Fr. David Curry has collected his four Lenten meditations into a single pdf document. Click here to download “The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy, and Anger”.
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Fr. David Curry 2025
Anger is the third of the Deadly Three and follows upon envy. The Gospel for Passion Sunday highlights the sin of anger. “And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren.” Indignation here is anger.
Pride is certainly the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and is what is deadly in them. Envy is certainly the ugliest of the seven deadly sins and is ugly and unattractive to all. But anger? Well, anger is certainly the most common of all the seven deadly sins.
Like all the seven deadly sins, anger, too, has its complement of related terms: wrath, ire, rage, resentment, vengeance, and indignation. The Latin term is ira, the shortest and smallest of all the terms used to capture this commonplace sin, the deadly sin of anger.
So common is anger that in the culture of the self-obsessed, the neurotic culture, as it were, anger is the most frequent problem that psycho-therapists deal with in their counseling practices. We live in an angry world full of angry people; we are the angry people. “I am as mad as Hell and I won’t take it any longer” is a slogan for our age. And perhaps, more than any other sin, we try to justify it, to redeem it, as it were, under the rubric of righteous anger. It is not too much to say that our culture is the culture of anger as much as anything else.
But Scripture advises us differently and quite insightfully. “Let not the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4.26), Don’t always be angry and don’t hold onto your anger. Notwithstanding there is a deadly danger in all our anger. It too is a powerful force. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay” as Hebrews puts it (Hebrews 10.30), recalling a host of Old Testament passages about divine justice and divine wrath.
The paradox is that the vengeance, anger or wrath of God is very different from our anger. To speak of divine wrath is itself a form of human speech applied to God which is really about what in us is opposed to God’s goodness and mercy. It is a kind of antidote to our anger because it leaves judgement with God, first and foremost. But this is something which we often forget and in so doing fall prey to the very thing that lurks in all our anger. Ultimately, all our anger at the world, at one another, even perhaps at ourselves, is really our anger at God. We are angry because things are not the way we think they should be. We lash out against God in all our anger, essentially blaming him for the way things are. Damn you God! This is what we mean in our anger.
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Fr. David Curry 2025
Envy and anger complete the triad of perverted love, the first of Dante’s threefold classification of the Seven Deadly Sins as forms of disordered love: love perverted, love defective and love excessive. From the standpoint of the theology of amor, everything comes down to what and how we love. That we love belongs fundamentally to our identity as spiritual beings.
As Dante sees it, pride, envy and anger constitute the forms of perverted love, the love that swerves to evil. Sloth is lukewarm love, a defective love, while avarice, gluttony and lust are the forms of excessive love, “love too hot of foot.”
We have already seen how pride is in all of the seven deadly sins. But of all of the seven sins, envy is the most unique and in some ways the most destructive. Why? Because, as one commentator (Graham Tomlin) puts it, there is no joy in it, no fun in envy at all. It is singularly perverse. Its only satisfaction is endless self-torment.
Envy is about hating the happiness of others. Gregory the Great describes the envious person as “so racked by another’s happiness, that he inflicts wounds on his own pining spirit.” John of Damascus defines envy as “discontent over someone else’s blessings.” Likewise, Aquinas describes envy as “sadness at the happiness or glory of another.” Envy is simply endless discontent in constantly comparing ourselves to others.
It is not just discontent at the happiness or blessing that others enjoy, but even at the prospect of their future happiness or blessing. This destructive and hurtful aspect of envy is well described in a Jewish devotional work, The Ways of the Righteous. It relates the parable of a greedy man and an envious man who met a king. “The king says to them, ‘One of you may ask something of me and I will give it to him, provided I give twice as much to the other.’ The envious person did not want to ask first for he was envious of his companion who would receive twice as much, and the greedy man did not want to ask first since he wanted everything that was to be had. Finally the greedy one pressed the envious one to be the first to make the request. So the envious person asked the king to pluck out one of his eyes, knowing that his companion would then have both eyes plucked out.” As Solomon Schimmel points out, “this illustrates the masochistic form that extreme envy can take. The pathologically envious are willing to suffer great injury as long as those they envy suffer even more” (The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology). Quite a remarkable insight into the perversity of our humanity. Such is the hurt or harm of envy.
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Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025
“Be it unto me according to thy word,” Mary says. It is the perfect and, really, the only counter to pride; it is humility in all of its strength and beauty. It complements the Beatitudes especially the first: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.“ Pride goeth before a fall,” the old saying goes as taken from Proverbs 16.18. It reads in full: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Only too true. “Ante ruinam exaltur,” Augustine says, “the heart is exalted before its destruction,” its ruin. But in a way, it is worse than that. Pride is the Fall in us. That is why pride is not only the first and the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is what is deadly in all of them.
