize our good work!

Pride causes the most damaging fall of all because it is a direct offense against God. It causes us to deny God as our helper, our firm support, and to claim any gifts or excellence we have as our own. A person who is under the sway of pride gets “a big head”, with an attitude that their way is the best way, and that those who disagree with them are foolish for not agreeing with him or her. Because we are not God and people will disagree with us, anger and sadness inevitably follow pride.

Remedy: To fight against pride, we should frequently remind ourselves of these four things: 1) our former life and past sins; 2) even though we were slaves of sin and our passions, Jesus, in His mercy, delivered us to a state of grace; 3) as Christians, we are to separate ourselves from the things of this world, which so often and in so many ways bring us low; and 4) it is Jesus who preserves us, saves us from these pitfalls and delivers us from the demons that would rage against us.

From the earliest days of Christianity, men and women have gone out into the desert, seeking God and to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” These Desert Fathers and Mothers are at the foundations of monastic life, and their wisdom and teachings were passed down from one monk and nun to the next. But one man systematized them into some very practical advice for those seeking God. Evagrius described for us “Eight Evil Thoughts” and stated that all our thoughts can be classified into one of these eight. And these thoughts, if left unchecked, keep us from true prayer, lead us away from God and take us down paths were we “do what we don’t want to do and don’t do what we want.” Evagrius and the Desert Fathers knew that the first step to real transformation is to know ourselves – our own thoughts and desires – and only then can we avoid the insanity of doing the same thing again and again, yet expecting different results.

These Eight Thoughts were picked up, further developed and refined by John Cassian, Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Thomas Aquinas and others to become the Capital (or Deadly) Sins many of us are familiar with today. So here’s a quick rundown of the Evagrius’ “Eight” and how to fight them.

Finally, some general remedies:

• Suffer from a wandering mind? Regain focus by reading Scripture and spiritual books, spending time at night or in the early morning in silent waiting on God, and pray.

• Ablaze with “flames of desire”? Quench earthly desires with fasting, regular manual labor (and/or exercise), and solitude.

• Afflicted with irascibility (anger)? Calm the beast within by singing psalms (for example, the Divine Office), practicing patience, and almsgiving or works of mercy.

Of course, we can’t fight any of these without God’s help and grace, so we should always ask Him for it!

Harness Your Passion Power!

In a previous post, we talked about what our passions are and the purpose they serve us, that they are truly powerful (for good or evil). Our passions are gifts from God and He intended them to be subject to reason, but because of sin and its effects, we must cooperate with God’s grace to discipline them and harness our passion power.

Harness Your Power! 

“A person who governs their passions is master of the world. We must either command them or be enslaved by them.” - Saint Dominic

All our passions begin with love, even hate (for example: we hate sickness only because we love health).  Our passions are informed by what we’ve taken in with our senses, including our sense of imagination, our environment, our natural temperament and biology, our upbringing and past experiences, and so on.  This is easy to see with food examples: we generally like the foods we grew up with and dislike the foods that are foreign to our palate.  But what other things trigger our emotions?  What buttons or sensitive spots do we have as a result of our temperament or past experiences that trigger anger?  Sadness? Joy?  Why?  Each of these attitudes or way of seeing and perceiving the world around us is unique to each person.

When passions break away…

We each have one or two passions that cause us particular problems and, left undisciplined, will lead us into vice. Love and desire left unchecked can lead us into bad relationships, overeating, overspending, selfishness, and so on. Sadness can leave us depressed and immobile in life. Courage can disintegrate into recklessness. Fear can freeze us from taking risks with our talents so that we bury them. Anger can lead to harsh words or even violence. So how do we harness our power without squelching it? First, pray for God’s grace and guidance. Then, remember AIR.

1. Assess - where is the heart? When you start to feel your passions rise, or even as you go about the day, pause and ask yourself, “where is my heart?” We can’t harness our passion power until we know which passion is driving us at the moment.

2. Investigate - why? Once you’ve identified the passion of the moment, ask, Why am I experiencing this passion? What is my perception of the good and/or evil here? What is it that I really love which is at root of this passion I am experiencing at this moment? Remember our passions arise because we first perceive something as good or evil - that perception is inside us and we are ultimately responsible for it.

3. Respond. Only after steps 1 and 2 are we in a place to respond to the passion. If our passion is reasonable (appropriate for the time and circumstances and in the right measure), we can give thanks! If it’s not, then we need to take measures to keep them disciplined. Our responses will depend on the passion and each person, but here are three alternatives we can try.

   1. Remind ourselves of some aspect of Jesus, Mary or the saints that shows the words, actions or virtue we want to imitate and grow.

