Editor’s Note: We gave our bloggers free rein in choosing which books or writings have been forming their soul. To our surprise and pleasure, several authors wrote about the same book—something that confirms for us that not only should we be picking up this particular book, you should be, too. Enjoy.
It has been a long time since a book has stopped me in my tracks, horrified me at the depth of sin in my life, and made me forget to breathe at times. Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung’s “Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies” (Brazos Press 2009) is doing all of that and more to me.
This book developed out of course Dr. DeYoung teaches at Calvin College. Drawing heavily on Thomas Aquinas and other writers regarding the traditional seven deadly sins, she carefully, like a good surgeon going after a splinter, lays what the vice is in classical Christian thinking. I often have not even noticed the knife slowly moving into my soul until the splinter (or rather the log) of the vice is pricked.
None of the chapters lets me off the hook. Reading a chapter a week so as to think about not only the vice in my life but Dr. DeYoung’s counterbalancing virtue exercises, I come to each new chapter and think I’m OK in this vice. Each time, I am nailed to the wall.
Here is an example: anger or wrath. (There is a place for righteous anger which is laid out very carefully in the text which is why the vice is really wrath.) I used to struggle greatly with anger but felt like over the years through prayer, healing, and intentional exercises I had gotten on top of things. Surprise! Not only was I convicted that maybe that room isn’t as cleaned up as I’d prided myself on thinking it was but I had hardly closed the book when I found myself confronted with a situation that caused my wrath to rise to the surface in very unsettling ways.
I was horrified.
In an e-mail exchange with Dr. DeYoung, I mentioned I was “properly horrified” reading her research. She encouraged me to focus on the grace, a much better perspective to reflect from.
I long to see in a new way that Jesus didn’t die and rise for me to remain horrified. Rather, his atoning sacrifice has paid the full horrible price those vices cost and has offered me a chance each day to substitute virtue in my thoughts, words and deeds.
Join the Conversation
It’s easy, as Valerie suggests, to think of ourselves as “okay” when it comes to one area of vice or another. Take a few moments to review a list of the seven deadly sins. Do you find yourself realizing that you’re perhaps not as “okay” as you think you might be?
We can sometimes find ourselves in that place of being “horrified” of our sins to the point of paralysis. What happens to that paralysis when you focus on grace?
 Valerie Hess is an author, instructor in the Spring Arbor University’s Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation and Leadership (MSFL) program, retreat speaker, musician, mother and pastor’s wife. She does a weekly blog for the MSFL program and has written numerous articles, mostly on the themes of spiritual formation through the spiritual disciplines and church music. She has written two books: Habits of a Child’s Heart: Raising Your Kids with the Spiritual Disciplines (co-authored with Dr. Marti Watson Garlett) and Spiritual Disciplines Devotional: A Year of Readings. Her husband is an Associate Pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Boulder, CO. She has two daughters and two son-in-laws.
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