The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [54]
GOOD OLD SIN
J. was horrifying me with tales of the sedate gambling places at Lake
Tahoe, the ones that are prim and country-clubbed, and which cater
to decent people, with dealerettes in prim black dresses, and soft
Muzak, and nary a drunk on the premises, and the nice old ladies
coming up to gamble in buses from the cities of the Plain. I am
utterly disheartened. What has happened to good old sin? Here I
am behind these walls, doing my bit and counting on the world to
do its bit, with barrelhouse piano and the walleyed guys in eyeshades,
with long cigars, raking in the pieces of eight, and the incandescent
floozies lolling over the roulette wheels. Tell me . . . am I wasting
my time?—
Thomas Merton, in a 1962 letter
The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there
are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil.
But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light
and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all
things are there.
—Pseudo-Macarius
It wasn’t until I had encountered the writings of fourth-century monks such as Pseudo-Macarius and Evagrius of Pontus that I found a workable, useful, and healthy definition of sin, a realistic sense of the capacity for both evil and virtue that resides in the human heart. My husband and I, raised in the pietistic churches of the 1950s, received an education in sin that was not only inadequate but harmful. From the Protestants I got a list of rules that were not to be broken and naively thought that as long as I wasn’t breaking those rules, sin was not much of a problem for me. As a young adult, I believed that I had no conscience, a state I was fortunate to survive. From the Catholics my husband got less a sense of sin than a terrific ability to feel guilty for everything under the sun, a situation that left him less likely to recognize and contend with those things for which he might actually wish to repent.
Having grown used to the polite verbiage of modern-day counseling—we speak of “having guilt feelings” rather than actually acknowledging our guilt—I found myself delighted by the pithy language and imagery of the early monks. Here, for example, is the seventh-century monk of Sinai, John Climacus, on the subject of pride, from a book that is still read in Orthodox monasteries during Lent:
Pride is a denial of God, an invention of the devil, contempt for men. It is the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of barrenness. It is a flight from God’s help, the harbinger of madness, the author of downfall. It is the cause of diabolical possession, the source of anger, the gateway of hypocrisy. It is the fortress of demons, the custodian of sins, the source of hardheartedness. It is the denial of compassion, a bitter pharisee, a cruel judge. It is the foe of God. It is the root of blasphemy.
Welcome to the truth: that’s the feeling I have when I read such a text. And the monk Evagrius, the first to write down and attempt to codify the beliefs and practices of the desert monks with regard to sin (which they called “demons” or “bad thoughts”), not only provides me with a means of understanding my own “bad thoughts” but also with the tools to confront them. His view of anger is typically sensible. Anger, he wrote, is given to us by God to help us confront true evil. We err when we use it casually, against other people, to gratify our own desires for power or control.
Considering “Good old sin,” in the sense that the ancient monks understood it, exposes the vast difference between their worldview and our own. These days, when someone commits an atrocity, we tend to sigh and say, “That’s human nature.” But our attitude would seem wrong-headed to the desert monks, who understood human beings to be part of the creation that God called good, special in that they are made in the image of God. Sin,