Spiritual Framework of Gluttony

Sensual pleasures appear as nectar in the beginning, but become poison in the end; such pleasures are in the mode of passion. [Bhagavad Gita 18.38]

Gluttony is a byproduct of immersion in physical pleasure and neglect of spiritual affirmations. When we adopt a secular reality lacking scriptural boundaries, we open ourselves to uninhibited consumption.

Monks and ascetics once fought on the front lines of the communal battle over control of the soul. They carried a mystical flag in a holy war to establish dominance of the spiritual over the physical. The lay societies depended on them, looked to them for advance intelligence on what could be done and what could be done without.

The ascetics reminded the public that life without material comforts is, indeed, worth living and dying for. If they would but imitate a small portion of the ascetics' practices, their society would be exalted. They would benefit, individually and collectively.

That was a time that has passed. Few people now look to ascetics or monks for moral or spiritual guidance. Today, notions of gluttony and temperance have a limited spiritual framework by which to be understood. They are significant primarily for cosmetic and social purposes.

Being removed from scriptural considerations of eating and nutrition, the public has lost its equilibrium. It no longer has living examples to support and reinforce disciplined eating practices.

Our modern society relies on the empirical sciences to recommend proper and beneficial behavior. Science offers many benefits and advances but often all we are offered are abstract models, statistical probabilities, theoretical applications, and pharmaceutic remedies that treat specific symptoms and conditions. Few living models are presented.

Noticeably absent from the scientific process is a visible, holistic way of life to be imitated and cultivated. No representative figures are available that actually implement exemplary behavior or practices, specially in the area of consumption. Rarely is a role model visible.

"I'm Michael and I'm obese." Doctors laughed at the American Medical Association annual meeting when one of their own stood up Monday to admit his girth, but the subject was serious: physicians tackling the nation's obesity epidemic by addressing their own weight problems. Dr. Michael Fleming - the Shreveport, La., family physician who prompted the chuckles Monday - said he has decided to wear a pedometer and take 10,000 steps daily. It is the same advice doctors give patients and a message the American Academy of Family Physicians is relaying to its more than 90,000 members so they can serve as role models. [see article "Plump Docs: Let's Heal Ourselves"]

Spiritual Healing

Spiritual well-being is essential to complete health. When spirituality is incorporated into our psychological states, it can lead to physical stability and mental equanimity. This is not to say that all who believe in God and worship Him will enjoy a long and healthy life, only that spiritual health is a fundamental components of natural human existence.

Despite great secular accomplishments during the modern age of discovery, exploration and technology, we have made little progress into the realm of spirituality. If fact, we could argue that spiritual understanding has actually declined during in the last two centuries.

Nevertheless, some scientists, particularly medical doctors, have always maintained a connection between physical health, mental well-being and spiritual strength. They have consistently affirmed the relationship between health and faith. Likewise, traditional healers rely on faith as much as on herbs.

The enormous power of spiritual equanimity and harmony brings exceptional relief when guilt, stress and anxiety are part of the illness. This is difficult for a person of little or no faith to understand. Joy to a suffering psyche can alone bring enough relief to improve the physical condition of a patient.

Sympathetic healers who have the confidence of their patients can provide emotional relief simply by psychological interaction. When they offer prayers, blessings or merely touch a patient, a spiritual placebo affects the patient's entire emotional system, generating responses not yet satisfactorily explained by science.

At times, removing from the thought process certain memories, distorted reasoning and faulty logic can accomplish healing. By erasing destructive thoughts, we remove some of the sources of tension, stress and anxiety thereby reducing pain, easing pressure and offering overall relief to the body.

The most effective way to correct the thought process is by emersion in faithful devotion and commitment to good deeds.

Guard against physical unruliness. Be restrained in body. Abandoning
physical wrong doing, lead a life of physical well doing.

Guard against mental unruliness. Be restrained in mind. Abandoning mental wrong doing, lead a life of mental well doing.

Guard against verbal unruliness. Be restrained in speech. Abandoning verbal wrong doing, lead a life of verbal well doing.