Thus Augustine called pride the foundation of sin. “Pride made the soul desert God to whom it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself as the source of its own life.” Pride always signals a kind of obsession with self, clinging to ourselves rather than to God the author of our very being.
Thomas Aquinas speaks about pride as “inordinate self-love [which] is the cause of every sin.” This is the point. Pride is in every sin.
Pride is in our envy, making us think that we deserve better than what we have or are and, consequently, to pull down and destroy anything that seems to stand above us and which others have. With pride there is no above, only below. There is only what stands below us and yet it consumes us in our revolt against the good or joy of others. It is the deadliest poison for our life together in the various forms of our communal and social life, our life in community, whether it is family, school, or church.
Pride is in our anger, making us adopt a position of superiority from which nothing can make us swerve. Even more, anger blinds us like smoke to the legitimate motives that move people. Anger is the smoke-screen that hides reality. Anger raises our fist to God because things are not as we think they should be for us. The all-consuming character of wrath or anger means that others sometimes see it better for what it is than we do. This is different from the category of righteous anger but even that runs the risk of overkill and overreach. Once again, our anger is about ourselves and often as not the penalty of anger is ourselves bringing harm upon ourselves in one way or another.
Pride is in our sloth, making us think that we may get by with a minimum of effort while obtaining the maximum result. Again, it signals a profound form of self-conceit and self-importance. It contributes to a kind of complacency and sense of entitlement based upon nothing more than our sense of ourselves and what is ‘owed’ to us without having to lift a finger.
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Fr. David Curry 2025
The paradox of sin and love, those “two vast, spacious things” which, as George Herbert observes, most need to be ‘measured’ over and above what can be known through the human philosophical sciences, is captured concisely in the phrase “to decline from sin and incline to virtue” found in the Penitential Service (Cdn. BCP 1962, pp. 611-615). The paradox is that the awareness of sin and evil presupposes the knowledge of the radical goodness of God as prior and thus as that which moves us to seek that good in spite of our failings and follies. Love is the moving force or activity in the virtues of the soul.
Sin and love go together and belong to the necessity of what is made known most clearly through Revelation in the witness of the Scripture which is why Herbert points us to the two moments of Christ’s agony: the agony of Christ in Gethsemane and at Calvary. Those passages illustrate the “two vast, spacious things,” namely, “sinne and love.”
The virtues are activities of the soul which pertain to excellence of character in relation to the highest end of our humanity. Charity, as Paul puts it, is “the greatest of the three,” referring to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes that charity orders all of the virtues to man’s highest end which is God. That ordering is not a negating of the classical traditions of the virtues but a reordering of them to the highest good which is our participation in the life of God. Love or charity, as Thomas argues, is “the form, the mover, and the root of the virtues” (de caritate, 3).
But what exactly is the sin that opposes love or virtue? It is the vices. The Penitential Service provides for the reading of the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. They, too, illustrate this profound and necessary interrelation between sin and love. The confession of sin, as Augustine states, is equally and necessarily the confession of praise to God. Peccatum poena peccati. “Sin is the punishment of sin,” he says, a point which reveals the self-contradictory nature of sin and which really points us to God. Sin is its own penalty; the reward or result of virtue is God in his essential goodness. To know sin presupposes the goodness of God as that which sin attempts to negate and deny.
There are seven deadly sins in the Christian moral tradition that are drawn from Scripture and ancient ethical philosophy. Proverbs 6. 16-19, for instance, explicitly speaks of seven sins. “There are six things which the Lord hates, seven which are an abomination to him.” Hate means things which stand in opposition to the goodness of God. The images in Proverbs speak of the things of the spirit by way of the things of the body: proud eyes, false tongues, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wickedness, feet that are swift to do evil, a false witness that breathes out lies, a sower of discord. They provide an interesting and important insight into vice by way of these concrete images.
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Comments rss TrackbackHear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.
To thee, Redeemer, on thy throne of glory:
lift we our weeping eyes in holy pleadings:
listen, O Jesu, to our supplications.
Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.
O thou chief cornerstone, right hand of the Father: way of salvation, gate of life celestial:
cleanse thou our sinful souls from all defilement.
Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.
God, we implore thee, in thy glory seated:
bow down and hearken to thy weeping children: pity and pardon all our grievous trespasses.
Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.
Sins oft committed, now we lay before thee:
with true contrition, now no more we veil them:
grant us, Redeemer, loving absolution.
Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.
Innocent captive, taken unresisting:
falsely accused, and for us sinners sentenced,
save us, we pray thee, Jesu, our Redeemer.
Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Psalm 51.17
Lord, for thy tender mercies’ sake, lay not our sins to our charge; But forgive that is past, and give us grace to amend our sinful lives; To decline from sin, and incline to virtue; That we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore. (BCP, Penitential Service, p. 614)
Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 138)
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Comments rss TrackbackThe words of the prophet Joel reverberate throughout the Ash Wednesday liturgy. “Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned,” we pray. They are framed as well by recalling the dust of our creation. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Dust and ashes: the dust of the ground of our created being and the ashes of repentance. Yet both the dust and the ashes are profoundly about our turning and being turned.
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. It is in every way a season of renewal, a renewal of our hearts and minds in the things of God. It is about our turning back to God from whom we have turned away. Yet that turning is itself the motion of God’s love in us returning us to the truth and dignity of our humanity found, as it only can be found, in God. It is all about the turning, or the “turning again,” as T.S.Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday puts it.
The poem begins in an almost mantra-like fashion. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” It begins, it seems, with a sense of hopelessness and despair. He quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” with its sense of separation and abandonment, of “myself almost despising,” yet as one who “looking upon himself and cursing his fate” still hopes, “wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/ Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, /Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” Eliot changes but one word, art for gift, “Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” It is a nod perhaps to where his poetic meditation ultimately leads. In the sixth and last section of the poem, the mantra turns to “although I do not hope to turn” and ends with a prayer. “Suffer me not to be separated and let my prayer come unto thee.” Hope, over and against even the denials of hope, ultimately cries out in prayer, a longing for a sense of unity and wholeness.
Between the beginning, which seems to eclipse any possibilities of continuing, and the ending, which at the very least opens out the possibilities of renewal, there is a kind of meditation. The poem is a meditation upon the ambiguities, the hesitancies, and yes, even the denials of desire, but as interspersed with the countering cries of the heart in the language of prayer. There are the cries for mercy, for forgiveness, for salvation, for “our peace in His will,” quoting Dante. The poem captures something of the disquieting unsettledness of our contemporary culture and our restless hearts.
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Comments rss TrackbackThe Gospel reading for the Feast of St. Luke is the very end of his Gospel. It ends not with the resurrection appearences of Jesus as in Matthew, Mark, and John, but with the Ascension, though that has been, at the very least, prepared for us in John’s Gospel, too. The ending of Luke’s Gospel is somewhat elaborated upon in the opening chapter of Acts, also attributed to Luke. Yet rather than emphasizing the problematic of Jesus’ going from us, as John in particular explains as ultimately being expedient or good for us, despite the sense of loss and grief, Luke sees the Ascension of Christ as the cause of great joy. The disciples, he says, “returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.” Luke shows us that Christ’s going from us is the condition of his being with us and of our being with him.
Such is “the work of an evangelist”, Paul suggests in 2 Timothy, the Epistle reading for the Feast, already intuiting what the Church Fathers will say about the Ascension as “the exaltation of our humanity”. While the Collect speaks about the healing of “all the diseases of our souls” by the wholesome medicines of Luke’s doctrine or teaching, there is more to the good news of his Gospel than healing. He shows us our end in God, our ultimate restoration to unity with God in his eternity. The point is that we participate in this now because time has been gathered into eternity.
Luke’s feast day belongs to the autumnal pageant which will bring us to All Saints’. What we are given to think is the Ascension of Christ as signifying our end with God and in God now and forever. But how? It is, I think, by attending to what Luke and Luke alone has Jesus ask us. “What is written? How readest thou”. In a way, his Gospel is particularly emphatic about how Jesus opens our understanding by providing a way of interpreting the Scriptures about Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, about repentance and forgiveness of sins, about the promise of the Father in the coming of the Holy Spirit wonderfully presented in Acts, and here about Christ’s Ascension.
Luke points us to our end in Christ by way of attending to his Word and its radical meaning about the quality of our life in Christ. Luke is the spiritual director of the Church throughout the Trinity Season especially. More Gospel readings come from Luke than from any other Evangelist, readings that move our hearts and illuminate our minds. As Dante so concisely puts it, Luke is scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the Scribe of the gentleness of Christ, and perhaps nowhere more wonderfully than in the readings for his feast day. Only Luke is with me, Paul says, with just a hint that this is almost enough though wanting the books and parchments that belong to the understanding of Christ. Luke shows us Jesus as opening our understanding about our end and life in Christ. This is our blessing and the reason for our gathering in the temple in great joy, “praising and blessing God”.
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Luke, 2024
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Comments rss TrackbackThe Psalms, more often than not, strike the right tone of approach to our liturgical observances. In this case, the high note of rejoicing and delight that belongs to the Feast of the Ascension is nicely captured by the words of the psalmist. “God has gone up with a merry noise/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet” (Psalm 47.5).
