Excessive Tendencies

Alcohol. Food. Games. The Internet. Shopping. These are all pleasures that add a little zest to life. Unless overindulgence in such pleasures gets in the way of love and family.

The word gluttony comes from a Latin verb meaning to swallow or gulp. Often we think of it only in narrow terms of overindulgence in food and drink but it really refers to the general problem of overindulgence or over consumption of any creature comforts. Gluttony involves indulgences that become a problem when they take a central place in one’s life, or when one's "right" to such comforts is taken for granted, at the expense of the love and service owed to the family. 

In Dante’s third circle of Hell we find the gluttonous wallowing in a putrid, nauseating slush produced by a ceaseless icy rancid rain. Having sacrificed love in life for solitary self-indulgence, the gluttons grovel in the mud by themselves, sightless and heedless of their neighbors, symbolizing the cold, selfish, and empty sensuality of their lives.

It is a particular challenge to deal with gluttony because the consumption of food and drink, the use of  medication, the acquisition of creature comforts, are all good in themselves and even necessary to life.

It is when the desire for these things--rather than the things themselves--get in the way of spouses serving one another, and their children, that gluttonous spouses find themselves increasingly mired in the cold, muck of their own self-indulgence, and the marriage begins to fall apart.

This post is excerpted from our book Climbing the Seven Story Mountain. You can read the entire chapter here.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch