There have been fires blazing to the north and east and south of us. The other morning the early light was a bilious yellow and the air carried the heavy, smoked scent of an aged wine barrel. The books under the open window next to my bed were dusted with a thin sprinkle of ivory ash. It is easy to understand how the threat of the flames of hell could be used to burden the believers of the early Christian Church.
High up above one of our doorways hangs a row of seven little plaster heads. At first glance you might think they were the seven dwarfs, but if you look carefully you will see that they are a succession of hooded medieval friars with rather grotesque faces. Each monk’s frozen expression depicts one of The Seven Deadly Sins.
The concept of listing human vices goes back at least as far as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, circa 340 BC, and was adopted in the oral teachings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. These spiritual seekers of the third through seventh centuries AD fled to the Egyptian wilderness in search of quiet contemplation and meditation. Here in the sands of the Scetis, they threw away all passions and possessions, essentially burning off the trappings that were thought to prevent unity with God. The practices of rigid self-discipline and mortification were seen as the means of combatting the unworthy tendencies through which the spiritual quest could be lost.
In his Logismoi (Thoughts), circa 375 AD, the Desert Father, theologian and teacher, Evagrius Ponticus listed Eight Terrible Temptations, which included Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Vanity, Wrath, Sadness, Apathy and Pride. Evagrius’ writings were later translated from the Greek into Latin by his student, St. John Cassian, a fourth and fifth century ascetic and philosopher. Cassian’s work, Collationes Patrum in Scetica Eremo (Conferences of the Desert Fathers), circa 420 AD, includes De Octo Spiritibus Malitiae (The Eight Spirits of Wickedness).
Gregory the Great, the first monk to become a pope, revised The Eight Spirits of Wickedness in his Moralia on Job (Commentary on Job), 590 AD. He amended Pride to include Vanity, merged Sadness and Apathy to create Sloth and added Envy to the list that was to become known as The Seven Deadly Sins. This teaching served as the basis for the ethical and moral philosophy of the Church throughout the middle ages. In the Summa Theologica (Summary of Theology), written between 1265 and 1274 AD, Thomas Aquinas would continue to expand and defend the Church’s definition of these vices as the flaws through which a human being might fall morally astray and risk eternal damnation. In Dante Alighieri’s Divina Comedia (Divine Comedy), written between 1308 and 1320 AD, the seven terraces of purgatory correspond to each of the Deadly Sins.
In the queue of monks that graces our wall, the Sins are represented in the order in which Pope Gregory listed them: Pride, Greed, Lust, Wrath, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. Is it coincidence that Gregory decided on seven sins? Hindu sacred texts from the middle of the first millennium AD illustrate seven major chakras. These invisible spinning wheels of energy travel up along the spine from its base to the crown of the head. According to this thought, a misalignment of body, mind and spirit occurs when there is an imbalance in any of these whirling, burning centres.
Each chakra is a colour of the rainbow from red to violet and corresponds to the different organs and energy systems of the body. When I was a child, I imagined the soul as a beam of light, much like a fluorescent tube, that extended from head to tail. Is it coincidence that all the colours of the rainbow when spun together create white light?
This evening, I am staring hard and long at the seven little monks. What if Pope Gregory could have understood each of the Deadly Sins not as sins but simply as fixed human emotions? What would Gregory’s Deadly Sins look like as interpreted through the chakras? I imagine shuffling the miniature heads around and arranging them vertically up the chakric ladder from the bottom rung to the top.
Using this analogy, I would leave the first monk where he is. Pride, at the level of the first chakra, is the first of the Deadly Sins and it’s the foundation upon which all others are constructed. It’s the ego that forms the basis for what we think we are and drives us toward all kinds of potential mayhem, precisely because it wants so much.
Climbing up this imaginary ladder, each subsequent imbalance would build upon the next, constricting the corresponding organs and their energies and threatening physical and energetic tumble:
Lust would burn in the pelvis.
Anger would combust in the belly.
Envy would blaze at the level of the heart.
Gluttony would choke the throat and drown the voice.
Greed, like smoke, would cloud the eyes.
And finally, Sloth would suffocate the vitality of the soul.
Years ago, I had a beloved friend and mentor. In the last months of her life, Pauline gave away almost everything she owned. She placed great time and thought into gifting her belongings to those whom she believed would be most joyful and appreciative in receiving them—china platters, oriental carpets, Pendleton wool blazers she had tailored herself. On what was to be her last Christmas, she surprised me with a large applewood carving of a prancing mare. All these years later, Annie still wears the red ribbon Pauline tied around her neck that day. “I want to experience the happiness these things bring to others while I am still alive,” she told me.
I went to visit Pauline on an Easter Sunday, a few days before she died. She had left her beautiful home with the floor to ceiling windows that looked out at the ocean and moved to a small three room apartment behind the Safeway. She sat draped in a striped saddle blanket in a simple upholstered chair in the centre of her bare living room. Framed by the nearly empty space, she shone translucent. She was more light than matter.
It was the last I would see of Pauline until a few months later when I scattered her ashes to the autumn breezes over the field where she used to graze her horses. Handfuls of charcoal grey sand streamed through my fingertips as I ran faster and faster through the damp grass. What remained of my friend floated behind me in the cool air like a boat’s silver wake in the sea. Grey sand and one tiny piece of vertebra.
And so tonight, the little plaster monks stare out at me and I recognize every one of their faces. Probably most of us would. And although not many of us would choose to follow in the footsteps of the desert saints, whatever we ultimately choose to keep or cast off, each of us has in our possession, by way of being human, the mystical possibility of transformation.
ash and light
What you grasp so tightly
Will find its antithesis
In gratitude
And love.
Embrace what is human in you.
It is the fuel that will burn form into ash.
Bow to what is divine in you.
It is the spark that will burn spirit into light.
We are each of us ash and light,
Human
Blazing into
Being.