A Word in Season: A Shrug is Meager Exercise... Or, whatcha gonna do with venial sins?

My column this week at Patheos is one part confession, and one part resolve.  I got some habits that be needin' some kicking.

Pardon me, but my spiritual mediocrity is showing. 

Lent is approaching -- Ash Wednesday on February 22 – and it’s causing me to consider my spiritual health. For a Christian, the resolution to be good and do good should permeate every day, not just at the onset of the penitential seasons. The call to holiness is in season and out. 

The trajectory of our lives should be a movement from our initial conversion -- a turning away from mortal sins and toward Christ. Indeed, the full maturation of the children of God is the call to be living saints, resembling Christ by imitation. 

Yet sometimes my witness is a bit shaky. 

No, let me say that more truthfully: I often settle for mediocrity. 

I settle for well, I haven’t broken any of the Ten Commandments recently, and I don’t have any mortal sins to confess, and so I coast. Even though I am old enough to know better, I am not immune to the lure of bad habits

Read the rest.

Please feel free to subscribe to this column for your RSS reader or email. 

Oh, and if you want a insightful look at the deadly sins in modern language, check this out, again at Patheos.

The F.U.N. Quotient... computer edition

A few sillies caught my eye this week: 

1. The Seven Deadly Sins on your computer.
H/T @MattSwaim on twitter.


2. Just another day at Tech Support 

Tech Support: "I need you to right-click on the Desktop."

Customer: "Ok."

Tech Support: "Did you get a pop-up menu?"

Customer: "No."

Tech Support: "Ok. Right click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?"

Customer: "No."

Tech Support: "Ok, sir. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?"

Customer: "Sure, you told me to write 'click' and I wrote click'." 

3. A smiley intervention for those of us who use 'em. This cracks me up. 



N.B.: F.U.N. = frequent unbridled nonsense
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This makes me think...

Don't set your heart on something less valuable than you yourself are. If you do that, you surrender your dignity because -- remember -- people come to resemble what they love.  If I love sin, which is nothingness, I too become a nothing. I can't fall any lower than that.


Sin begins simply, innocuously. It begins in loving what God hates and hating what God loves.  That's why if you love the transient things of this world and yourself with a self-absorbed love, you sin.  God hates this.


In fact, it makes God so unhappy, He decided to work out vengeance and punishment for it on His own body. God made himself an anvil and on this anvil hammered out our sins.

---Catherine of Siena, Letters


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