[Dhammapada 18:231-233]

Apocalyptic Pettiness

Be urgent in good; hold your thoughts off evil. When one is slack in doing good the mind delights in evil [The Dhammapada 9:116].

How we magnify events, making pettiness into apocalyptic crises, so trivial yet so overwhelming to the intellect, absorbing thoughts and time as if life depended on them. Tomorrow they are forgotten, as another petty problem replenishes our worries and fills our mind with worthless speculation.

Yet, how grateful we should be that it is pettiness that fills our thoughts, inconsequence that worries us. Happy we should be that the most crucial event in our reality is soon forgotten, for were we to bear the burden of real pain, we would suffer incurably, crying endlessly, immersed in self-pity, well-deserved misery. Well-deserved for it is we who create our burdens and are deserving of our plight.

So let us be thankful and rejoice that our burdens are light and our worries petty, for it is quite doubtful that we have the strength to bear anything greater. Thank you Lord.

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you [Lao Tzu].

Quantum Donkeys

By thinking, He cannot be reduced to thought, even by thinking hundreds of thousands of times. [Guru Nanak, Sri Guru Granth Sahib 1:1]

As scientists probe deeper and deeper into outer and inner space, into the micro and macrocosm of physical reality, they are encountering greater complexities and less certainty. The arrogance of the nineteenth century European enlightenment has slowly dissipated into the bedevilment of twentieth century chaos.

Science acknowledges that after a certain point, human observation requires interpolation, interpretation and analogies. No direct view is available. In outer space and molecular biology, in quantum mechanics and the human genome, no direct view is possible. What is even more discomforting is that human observation itself becomes an obstacle to measurement.

Our senses can directly comprehend familiar measures without much thinking. We can easily visualize a person six feet tall, but how tall is four cubits? Nanoseconds and gigabytes are generally understood but they are still a few thoughts away from being perceived directly.

Our mind is able to understand a measurement of size, weight, distance, etc. after becoming familiar with it by direct observation. It then becomes a symbol for the information.

We are thus able to "perceive" directly what a measurement signifies without calculating or thinking about it. After using measurements for a while, we can understand them and use them to reason and calculate.

As science increasingly relies on indirect measurements, however, direct understanding and reasoning diminish. We now increasingly rely on symbols and indirect measurements to calculate, measure and investigate physical matter.

As a result of our use of symbols, knowledge needs to be interpreted. Complex data is not directly relevant to the senses, and must be made relevant by interpretation. That is what scientists do. That is how great minds are tested.

The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. [Albert Einstein]

When we enter the realm of interpreting data in order to utilize it, we lose a degree of certainty and understanding. This new area has many parallels to religion.

Once in the realm of thoughts instead of direct empirical observation, the scientist resembles a theologian or a philosopher. His knowledge becomes based on assumptions, theories and ideas regarding the nature of reality. As with theologians, the scientist’s swagger begins to falter at this point and doubt appears.

Whether sought through the microscope or the telescope, God is ever beyond human perception. God's vast and infinitesimal dimensions are outside human comprehension, yet they are just a deep thought away.

Nasruddin went one day to the market to sell ten donkeys he owned. At times he rode one of them and at times he walked. After a while, he stopped to check the number of donkeys and counted only nine. So he dismounted and started to count them again. He counted ten so he mounted and continued the journey. When he again counted the donkeys as he rode, he found them nine. So he dismounted and counted and again counted ten. Finally, he told himself, "Walking and gaining a donkey is better than riding and losing one!"

Shopping Sprees

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? [Matthew 6:24].

Charity and gluttony are inversely related. Being truly charitable, in the essential meaning of the word, is difficult while being a glutton. By definition, a charitable person gives away what is superfluous, the unnecessary surplus that is so burdensome to the spirit.

By contrast, a glutton devours not only what is needed but also what is excessive, until he becomes so consumed by sensual pleasures that he loses connection to the Creator. It is the tendency toward gluttony, hoarding and greed that distorts our spiritual form, making us too fat to pass through the proverbial needle's eye.