The Ascension of Christ, as Acts suggests, marks the fortieth day of Easter. It marks the end, in the sense of the completion, of the Easter season. One of the creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith, the Ascension is often overlooked, perhaps because it doesn’t fall on a Sunday, but on a Thursday. And yet, it provides some very important and powerful teaching about the priority of things spiritual into which is gathered all things material and physical. In other words, the world finds its meaning in God and not the other way around.
What is the Ascension about? It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father and thus it is our homecoming too. Jesus on Rogation Sunday just past told us: “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world and go to the Father.” There is the sense of ‘mission accomplished!’ And that mission concerns our good and the good of the world. In other words, the Ascension brings to a certain completion and fullness the redemption of the world and the redemption of our humanity. The Son returns to the Father, not in flight from the world, as if matter or the physical world were inherently evil, but having accomplished the redemption of the world.
“God’s going up with a merry noise” is the lovely and exaltant metaphor that opens us out to the reality of God’s eternal life into which we are gathered. It is literally about our lives spiritually that embraces the physical and natural world without collapsing the spiritual into it. The Ascension signals the radical meaning of the redemption of the world and our humanity.
This is where the Ascension speaks so profoundly to our present-day concerns, fears, and worries. The Ascension means that the world and our humanity have an end in God, an end in God in the sense that the meaning and purpose of the world and the meaning and the purpose of our human lives is found in our relation to God in Jesus Christ. Against the perversity and folly of thinking that the world is just there for us to manipulate, exploit, or destroy, the Ascension reminds us that the world is God’s world. It exists for his will and purpose. And so do we. Ascension is about the sense that we have an end and a place with God. “I go to prepare a place for you,” as Jesus says. It is the counter to all of the forms of material determinism, to the “dialectical materialism” of Marxism and of capitalist consumer culture which reduces everything to material production and consumption. It changes how we see things.
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Comments rss TrackbackSuch is the hope for ourselves as we enter into the Passion of Christ. The joint commemoration of Benedict, the founder of Benedictine monasticism, along with Thomas Cranmer, the architect of The Book of Common Prayer, suggests the legacy of the Fathers for the continuing life of the Church. Benedict (480-547) was the founder of Benedictine monasticism which has shaped the European world. It was in the Benedictine monasteries that the writings of the Fathers were largely preserved and passed on as living presences and voices in the devotional and doctrinal life of the Church. What we have come to call ‘Anglicanism’ is itself an inheritor of that tradition with its attention to “the mind of the Fathers.” Diarmaid McCulloch observes that Gerlach Flicke’s iconic 16th century portrait of Cranmer (1545) captures the essential features of the English Reformation project: the reading of the Scriptures through the Fathers, principally, though not exclusively, Augustine. Augustine, however, is certainly the dominant and seminal figure for the shaping of Benedictine monasticism and its heirs.
The one, who founded the spiritual and intellectual traditions which remain with us, at least for those, who, as Jesus says, “have ears to hear,” complements the other who was an Archbishop and a martyr. Together they contribute to our Lenten reflections on reading with the Fathers especially with respect to Passiontide. I want to offer a few passages from Origen, Chrysostom, and Leo on the symbolic meaning of Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem which emphasize the centrality of the Passion. Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church (b. ? – d. 461) concentrates the doctrinal emphasis for us: “His the humiliation Whose also [is] the glory.” That marks the character of our participation in the Passion through the pageant of Holy Week.
Origen (185-254) the great theologian and biblical exegete par excellence, commenting on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, states what becomes a common approach of the Fathers to the Scriptures. “It is,” he says, “worth while in such places in the Gospel to apply our minds to the meaning and purpose of the writers, and to consider why, after they had related the wonders and portents of the Saviour’s actions, they should also record these things which reveal nothing of this sort.” Something is to be learned even in the seemingly minor details of the Gospel narratives. As he says:
It is understandable that the Evangelists should commemorate the restoration of sight to the blind man, the healing of the paralytic, the raising of the dead, the cleansing of the lepers, in order that those who would read their writings might be strengthened in Jesus. But what purpose had they in mind in this place in which it is recounted, that, after Jesus had with His disciples drawn near to Jerusalem, and had come to Bethphage close to Mount Olivet, He sent two Disciples with the command that they should loose and bring to Him an ass that was tied, together with its colt [?]; He Who frequently made long journeys on foot, and did not refuse to complete His sojourn here on foot, as when He had come to Jerusalem, and passing through Samaria arrived at the well, and being weary from the road had sat down by it? And what did Jesus also mean when He bade them loose the ass that was tied, and the colt with her, telling them to answer any man who asked them: ‘Why do you loose him?’ to answer, ‘that the Lord hath need of them: and forthwith he will let them go?’”
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