Seven Deadly Sins

From Frederick Beuchner's Wishful Thinking. This is helpful to think about during Holy Week.

Anger

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

Envy

Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else be just as unsuccessful and miserable as you are.

Gluttony

A glutton is one who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.

Greed

Greed is based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of Jesus that it is more blessed to give than to recieve is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that Jesus tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too.

Lust

Craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.

Pride

Self-love or pride is a sin when, instead of leading you to share with others the self that you love, it leads you to keep yourself in perpetual safe deposit. You don't accrue any interest that way, but become less and less interesting every day.

Sloth

Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. A lazy man, a man who sits around and watches the grass grow, may be a man at peace. His sun-drenched, bumblebee dreaming may be the prelude to action or itself an act well worth the acting.

A slothful man, on the other hand, may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly lost his sense of taste and smell. He knows something’s wrong with him, but not wrong enough to do anything about. Other people come and go, but through glazed eyes he hardly notices them. He is letting things run their course. He is getting through his life.