If you're unfamiliar, The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis presents letters from a senior demon to his nephew Wormwood, a junior assigned to tempt a particular human (it appears every human has one). It describes how the devils get at us, how they manipulate us into sinning, embracing lies, and avoiding the truth. It's worth reading regularly.
In one letter, Screwtape chides his nephew for disparaging gluttony as a means of catching souls:
One of the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a sermon preached or a conscience troubled about it in the whole length and breadth of Europe. This has largely been effected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess.
"Gluttony of delicacy"? Yes. He goes on to describe a woman (no doubt quite thin) "enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small." She doesn't think of herself as a glutton because she doesn't want much. She'll turn away a feast and demand to be given only "a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast."
Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practising temperance.
She is "a positive terror to hostesses and servants" because she can never just take what is set before her. Screwtape says "her belly now dominates her whole life."
Which is something St. Paul wrote about. In Philippians, he mentioned those whose "god is their stomach" (Phil 3:19), which may be more than gluttony, but it's certainly included. When we allow our physical desires to direct our lives, they become our god. This opens up the world of gluttony. It's not simply the habit of overeating; it's the insistence on sating our desires. The person who puts away enough food for three people is easily recognized as a glutton. The person no one would dream of inviting to dinner because they're always obsessed with some "healthy" diet trend — be it avoiding gluten or counting macronutrients — is less easily recognized.
The problem with the woman Screwtape described was not that she liked weak tea and crisp toast. It was that she could not just eat what someone offered her. She made her desires the most important thing in everyone's life. And she couldn't recognize it for what it was.
Which begs us to ask, what other sins work that way?
One obvious example: Lust is normally thought of as visual. A man sees and then desires and then thinks (and thinks). Or he desires, so he goes looking for something to see. But smut can be purely text. Graphic sex scenes in print can be as stimulating as video. Men and women both are ensnared by this, but it appears women are more prone to it. How many people don't think of it as lust or pornography because it's not visually based?
Do you know a gossip? We think of a gossip as someone who enjoys talking about people behind their back, telling what doesn't need to be told. But a gossip needs an audience. The person who's always willing to listen, even if they never share, is committing the same sin. They treasure knowing these secrets, but "I never tell anyone" keeps them from thinking of themselves as a gossip.
I know someone who struggles with anger. But it's not yelling, throwing things, or hitting people. His anger manifests in very quietly belittling his targets — "putting them in their place." Sometimes it might even be well-deserved, but it's done with anger, to punish rather than to correct. Thankfully, he recognizes that for what it is, but how many don't think of themselves as "an angry person" because their anger is quiet?
All of this makes me wonder and makes me worry, what do I not recognize as sin? I have no doubt there are other sins with another subtle, less obvious face. Does one live in me? Does one live in you? We should regularly ask the Lord to reveal anything we don't recognize as sin in our lives to us. Then we should kill it.
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