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Last
week we looked at gluttony, the first
in our series on the Seven Deadly Sins. I hope it didn’t
leave feeling too depressed!
The
point of this Lenten journey is not to induce feelings of fear or
guilt, or the idea that we can’t do anything, so we’d
better do nothing. That’s why this week we’re looking
at the sin of sloth or laziness.
Sloth
– ‘the desire for ease, even at the expense of doing the
will of God.’ Or as Mortimer Caplan put it: ‘Laziness
is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.’
Life
today is increasingly busy and stressed. There seems to be a mountain
of paperwork, housework, charity work to be done and the time is
running out.
We
arrive home exhausted from a day at work, only to find endless things
needing to be done at home. Demands and expectations, deadlines
and commitments rule our existence.
So it’s easy to think like Robert
Service.
Sometimes we get completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of life
today. I, like many other people, suffer from clinical depression,
a disease that robs its sufferers of physical, emotional and psychological
energy.
To
the outside observer, it looks like laziness – to the one who
lives with it, it can be a prison. Part of the way out of it, for
me at least, is to concentrate what little energy I have in doing
the things that really matter.
Sloth
isn’t simply a lack of business. It’s about not saving
energy for the important things. It is an apathy and a narrowness
of vision. So we may fill every minute of every day with activity,
but are we doing the right things?
Lent
allows us to step back for a while from the frenzied activity of
our busy lives and ask: ‘What is it I’m not doing that
I should be?
Rev Sam McBratney
Week one: wilderness
Week two: sloth
Week three: envy
Week four: anger
Week five: greed
and lust
Week six: pride
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