Lust and Chastity

The first vice-virtue pair is not just about sexuality. Most generally, the pair is about the craving that drives someone to desire something. We can lust after sex, of course, but we also lust after other things. Power is a traditional focus of lust, but these days I suspect a lust for fame is pretty common as well. Certainly there are other things that we lust after.

If you're thinking that this all sounds a lot like greed, then you go to the head of the class. They're quite similar. The way to contrast lust and greed is to consider their paired virtues: chastity and generosity. Lust and chastity are about how we handle the wanting of something. Greed and generosity are about how we handle the having of something. The two are clearly closely related, but as I said in the introductory article, all the vices are fundamentally related because they are rooted in a lack of ability to love.

Those who lust have decided that something is more important than love. Sex, power, fame, etc., are so important to these people that when push comes to shove, their craving for whatever they're after will win out over doing something loving.

For example, let's say that I meet a pretty girl at a party. The loving thing to do is to treat her like I would anyone else that I respect greatly. That should be my starting point. She is capable of great depth of conversation, insights into life and love, the pursuit of a relationship with others and with God - the whole nine yards. That's the loving thing. That's the chaste thing.

But I'm not chaste. I'm a luster, so I "check her out", admiring her body. After all, I don't know anyone capable of great depth of conversation and all that drivel. What I implicitly know is that people use each other, and that she'd be fun to "use". That's just the way things are. She's just interested in using me back of course, so it all works out. From there, I approach her to begin my conquest.

Kinda sad, isn't it? The worst of it is when she acts in a way consistent with his lustful attitudes because she isn't any more chaste than he is.

The luster doesn't have the starting point of acting in a loving way because he doesn't see the chaste promise of the girl at the party. Even if she's is a "bimbo" or a "slut", she retains the capacity to do all the things I listed. A fun exposition of that idea is the Judy Holliday movie "Born Yesterday". We get a glimpse of a woman who begins to realize her potential only when she gets the word as an adult.

When I'm talking about capacity or promise, I'm talking about up-to-and-including love. Even the luster has the capacity, but he is so blinded by lust (and other delusions) that love isn't even on his radar. That's why he cannot imagine pursuing chastity. To him, chastity is an absence of lust. Without love, lust is all there is when we consider human sexuality. But what happens when we truly understand love?

Chastity is what happens. Chastity isn't just saying that you won't abuse sex, power or fame. It's saying that you will actively employ them for the gifts that they are. They are gifts because they are a means by which we can love one another. Remember; love involves acting for the best interests of everyone.

We employ sexuality as a gift when we use it as a means of creating children. I don't mean that we do this in the dark, with grim faces and in as brief a time as possible. Sexuality is something that a married couple uses as a celebration of their union. They rejoice in being physically one person as much as you can be, and look forward to the creation of new life. That second part is key because it dwarfs the purely physical part. The desire for new life is a statement of lifelong commitment to their union, of intertwining of not only limbs but of intertwining their identities in each other.

That is what chastity is about: realizing the vast potential of the human experience. The lustful people stop at the point of intertwining their bodies, while the chaste intertwine themselves body and soul. That requires great love, and it is something that the lustful are simply blind to.

This applies to power, fame and another other thing that can be lusted after. The chaste man or woman who holds power or fame understands that it is an opportunity to love others. Power is a way to move the mountains that stand in the way of love. Fame is a way to reach out lovingly to many more people than you normally could. Those who lust after power use it for selfish gain, and those who lust for fame simply self-aggrandize, reminding us of how famous they are.

Lust is a self-limiting attitude and as a result it damages us. It holds us back. It is not loving of others and it is not loving of ourselves. Chastity is the exact opposite, letting us realize a greater experience of love and life. Often the only thing standing in the way of chastity is understanding. Sometimes it just takes a leap of faith that chastity can work. You'll find that this is the pattern of all the vice-virtue pairs.

Vices and Virtues

John A has again prodded me into an article or two. Or seven. He brought up the topic of the seven deadly sins and the corresponding virtues. I figured I'd take a stab at that topic.

First, we have to figure out what a sin is. "A sin is something that's 'bad'" is the usual understanding. In fact, a sin is an offense against God. Sure, breaking the law is a sin. But that's not a bottom-line measure of sin, because there are many things that are completely legal (especially in America) that are sinful. They are things that we do that are effectively a thumbing of our noses at God. And at the world in general. But why should we care?

As it turns out, God wants the very best for us. He loves us dearly. We're all His kids, after all. Would you want anything bad for your kids? Of course not. You may want them to endure certain trials and tribulations, but only as a means of building their character, having perspective and a bit of a sense of reality in their lives. But I digress.

If a sin is an offense against God and God only wants the very best for us, you can see how a sin is categorically a bad thing. It is an action that does something that isn't good for us. The worse the action, the more serious the sin. It's not a case of getting gold stars in a ledger in heaven, jumping through hoops and dotting the requisite 'i's. It's a case of living a joyful, loving, exultant experience while we spend our days as mortal beings. When you're doing that, you're living a virtuous life. When you're at the other end of the spectrum, living an unhappy, contemptuous and asocial existence devoid of love, you are living a sinful life.

I'm trying to work around to the cardinal virtues and deadly sins. To do that, we have to realize that this whole sinning business is about love. When we're acting in ways that don't exhibit love for others, we're in the sinning space. When we're acting in ways that DO exhibit love for others, we're in the virtue space. And that brings us around to the categorization of actions that the seven cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins represents. It's a way of looking at our actions to figure out if they're loving or not.

