FOCUS | From the Editor
The names of the Seven Deadly Sins bring our immediate interest and attention: pride, envy, avarice, anger, lust, gluttony, sloth. We know them all, all of us, in one degree or another. They are lodging in the human heart today as certainly as when the early church fathers espied them in their own hearts, as securely as when the first Buddhist monks wrestled them within theirs. Somehow or other, they seem to belong to the human condition. They cling to us, and we to them.
Perhaps they interest us because they are names for suffering, for the psychic pain of our isolation, frustration, and fear. In a time when the word seems an embarrassing anachronism, each of our contributors has had to face the question of what sin means to us today. Is sin an action, an external deed? What is a "state" of sin? Do these tendencies have a purpose? Are we responsible for these impulses--inevitable and "natural" to us as they are? They have a vigorous life within us--are they in any sense needed?
“Envy,” Roger Lipsey says in his essay, “drives us, raving, to ourselves.” Each of these sins drives us, raving, to ourselves; and there, within ourselves, they bring us to an end or a beginning.
From many points of view, in many different ways, and to a surprising extent, the contributors to this issue share a fundamental approach to the question of sin. “Virtue,” says P.L. Travers, “is always equivocal.” Vice seems to offer a sure thing, the appearance of certainty. It is, in fact, a point of arrested movement, a place where process has stopped, where growth ends, where change crystalizes into a distortion. “Change breaks down our boundaries,” Thomas Buckley writes in this issue, “links us to all else, providing the grounds of our interconnectedness, our interdependency… we seem to fear both impermanence and interdependence.” These sins, our contributors are saying, can block our realization of this impermanence, can appear to offer us a way out of fear, and give us an assurance of control. And lead us into temptation.
That we can be led into temptation, that we have a capacity for fearsome excesses is at the same time a testimony to our freedom and our will. No animal is gifted with the choice to move toward growth or toward decay – a choice present at every moment. “The moment I begin to act,” de Dampierre says, “these impulses are there and must be taken into account.”
What is it within us that can take them into account, that can bring them into the light? For these deadly sins can flourish only in the darkness of the ego and its partial and limited desires. Denied and unseen, they are all the beasts of creation exercising certain dominion over our humanity. Only virtue is uncertain, and always threatened, demanding a conscious awakening to a deeper reality. Perhaps these sins, with their sting of death, can bring us to the exercise of that capacity, and to life.”
– Lorraine Kisly
Cover: "Pride" by Gloria C. Ortíz, 1985. Mixed media. Photograph by David Heald.
