In recent weeks, my spiritual reading has been from Brant Pitre. It’s rare to find a book which delights me with things I do not yet know about core aspects of my Catholic faith and practice. Some years ago, I found such a book in Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. Was this a one-off? Pitre does not disappoint. In his more recent books on Mary, on Christ as Bridegroom, and now reading his masterpiece on the Spiritual Life, there are treasures galore.
Now, I will freely admit that I am obese, so as a rule-following autistic priest, when I worked through Pitre’s treatment of the Seven Deadly Sins, I expected to find myself convicted of gluttony as my Achilees’ heel. But what I read was not what I expected.
Living alone as a priest, it is hard to manage food. Cooking for one often produces large portions. Parishioners unexpectedly give me things which, if I can stomach them, I feel obliged to eat – and then that throws off my planning for keeping just the right amount of fresh things in the fridge before they expire. Far too much cake enters my kitchen – though I don’t have much of a taste for cake so most of it ends up going stale and being thrown out. I enjoy too many carbohydrates, and find salad and many vegetables distasteful, having to force myself to add something green to each meal rather than opening another tin of baked beans. And I try not to keep chocolate biscuits or custard creams in the house, for once a packet is opened, it will likely not last the day.
Pitre observes that Scripture often brands a person as a ‘glutton and a drunkard’ pairing the desires for food and wine, with the sin of gluttony as the ‘disordered or immoderate desire for food or drink’. Wine enjoyed in moderation is not a problem, as Our Lord illustrated at Cana (though I myself have always been teetotal, save for a thimbleful of champagne to celebrate someone’s happy day). The Rich Man sent to Hades for neglecting Lazarus at his gate is addicted to his food to the extent of not wanting to share it with the hungry.
For me, drinking is not an issue. Nor do I hoard food from others – when a person in poverty rings my doorbell I will fill a shopping bag with whatever I happen to have in my store-cupboard at the time. So my over-eating is not gluttony in the sense Pitre is describing.
At the same time, I’ve been working on something about mental health which has made me focus on eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. And this has brought to my attention how, for most people, eating must be not just the interplay of basic appetites and rational thoughts, but that whole emotional mix (which I barely experience) which is to do with body image and worries about what other people will think of your choice of food. So it’s hard for me to imagine what goes through most people’s minds when they choose both what to eat, and how much of it to have.
My mental apparatus is much simpler. I have a basic appetite – I am hungry. That’s a more primitive feeling than emotion. There are foods I like, which give me pleasure to eat. I haven’t chosen to pay attention to working out what a balanced diet or an appropriate portion would look like – that feels like too much work to research and to implement in a busy priestly life. If I devour a whole packet of biscuits, I don’t think I am consciously self-medicating to drive away some unwanted feeling – I’m simply attracted by the pleasure of eating. This isn’t good – but it doesn’t seem to be gluttony in the sense Pitre is describing because it isn’t linked with a possessiveness.
Do others suffer from the pringle effect (once you pop, you can’t stop)? Thushan Jayaratne has blogged about this. For him, the motivation may be to stop someone else consuming ‘his’ good things or to overcome the insecurity of not being able to see what’s in the packet. But I don’t have a rival eating what’s in my kitchen and I’m not conscious of some insecurity. Nevertheless, because I know I am vulnerable to this ‘pringle effect’ I do try not to have crisps or sweet biscuits in my house.
aspiepriest 