Two Home Towns

Last week I posted on starting a Sunday School class on the Seven Deadly Sins. Our topic then was Lust, this week it was Gluttony. There was much discussion of how only 9% of Americans would describe themselves as gluttons though fully a third of us are deemed overweight. With the sedentary lives we lead in today’s age of knowledge work I suspect that it’s quite a bit easier to be overweight without being a glutton than it once was. But that wouldn’t explain the 35,000 calorie per day eating habits in TLC’s show on the Brookhaven Obesity Clinic would it?

Gluttony has many angles of course. Food is one, drink is another, and excesses of other things by quantity, delicacy or expense were also discussed. Reflecting on last week’s topic one of our class members asked the excellent question of whether hunger was to gluttony as sexual desire is to lust. I think that’s probably right. Eating and sex are both good and good for you in the right contexts and quantities. Outside of those, no.

Our class instructor asked at the outset what we thought of when we thought of gluttony. For me the thing that came to mind immediately was “Rome”. What better portrait of consumption to excess was there than the Roman norm of eating and drinking to the point of vomiting and then starting all over again? Also, since one of the ideas behind the Seven Deadly Sins is that they lead to other sins, the Roman orgy seems to me that it defines gluttony. I suspect that it did so for the Jews and early Christians also, considering their less-than-friendly relationship with the culture and power of Rome.

Since lust, gluttony and greed are not so much acts themselves as they are descriptive of the degree or manner of other behaviors, there followed some discourse on what constituted pleasurable and healthy consumption versus sinful and self destructive behavior. For me the answer is most easily given in hindsight. With an honest heart assess yourself the following day and ask if you are better off now or worse. Do you have a hangover? Is your digestion wrecked? Do you have to consult other people to know what your actions were? Did you damage any relationships last night or treat anybody badly after you started drinking? If so, I’d say that there was some gluttony in there somewhere. Do that enough and you will surely diminish your life – eventually you’ll run out of people that think you are any fun!

For me, one thing is certain. Merely eating, drinking and being merry is not sinful or gluttonous in any way. In fact, the very phrase comes from a positive statement in Ecclesiastes 8:15, and it just might be my favorite verse in the whole bible:

“So I commended mirth, that a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry, and that this should accompany him in his labor all the days of his life which God hath given him under the sun.”

To me that is pretty clear – the joy of food, drink and merriment is hard to beat, but if you are indulging so much that you can’t labor you’ve obviously got a problem. I think the same thing is clearly true if you’re merriment comes at the cost of hurt to yourself or to someone else.

But when it doesn’t? When a genuine good time is had by all, what happens then? Well that’s some of the best stuff life has to offer, and I think that it can do much to not only make life pleasurable, but to even make a better person. I know it’s made a difference for me. For the past two years when we’ve had our holiday parties at work, I’ve had my fill of wine and laughs with co-workers, some of whom I’d had my doubts about or conflicts with. In those moments I’ve quite literally felt the wall in my heart come down toward them, to my certain benefit and betterment.