The cardinal virtues and deadly sins are really one and the same. Each virtue is paired with a sin. The virtue is an act of loving and the sin is an act of not loving. For example, let's take the pair of Gluttony and Moderation. Gluttony is the sin and Moderation is the virtue. The man who practices gluttony is the one who seeks to overindulge in whatever it is that he's a glutton about. That might be excessive eating, but it might also be excessive time at the beach. Any kind of overindulgence in a selfish pursuit is, by definition, something that is focused on "self" and not on others.

That statement should jump out at you. If your action is not predicated in loving others, then it is sinful. Not loving. Sinful. Get it? A virtuous act is something that demonstrates love for others. A sinful act is something that is devoid of love for others. We don't often have actions that are purely virtuous or purely sinful, so don't stand back at 100 feet and declare something sinful or virtuous. Take some time to look closely and see the mix of the two in any act.

Here's the list of pairs of sins and virtues:

Lust	Chastity
Gluttony	Moderation
Greed	Generosity
Sloth	Zeal
Wrath	Meekness
Envy	Charity
Pride	Humility

I don't know about you, but those strike me as being powerful words. They jump to the heart of any motivation that we might have for doing pretty much anything. Imagine somebody with all the sins and none of the virtues. That would be one Walking Nightmare. Would you want them living your neighborhood, around your kids? But what about the other end of the spectrum? Someone with all those traits would seem to be your typical Christian Killjoy. Chastity, moderation, meekness AND humility? Give me a break. What do they do for fun? Rearrange their holy card collection?

That's the funny thing about the vices and virtues listed. We're all drawn to our favorite vices in the here and now, while realizing that the virtues are probably best for us in the long term. But the virtues are invariably boring, so we continue to dabble in a vice or three. The trick to life is figuring out how to see that stack of virtues as a wonderful place to be. (That's the column on the right, for those of you who are having difficulty with this) Maybe such a person wouldn't be a complete weenie, but instead could be someone as remarkable as Pope John Paul II. Or Ghandi. I'm sure you can think of other powerful, dynamic and motivated people who realized great power and influence, yet didn't turn into a hedonistic, self-aggrandizing imbecile. A jerk.

I was going to do an article on winning a lottery a while back. That article was going to touch on the fact that our ability to indulge in vices and virtues is magnified when we do something like win a lottery. We attain more power, and our inclinations to vice or virtue are put on steroids. So instead of the choice of giving $100 to a charity or blowing it on a nice meal, we have the choice of giving $100,000 to charity or renovating the entire house. Your choices of virtues and vices may be working for you now, but what would happen if you were tempted on a grander scale? Would your acts be loving or despising of those around you? Of God Himself?

In the coming articles, I'll talk a bit about each vice/virtue pair. A lot of it is going to be trying to open your eyes to why the virtues are worth pursuing. It can be tough to imagine it when the environment we're in is dominated by so much of the vice.

A Kindness

We are often extolled by Christian virtue to commit charitable acts for the benefit of others. When we hear that, we think of doing things like volunteering or giving money to charities. There is a level of this that frequently sneaks under our radar, perhaps because it is so personal, so intimate. We don't often talk about this sort of thing anymore, perhaps because of the wide range of social customs and mores that are active in America these days. I'm talking about social pleasantries. Well, more than that, really, because the saying that I'm trying to work around to is this:

"A Kindness Accepted is a Kindness Offered"

Have you ever held a door for someone as you walked into or out of a building, only to have them insist that you go through? Waited to let someone with fewer items go ahead of you at the grocery store, only to have them decline? You offered a kindness and they didn't accept the kindness. Ever had a stranger offer to help you carry something - and turned them down as nicely as you could because you don't really trust strangers?

Those are examples of kindnesses being offered, but not accepted. The point of this article is to remind you that to accept a kindness is to offer one in return. Why do we hold doors open for each other? Much of the time, it's just because we're trying to be nice and neighborly. I know that I'm more inclined to open a door for a pretty woman than anyone else, but that door gets held open for many other reasons as well. I am offering a kindness, and most of the time, it is accepted. I get eye contact from the recipient of my gift, and they offer some simple thanks.

That acceptance is a kindness that they have offered back to me. It is a way of declaring the value of the kindness of opening the door in the first place.

Do you find yourself declining kindnesses from other people? I know that I did for the better part of my life. I was raised to be an independent, self-sufficient American man. What I didn't understand was that by accepting a simple kindness from someone, I was doing something kind for them in return.

We live in a society where we don't really need anyone else in our day to day. Most anyone in the world can work even the most basic of jobs and live the life of a comfortable hermit. There's plenty of food, water and shelter for such a person. We don't really NEED other people. Except that we do, of course. We need our friends, our family, our greater community, because we are social beings. Yet when we walk down the street and someone makes eye contact with us, do we glance away or do we smile?

A smile would seem foolish. It's a stranger. If it's a single person walking down the street, they could be nutty as an almond factory. But by odds, 99% of the time that other person is just going to be another normal person. Yet we turn our back on the mainstream because we're terrified of the slim possibility of the Almond Factory Scenario. We're making a declaration that people just aren't worth the risk.

This continues throughout our society which is fascinated with Train Wrecks. We no longer view each other as neighbors, but as strange sorts of adversaries. We have so many dissimilar views that it's nearly impossible to find anyone who can confess to sharing the same life experience that you have. With all that in mind, maybe it's time to get back to that basic human practice of offering - and accepting - those simple social kindnesses that neighbors offer each other. I suspect that it is at the core of why America can operate as a melting pot of so many cultures. Deep down, we just want to be neighbors.