Shopping sprees and impulses to buy may be perverted efforts by the mind to discard excess money. Unfortunately, discarding by consuming merely exchanges but does not eliminate the basic problem. Only selfless charity accomplishes that.

Once charity becomes a core aspect of our constitution, personal appetites diminish. We quietly transform our obsession to indulge into a desire to provide, not only materially but from every resource at our disposal. We seek to give of our property, of our time, of our intellect and, of course, of our spirit.

O shrewd businessman, do only profitable business: Deal only in that commodity which shall accompany you after death. [Adi Granth, Sri Raga, M.1, p. 22]

National Exorcism

And when he was come into the house, his disciples asked him privately, Why could not we cast him [the evil spirit] out? And he said unto them, This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting [Matthew 17:19-21].

Jesus offers us insight into the nature of certain malevolent conditions that require uncommon efforts to correct. His disciples had been unable to cast out a particularly unmanageable spirit by conventional declarations and oaths. The Messiah suggests that their faith was insufficient. It had to be bolstered by fasting and prayer, to succeed against such a defiant opponent.

Today, we live in a period of greatly diminished faith. Having abandoned the paths offered by scripture, we have opened the doors to unprecedented social degeneration. The vacuum created by rejecting faith has been filled by a "banality of evil" that reigns pervasively throughout modern societies. Philosopher Hannah Arendt eloquently expressed this in her analysis of the trial of Nazi leader, Adolph Eichmann:

From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied . . . that this new type of criminal . . . commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible from him to know or feel that he is doing wrong. [Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil].

Our first line of defense against such prevailing depravity is to rely on the grace of God, being faithful in our worship, adhering to high moral principles and avoiding sinfulness. We must remain firm in our personal commitment to Truth, and to persevering in a life of altruistic service. However, under extreme conditions, our personal exorcism must include dedicated prayer and fasting.

A fifth and more weighty reason for fasting is that it is a help to prayer; particularly when we set apart larger portions of time for private prayer. Then especially it is that God is often pleased to lift up the souls of his servants above all the things of earth, and sometimes to rapt them up, as it were, into the third heaven. And it is chiefly as it is a help to prayer that it has so frequently been found a means in the hand of God of confirming and increasing . . . seriousness of spirit, earnestness, sensibility, and tenderness of conscience; deadness to the world and consequently the love of God and every holy and heavenly affection [John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions]

Fasting enhances God-consciousness, humbles the spirit and immerses the mind in repentance. It makes our soul bow even before we prostrate in prayer, diluting our arrogance, shrinking our pride and binding our ego, leaving us free to worship and praise the Almighty Creator uninhibited by affectation and amenities.

As Jesus pointed out, exorcism as prayer for liberation and deliverance from evil is most effective when accompanied by fasting. Whether at the individual or communal level, prayer and fasting are powerful natural resources for resisting the disintegration of our social order.

In regard, then, to the discipline of which we now treat, whenever supplication is to be made to God on any important occasion, it is befitting to appoint a period for fasting and prayer. Thus when the Christians of Antioch laid hands on Barnabas and Paul, that they might the better recommend their ministry, which was of so great importance, they joined fasting and prayer (Acts 13:3). Thus these two apostles afterwards, when they appointed ministers to churches, were wont to use prayer and fasting (Acts 14:23). In general, the only object which they had in fasting was to render themselves more alert and disencumbered for prayer. [John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion]

On the communal level, persons in leadership positions must employ all available resources. Of particular importance are spiritual assets generally dismissed as unscientific and disregarded by most contemporary leaders. These include our faithful arsenal of fasting and prayer.

Fasting heightens the ecstasy of communal prayer. It is comparable to a chemical reaction that produces unexpected byproducts. It energizes the supplicants with sincere emotions rarely kindled during periods of careless eating and drinking. A distinct passion envelops the congregation that fasts to please God.

