Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies

by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

The slothful person tends to cope by mentally and emotionally “checking out.”

Lazy people, people who sit around and watch the grass grow, may be people at peace. Their sun-drenched, bumblebee dreaming may be the prelude to action or itself an act well worth the acting . . . Like somebody with a bad head cold, [slothful people] have mostly lost their sense of taste and smell. They know something’s wrong with them, but not wrong enough to want to do something about it. Other people come and go, but through glazed eyes they hardly notice them. They are letting things run their course. They are getting through their lives.26

Sloth can thus show itself in the total inertia of the couch potato or the restless distractions of endless activity.

find meaning and purpose in your life. In desperation the rich are continually temped to believe that

“Gluttony primarily and intrinsically signifies the intemperate desire to consume food, not the intemperate consumption of food.”

Important

“Too daintily, too sumptuously, too hastily, too greedily, too much.”

“All human toil is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not satisfied” (Eccles. 6:7).

Like C. S. Lewis’s old woman, I was relying on the pleasure of food to compensate for the lack of rest, relaxation, and joy in an overstressed life. I was behaving toward food like a starving animal would, because I had starved my life of other things that kept me fully human.