   2. Meditate on a mystery of the Rosary or a story from Scriptures that corresponds with the passion. Saint Teresa of Avila used to advise her sisters that if they were sad, particularly for selfish or worldly reasons, and couldn’t shake it, to meditate on Jesus’ agony in the garden and His sadness. The idea is that by giving your passion “new and better food”, it will lose it’s taste for any worldly food and will become more disciplined over time.

   3. Use the passions against one another. This is where the passion of anger is particularly useful, because it is often not compatible with the other passions and can easily summon courage for action. If the passion we are experiencing is leading us to the point of yielding to temptation (perhaps we desire something that would not be healthy or even sinful, or we desire to do nothing when we should do something) or the passion is keeping us from peace and joy in truly good things (for example, we are weighed down by sadness or despair), then we can rouse anger to help dispel the “unruly passion” and spur us on to take any action we may need to take.

The struggle to discipline the passions is hard work, especially at first. But with grace, time and consistent practice, they begin to pull together and in line with reason. Passion Power!

Passion Power: Directing Us Toward The Good

It’s Friday night after a long week. You’re walking in the door from a long day of work.  Immediately, your nose picks up a smell: pizza!  Your mouth begins to salivate and your stomach growls.  You want a slice (or two or three), so you head to the kitchen.  Then you see an open tin on the counter and another smell hits you.  Anchovies.  It’s one of your roommate’s favorite pizza toppings, but you cannot stand them.  You quickly pipe up to your roommate, “none for me, thank you!” and shrugging, your roommate gobbles up “your share”.

Just then, your cell phone rings.  It’s your new boss and he is not happy about a project you finished today.  You begin to tremble and feel defensive.  You’ve been struggling at work and trying to make a good impression; as you listen to his words, your spirit sinks lower and lower - you feel powerless and immobilized and you’re mind goes numb.  Then you realize he’s not seen all of your report and your heart picks up a beat with a glimmer of hope.  Taking a deep breath, you gather your courage and leave the room with your phone as other friends begin to arrive.  A while later, you hang up the phone. The conversation took longer than you thought, but in the end, you worked everything out - your boss is happy and you feel peace to enjoy the weekend. 

Smiling with satisfaction, you remember your friends and the waiting pizza.  So you walk out into the kitchen only to find… empty pizza boxes!  A wave of sadness and disappointment sweeps over you, then irritation and anger begins to rise (how could they eat it all?!).  Your roommate enters the room, munching on a crust.  “Oh hey!  We weren’t sure how long you were going to be, so we saved you some slices.  They are in the oven keeping warm.”  As you settle in your favorite chair with your slices (anchovy-free!) and friends all around, you sigh deeply with joy.

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 Our passions, or our emotions, are truly powerful - they can move us, or drag us down, like nothing else!  But what are our passions?  What purpose do they serve? Are they good? Should we just “follow our hearts” and let our passions lead us? Or are they so opposed to our intellect that we should try to deny and extinguish them? Can we harness our passion power for good and not evil?

Know Your Power!

As humans, we are flesh and spirit, body and soul.  Our passions, or emotions, are movements of our sensitive appetite and is something we have in common with all animals.  We perceive some object with our senses, we believe it to be either good or evil and a change in our physical bodies results.  In our above example, we smelled pizza, we believe pizza is good and our mouths began to water and our stomach growled.  When we thought our friends had eaten the pizza, thus depriving us of that good, we experienced sadness, and so on.

Thomas Aquinas describes eleven passions.  Six passions incline us to seek sensible and pleasurable goods and to flee harmful evil: love, hate, desire, aversion, joy, and sadness.  The remaining five passions incline us to resist obstacles and, in spite of them, to obtain a difficult good: hope, despair, courage, fear, and anger. Looking back at our story, can you spot all 11 passions?

Power For Good…Or Evil?

So are the passions good or bad?  Pleasure-seekers would say, “they are good!  Follow your passions!  Do what feels good!  That is a legitimate expression of our human nature!”  Stoics, recognizing unbridled passions can lead us to act contrary to our human reason, would argue that passions should be suppressed.  We, as Catholics, take the middle road: our passions are neither good nor bad – it’s what we do with them that matters.  What makes them good or bad is whether they are conformed to right reason.  Having one or two slices of pizza when we’re hungry is not bad!  Having a whole pizza or two likely is. 

Thomas Aquinas also goes further.  Our passions can actually increase or decrease the merits of our virtuous acts (and do the same for the demerits of our vicious ones)!  We instinctively recognize this when we watch someone doing something good, but say “his heart is not in it.”  God too loves a cheerful giver, which is why we should strive to have our passions in line with right reason.  So our passions should be disciplined, but not extinguished.  We can think of our passions as the “horsepower” of our soul.  Our passions are like a stallion, our body the chariot and our intellect the driver.  If the driver does not train and guide the stallion with a firm but gentle hand, the stallion will break away and cause a wreck.  Next time, we’ll talk more about how to harness this passion power!