"Hollow Men", Part 2

There are reasons why such hollowness exists, of course.  One reason is ignorance, the second and more significant one is sloth.
   Being a "swiss cheese" person is more of a remnant of paganism or life before or  without Christ than it is a "spiritual problem" per se.  Without Christ as the founder of life, wisdom, and virtue, how would you know what real virtue, strength, grace looks like?  It's impossible.  So people do the best they can and get some things right, others wrong, and don't even know that others exist.  It's a problem in that failures of character and life without God always lead to death, but it isn't the same kind of tricky spiritual morass that sloth is.
   I think the chief cause of hollowness is sloth (a second cause might be anxiety).  Christians are superficial hollow men and women because it is much easier to live that way, to invest in appearance or not invest in a real life with God, and a thoughtful, obedient life, than it is to really love God and love your neighbor.  But as the epistles of John say, we are fooling ourselves if we imagine that we love God, but we have not spent ourselves in learning how to deeply love our neighbor.  But deeply loving our neighbor requires depth and transformation and honesty and perseverance and courage and the acquisition of real wisdom.  It requires plodding down a particular path that is difficult to walk down, and in walking along we often feel as though we fumble about taking steps backwards as often as we go forward.  As many a spiritual master has said, spiritual change is the slowest kind of change.   But if we're not on that path on spiritual life and change, we aren't on a path worth walking down.  And things that don't change, die.
  I was reading a book by Gabriel Bunge called Despondency which was about Sloth or acedia.  Reading that book helped me see anew how much the real spiritual danger for most Christians isn't really unbelief, it's sloth.  The new Christian and the Christian owning their faith for the first time might genuinely have long and hard struggles with really deciding and believing that God exists.  I imagine for a few people, that may be their continual struggle.  There might be periods in one's life where believing or not believing is the question that occupies one's attentions.  But I would take bets on sloth being the vice that attacks the Christian more solidly attached to the pew bench.  Sloth is the great minimizer, the one that says, Does it really matter that I pray today?  Or read my bible?  Or try to listen carefully to the sermon?  Or really focus on the liturgy?  Or treat my husband with respect when he's annoying? Or do that thing that ought to be good for me?  It won't really hurt, it won't really matter.  How could it really make a difference that I did this or that or a thousand different things?  What difference does it make if I care?  If I put effort into this?  Someone else will do it, or at least, my contribution will not be missed, since it couldn't possibly be that important.
  And how could this little sin matter all that much to my prayer life?  How could it hurt anyone?  No one will notice, no one will care.  And if they do, they are probably just being anxious and making a big deal out of it.  I could do something here, I could do the smart thing and invest in x thing .. . but that takes work and I'm not good at this work and I don't really want to do it anyway . . . .  What Jesus said here is hard, so I will just ignore it for now--it can't be that important.  If it were that important, I would be good at it--it certainly wouldn't be as difficult as it seems to be.  What difference does it make whether I am honest with my friends, or obey what Jesus says, or invest in my life with Christ, or refrain from doing what I know to be wrong, and try hard to do what I know to be right?  Maybe I will try tomorrow . . . and it probably doesn't matter too much anyway.
   For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote on sloth as a simulacrum of despair--it was something that looked like despair and could be confused with it.  If I were writing such a paper again, I think I would write on the simulacra of sloth and various virtues like humility or modesty or submissiveness or being easily pleased.  I would write on our endless human capacity for self-deception--how we think we are doing something good, in this case, we could fool ourselves into thinking we are appropriately appreciating our own smallness when really we are failing to walk in love as Christ loved us.
  Gabriel Bunge didn't say that sloth is full of shit (possibly because he's an Orthodox monk-priest), but he did describe it as the "noonday demon" and a liar.  He did describe our contest with sloth as a battle that has to be fought.  He did describe this incredibly important struggle as one waged in every-day life.  I wonder if that is part of what separates real people from hollow men--real people know that every day character is the only sort of character you get--no exceptions, what you sow, you reap.  If you spend 8 years telling the truth to your friends the way my friend did (that I mentioned in the last post), you end up with some real solidity at the end.  If you spend 8 years telling little lies to yourself and your friends to excuse your behavior and to avoid confronting yourself, you end up with a void.  If you are incredibly unlucky, no one will get in your face enough to stop you and you will persist in wasting years of your life on your own personal bridge to nowhere.  If you allow yourself to be convicted and to change, you have a chance to become a real human being.
  I wish it were possible to convince every single person I know that everything they do actually matters.  I do not know whether it is difficult for most people to see that the decisions they make are rarely if ever morally neutral.  I could also wish that everyone spent an hour or two playing a particular Star Wars game for PC--Knights of the Old Republic.  In that game (and others, I imagine), one has an option of making various kinds of decisions throughout the game at different juncture points (sometimes that decision can be to do nothing), most of which either contribute to "light side points" or "dark side points."  In real life, sloth gets you dark side points because it is indifference and callousness to goodness.  When there was good to be done, you passed your turn.
   God never meant for anyone of his children to be hollow, without real substance and lacking real inward strength born of walking with God.  He never meant for us to wander around, doing "good" for all the wrong reasons, wasting our time seeking after prestige or honor or trying to earn acceptance or approval or even love.  God has no use for such dead works and intends for us to receive much more from him than that.  He has love without measure, and he has Jesus Christ, the wisdom and power of God who was born to make us free for something very solid and very real and very strong.