Lust and Sloth
The always-excellent John Zmirak penned an absolutely excellent (and deliciously funny) article a while ago (during my lengthy break from the Internet over Christmas, natch) concerning lust, chastity, and frigidity.
It really is a belly-laugher, at least from a guy’s perspective. I mean, how funny is this:
From the age of eleven right up into Alzheimer’s, your average straight male walking down the street doesn’t see people in their various demographic categories — according to age, ethnicity, social class, etc. Nope. Instead, he sees his fellow humans breaking into two categories:
1) Good-looking women.
2) Orange traffic cones.
I know what the kindly female reader is saying, the one who has many men in her life whom she loves and respects as fellow Christians. “Well, that’s not true of … Harvey! When he works with me at the soup kitchen, I know that he looks at each of those homeless men who come to us as human beings. In fact, he once said to me that he viewed each of them as an image of Christ …”
Nope. Sorry sister. That may be what he wants or tries to see. But when he looks over the bubbling kettle of hot dog soup in the dim church basement at that long line of “people-who-aren’t-good-looking-women” (it’s a broad and, alas, all too common category) what he really sees are orange traffic cones. Now, when he looks at you, on the other hand … notice how his face lights up. That’s because you’re literally the first person he’s seen all morning. Try to take the compliment. He can’t help it. None of us can.
It gets better from there. Though now that I think about it, I should probably have saved mention of the article for tomorrow. Whoops.
Zmirak’s more recent article on sloth is somewhat more sobering, but I was struck especially by this reflection therein:
If a person or group’s public statements seem more grounded in hatred of an evil than love for a threatened good, it’s time to be suspicious. Even obvious, almost metaphysical evils such as Communism or Nazism can goad us to oppose them in the wrong way, overzealously, in a way that can corrupt us.
It seems to me that I may have railed away before at my dislike of the idea of “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Human beings can espouse such nice ideals, but tend to be more or less incapable of actually living them. We can love something or hate something…we usually can’t do both.
