Filling the Hole

If you’ve ever studied art history, or visited a medieval cathedral or read Dante, you have come across the concept of gluttony being a sin.  A deadly sin, no less. 

In our own modern culture, gluttony is more a picture of the Good Life, enshrined as a standard for holidays like Mardi Gras, Thanksgiving and SuperBowl Sunday, when all good citizens eat until the buttons pop.

How did we make such a long leap, from capital sin to near-virtue?

I could make my case against profiteers, but that’s beside the point.  The only thing that really matters here is us, and how we can make better lives for ourselves. 

Most of us are carrying a lot of shame around overeating.  We may even do it in secret, late at night with no one around, and then go to some trouble to hide the evidence from our families.  We’re embarrassed, but we do it. 

I’ll bet every single one of us has been at the grocery store, seen someone we know down at the far end of the aisle, and done a quick sweep of our basket to see if there’s anything incriminating in there.  Maybe thrown a jacket over it, eh?   

We compare ourselves to magazine ads and movie celebrities, and come up so far short, it’s like they’re a whole different species. 

So what do we need with the idea of sin??  We’re already ashamed!

Here’s the great thing about sin: it has an answer.  

If all we ever are is ashamed, and we can’t pinpoint the source of our eating compulsions and we can’t get rid of them and try over and over again and nothing is working... that is a prescription for despair.  It all seems hopeless.

But if we think of sin as a force in the world that is eager for our destruction, we can easily see it as the enemy.  In my Christian worldview, it genuinely is the enemy; it is a personal power who would like to keep me from reaching joy in God, out of jealousy, perversity and spite. 

Whatever your world view, I think we can all agree that there are forces at work that pull us away from our highest good. 

Perhaps overeating is one effect of those forces. 

Overeating, first of all, chips away at our self-respect.  That may be its very worst harm.  We don’t go out into the world as much. Our capacity for doing good is handicapped because we’re not there; we’re hiding.  Our relationships are diluted because we don’t want anyone to know what’s deepest inside.  Shame is a powerful captor.

When overeating leads to overweight, then our health is at risk.  We deny ourselves the pleasure of activity, of moving freely in this beautiful world.  Our lives are narrowed by illness or incapacity, then shortened. 

Do you see why a good and loving God might not want that for his precious ones?

So we come back to sin, not in terms of a punishable crime, not one more thing to be ashamed of.  But sin as a danger signal, as a sweet and loving parent saying, “Don’t go there; you’ll get hurt.”

I think the root of overeating for many of us is the lack of love at some point in our lives when we badly needed it.  Someone failed us or wasn’t there, and the wound is still inside, crying to be filled up. 

As long as we keep ourselves to ourselves, not allowing Love to come in our secret doors, we continue to overeat.  No wonder; we’re trying to fill that hole!  It actually makes a whole lot of sense.  We’re behaving very understandably if there is no Love in the world that cares for our ultimate good.

Whatever your religious beliefs, somewhere in them is a loving power.

You have to follow your own path to that love.  Do something this week to more firmly connect with the power of Good.  Find a book or a prayer or perhaps a childhood memory of a time when you were connected to the source of love.  Stay there awhile and let yourself be loved. It's harder than it sounds. It may even sting. Stay with it. It will begin to fill in the hole.