The spiritual benefit of fasting came from prayer and from hearing the word of God, thus the fast day was devoted to communal prayer and service attendance. The resulting mass interaction of godly clergy and laity, focused and intensified by a common emergency and a state of repentance, made the fast... "a special engine of Puritan religion."And exorcism was high octane for this engine, increasing its power and magnifying its benefits [Peter Lake, Michael C. Questier, Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, C. 1560-1660 , p. 40].

Thus, fasting is a liturgical complement to communal prayer. If prayer is the vehicle that brings a congregation into contact with the Creator, then fasting is the protocol that allows them to approach the holy precincts.

Let them, therefore, with fasting and with prayer make their adjurations, and not with the elegant and well-arranged and fitly-ordered words of learning, but as men who have received the gift of healing from God, confidently, to the glory of God. By your fastings and prayers and perpetual watching, together with your other good works, mortify the works of the flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit [Pope Clement I, Two Epistles on Virginity, Ch. XII].

Our political leaders must look into the heart of their constituents, as would a physician examining the nature of an illness. Instead of pollsters and pundits, they must listen to the cries of anguish emanating from souls longing for healing.

They should imitate wise rulers who, in the past, turned to God for relief when their society faced imminent and pervasive threats. The fasting of Nineveh in response to Jonas’ preaching and of Nehemiah upon reflecting on Jerusalem’s ruins are but two examples depicting reliance on God for comfort and respite.

Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month the children of Israel were assembled with fasting, in sackcloth, and with dust on their heads. Then those of Israelite lineage separated themselves from all foreigners; and they stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers[Nehemiah 9:1].

In the United States, President John Adams declared March 6, 1799, a National Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer to the Most High God. Abraham Lincoln did likewise on August 12, 1861.

Therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do appoint the last Thursday in September next, as a day of humiliation, prayer and fasting for all the people of the nation. And I do earnestly recommend to all the People, and especially to all ministers and teachers of religion of all denominations, and to all heads of families, to observe and keep that day according to their several creeds and modes of worship, in all humility and with all religious solemnity, to the end that the united prayer of the nation may ascend to the Throne of Grace and bring down plentiful blessings upon our Country [Proclamation of a Day of Fasting].

George Washington issued the first Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789, which would eventually become our November national holiday. As with Christmas, the sanctity of our holy days has all but withered and our commemorations have deteriorated into frolicking indulgence.

. . . And fasting is far better for you, if ye only knew. [Qur’an 2:184].

Fitting into Heaven

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved? But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible. [Matthew 19:23-26].

Small entrances, sometimes named "Needle's Eye," were common features of ancient walled cities. For security reasons, these gates allowed humans to pass singly with relative ease, while armed invaders could not. Large animals, such as camels, had to be unloaded and made to kneel to get through, even then with difficulty.

When Jesus compares a rich man’s entrance into heaven to a camel passing through a needle’s eye, the disciples ask, "Who then can be saved?"

It is impossible, Jesus answered, except it be by God’s grace. Only God enables entrance into heaven. Salvation depends wholly on God, to whom all things are possible.

So, how do we start to get that fat camel through the Needle’s Eye? With charity. Allow God to remove the burdens, then kneel in submission.

With the help of God, we can free ourselves from attachment to possessions. An eternal inheritance awaits us when we are unburdened of selfish desires and live in the world serving God, in submission and humility.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also [Matthew 6.19-21].

When our chief concern ceases to be self-gratification, we begin to unburden ourselves of excessive consumption and the amassing of ephemeral baggage. When we bow in submission to our Creator, the burdens weighing us down immediately shrink, for we have adopted a sublime scale.

By charitable acts, we abandon the truly superfluous weight burdening our existence. Thus freed, we discard the material excesses and uncontrolled appetites to which fleshly desires cling. Our heart becomes filled with love and replete with kindness, light garments that permit passage through that narrow gate.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may
not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
not so much to be understood as to understand,
not so much to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
it is in dying that we awake to eternal life [St. Francis of Assisi]