Longing for God - nuggets 3

From the book "Longing for God" comes this nugget. Success or failure in the eyes of society is meansured in terms of wealth, power, prestige and personal achievement. But success in our spiritual life is measured in terms of our ability to understand and address our own spiritual condition as well as the spiritual needs of others. Yet there is almost nothing in our contemporary culture that directs us this way.

Evagrius of Ponticus tells us, "The spiritual life is a journey that will see us react to the gravitational pull of eight deadly thoughts: gluttony, anger, greed or avarice, envy or vainglory, pride, lust or impurity, indifference or impatient discouragement -sloth, melancholy or depression.

We can overcome the disorientation of the eight deadly thoughts only through the orienting effects of the eight godly virtues: temperance overcomes gluttony, mildness overcomes anger, generosity over greed and avarice, happiness over envy, humility over pride, chastity over lust and impurity , diligence over indifference, wisdom over melanchholy.

The mind is the first and, in many ways, the most central arena of this battlefield in the moral life. Seeing the progression, gluttony is the most basic of the passions and temperance, the most basic of the virtues.