Seven Deadly Sins That Won’t Go Away

I followed my usual practice of reading the contents first – and the introduction at the end. I am glad I postponed the personal intro, because this is a rare  Christian book which can make good sense to people of any faith or none.

In it the author describes her life experience through the lens of the traditional seven deadly sins. She achieves her powerful reach by the extreme honesty and frankness of her writing. It is coupled with such scepticism, self-awareness and humour that any of us could say we have been there.

Anger is a natural, human emotion – and often may be justified. The author distinguishes it from Wrath – where we take a curious pleasure in unleashing our hostility and aggression on people we see as being “Not Like Me.” She ascribes this state to the instinctive Fight or Flight response when we encounter something unfamiliar.

We find that jagged emotion almost every day in the headlines of the Daily Mail or the rhetoric of Reform. The advice is to take a step back and allow the adrenalin levels to sink back down.

Ms Oldfield set up a podcast titled The Sacred with the express purpose of bridging the bitter divide in Britain that opened up after the Brexit vote. She was appalled at the way our public discourse had degenerated into angry intolerance.

The chapter on Envy is equally revealing – showing how this unpleasant feeling is tied to anxiety about our status. We all dance to strange tunes as we interact with those we perceive as above or below us in the social hierarchy.

The author identifies the neighbouring emotions of shame and insecurity, and the deep sense of “not-enough-ness.” It might be something as trivial as “Do I have a flat belly?” She writes “Most of us feel envy towards those who surpass us in things that we feel central to our own identity. Envy is a clue to who we wish we were.”

Gradually we are won over to see that these emotional failings inflict what Christians would call a spiritual wound on ourselves. However rational and atheistic we may be, we still have an innate sense of our personal, moral awareness, our successes and failures. We are surfing the waves of momentary choices as they either match or conflict with our aims and ideals.

Dealing with Greed, the author employs a great word: “Stuffocation.”  How we are stimulated to buy one thing after another, as long as the money lasts, to fulfil needs which we once never knew we had. It can easily turn into a kind of addiction, a hopeless habit of shopping for novelties to appease an inner loneliness that won’t go away.

When you move, or downsize, you will know what she means.

In each of the chapters, we follow the author down her own path of battling the temptations. The narration is so fresh and detailed that it becomes an anatomy of our modern western lifestyle, and the inner meanings that it reflects.

The chapter on Gluttony traces a spectrum “from Numbing to Ecstasy.” She accepts that many of these human drives have a positive as well as a negative side. She describes how alcohol and drugs can be vehicles for our desire to achieve transcendence. Or they can destroy us.

Dealing with Lust, she is very frank about her own learning struggles. She tries to distinguish erotic desire from objectification, where we no longer care about our partner in a relationship, and how they will be affected. And she brings out the element of mysticism in love, the erotic element of spiritual experience, particularly in the lives of some women.

The chapter on Acedia – or Apathy – focuses on the distracting nature of the modern world. We can while away huge chunks of our life looking at a screen or surfing social media, staying just clear of boredom or sadness. She contrasts this with giving our whole attention to something or somebody and making real friendships and relationships.

Finally the sin of Pride, which might be justified when celebrating a difficult achievement. She sees the downside as an arrogant and excessive individualism. An intellectual person may pride themselves on their clear-sighted rationality, the fact that they are never fooled by false narratives. But the penalty may be the loss of connection to a community. A false sense that we can solve all our problems by ourselves, in our own super-smart head. We may pride ourselves on our bravery in seeing life as meaningless.

In the face of mounting global challenges, Elizabeth Oldfield has used the phrase “we need to build up our spiritual core strength.” It’s a metaphor from Pilates or Yoga. Whether or not we have a soul, we all have something pretty similar – a sense of rising and falling self-worth. And we need to keep doing the exercises…

The book achieves an impressive double purpose: to update traditional Christian teaching for modern times. And secondly, to explain religious, moral thinking in terms which can make sense to secularists and those in between.

The author explains how she has realised the urge in her own life to forge loving connections with other people by living in a community, along with her family. That won’t be for everyone!

So is this book worth reading (and maybe re-reading)? Yes.

Does the God, which she has experienced as a sense of Belovedness, exist? I would say that doesn’t matter, because God is a word with so many, changing meanings (99 in fact, if you are a muslim.) But if the experience is real for you, it may be your most precious possession.

What matters is that we are all much better off if we can find things and people to believe in and cherish outside our individual self.

We all have some things that are touchstones, lines we will never willingly cross. We should articulate those values, feel them and express them. And if we can, build a community with like-minded fellow human beings.