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By Alan Altany Lethal gateways to mortal demise, the Seven Deadlies mock divine love, sneering at all godly virtues with a tolling of pure disdain. Pride is an egocentric spinning, a centripetal conceit of fierce hubris, contempt for God’s blazing acts of ultimate humility. Envy is the devil’s finest resentment leading to the living of constant dying, a perpetual blaming and craving that voids every remnant of charity. Wrath’s wild rages expose renegade emotions, like feral mustangs pounding the earth with abandon, having none of the Crucified Christ’s merciful patience. Sloth discloses a mediocre body and soul, too sedated with ennui to care for anyone, languishing in vain idleness, so spiritually lukewarm as to preclude fruitful diligence. Greed generates a fantasy lure for ever-elusive satisfaction and powerful pleasures that disorder and spurn all the gracious good found in generosity. Gluttony is eating, drinking, drugging beyond the pale, where self-stuffings create gods out of ego-addictions, leaving no room for tolerating any temperance. Lust’s deluded seductions are many in kind, base desires with no intimacy, a full immersion into transient carnal power without the moral dignity and courage of chastity. Yet all the Deadlies are divinely forgivable and lose their dreadful odors in sorrowing repentance where scars of awe-struck healing descend from the virtue of God. Alan Altany, Ph.D., is a septuagenarian college professor of religious studies. He’s been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, etc. He published a book of poetry in 2022 entitled A Beautiful Absurdity: Christian Poetry of the Sacred. His website is at https://www.alanaltany.com/.
'The Seven Deadlies' first appeared in A Beautiful Absurdity: Christian Poetry of the Sacred. It has been republished here with the author's permission. Alan's previous work on Foreshadow: Grunewald's Crucifixion (Poetry, September 2022) Habit of Being Wise (Poetry, October 2022) Please support us by sharing this post and buying us a book.
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