Little Sins Mean a Lot. Elizabeth Scalia

Maybe you didn’t listen well.

      4. Ask forgiveness for your failings and for your sins, little and bigger. If one particular moment stands out, ask God to give you wisdom on that matter so that you might learn from it. Be eager for instruction. We can never go wrong by echoing Solomon’s prayer for “an understanding heart.”

      5. Ask for the graces to do better tomorrow, and let God know that you gratefully look forward to a new day.

      An examen is not terribly time-consuming. St. Benedict might have said of the examen that it “contains nothing harsh or burdensome” because it is merely a review of the day between you and God, but it is a review that covers all of the spiritual bases: it begins not with a “please” but with a “thank you,” and then manages an apology where needed before asking for anything more. Taking these 10 or 15 minutes a day to meet and talk to God is an amazingly simple yet powerful way to increase our capacity for mindfulness, which will make us better aware of other people.

      That will, in short order, lessen the sinful excesses of our own self-interest.

      Pray (This prayer or your own)

      Heavenly Father, your psalmist begged, “Set, O Lord, a guard over my mouth; / keep watch at the door of my lips!” (Ps 141:3). So often our mouths and our minds are reckless, running by the full force of our egos. We are so interested in being seen, and noticed, and thought well of by others, that we ironically render ourselves unable to see those very same people — and then, by our thoughtlessness, we injure them; we use them as sounding boards or reflecting mirrors, rather than respecting the dignity with which you have endowed their humanity. Please help me to keep a watch on my own excesses, that I may be more eager to see than to be seen; more willing to hear than to be heard — all that your creation may be better served. In Christ’s name, I pray. Amen.

      Chapter Three

       Self-Neglect

      Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin As self-neglecting.— Henry V, Act II, Scene IV

      Flannery O’ Connor once proclaimed that “half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.” As I demonstrated in the chapter on procrastination, she is quite right. Of all the chapters I have desperately tried to avoid writing for this book, I have felt real revulsion at the prospect of pulling this one from my brain because it touches on too many home truths. I’ve always said self-effacement is a much easier discipline than facing the self.

      A couple of years ago, discussing a public figure with a young Catholic writer, I wondered about whether our subject was as narcissistic as it was claimed. He looked down upon me, mostly because I am short, and said, “You could use a little of his narcissism.”

      When people make spontaneous comments touching on my looks, I never know how to receive it, and therefore I rarely make a response. I’m always too busy trying to figure out whether they were complimenting me or expressing dismay.

      That’s not a joke. In my youth, I had managed a brief moment of svelte prettiness that always seemed to bring out the lecher in crass sorts of men (and occasionally crass women), and it always left me wary and wondering. Having become plump in my 30s, I recall meeting a woman on the street who exclaimed, and loudly, “What happened to you? You used to weigh 80 pounds!”

      Mistaking my silence and dumb look for a rebuke, she telephoned later to apologize, and I had no idea how to explain to her that my silence was not meant as a censure: I’d simply been trying to figure out if I had ever looked as good as she seemed to think. In my own mind, I have always been a hideous specimen, which perhaps explains why it is that, while I love looking at fashion and fabric, and shoes, I think of them as “not for me.” I generally wander about wearing years-old black clothing and plastic Crocs on my feet. It occurs to me that, having never felt like much of a gift to anyone, wrapping myself up in pretty colors and topping myself off with a bow would seem a bit like false advertising.

      Is that self-loathing? Sure, it is, in spades. If excessive self-love can come from a place of insecurity, self-neglect comes from a place of hate and anger — from a place where God is not, because we do not extend an invitation to God to join us in our interior squalor.

      That is to our detriment, though, because if we would only invite him in, he would come. And then, where God is, what has been empty becomes full; what has been dark becomes light; what has been plundered can be made whole. The job is neither easy nor fast, but eventually our interior restoration cannot help, in those circumstances, to eventually become reflected in our exterior.

      Pondering that, I scald at my own bad habits and the deficient understanding that has allowed them to take such hardy root within me, for so long, because it has only made my restoration a bigger undertaking than it might have been 20 or 30 years earlier.

      Back when my companion recommended that I embrace a measure of narcissism, I was left with questions:

      • Why would someone advise me toward narcissism?

      • Is my self-neglect so obvious?

      • But it’s a good and humble thing, is it not, to be unconcerned about the body and how it is clothed and whether or not I am in fashion?

      I didn’t pursue the answers, at that time, because if I had, they would have been obvious:

      • Because look at yourself, woman!

      • Yes.

      • Umm, well … you’re confusing detachment, which is a good and humble thing, with treating and dressing yourself in a manner wholly distinct from the way you treat or dress the people you actually love.

      Oh — and ow.

      Yeah, that stung to write. And I bet a lot of parents reading that last bit might identify with it, and feel a bit stung too.