Pints With Aquinas - Love of MONEY and Sadness: Eight Evil Thoughts Episode Two | Mthr Natalia

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Mother continues her mini series on the eight evil thoughts. In this episode she talks about the Love of Money and Sadness. What do these thoughts really do to the soul and to the spiritual life? 🎧 Mother's Podcast: https://whatgodisnot.com/ 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/matt 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd We get a small kick back from affiliate links

Glory to Jesus Christ. I'm Mother Natalia, a Byzantine Catholic nun from Christ the Bridegroom monastery, and this is Pines with Aquinas. We're continuing on with our series on the eight evil thoughts brought about by Evagrius the Solitary. And I'm really, you know, it doesn't do any justice to talk about any of the evil thoughts for five to ten minutes, which is what I'm doing. But I also thought that y'all would be pretty upset with me if this if this lasted for several months instead of several weeks. And so I'm trying to cover two of the eight evil thoughts per day per week. So last time we talked about gluttony and lust. And today I'm talking about love of money and sadness.

And again, just to give credit where it's due, almost all of the things that I'm getting from this, all of the quotes from the Fathers and things like that are from the book, Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses, by Dr. Jean-Claude Larcher from the first volume. And so for Love of Money, St. Maximus, the confessor, describes this as the delight in having money, the difficulty in separating from it, and the pain that one feels when giving it away as a gift. And like Dr. Larcher, I'm going to include in this evil thought of love of money, I'm going to include the passion of greed, which is just a little bit broader and is about the

desire to possess goods and to acquire more and more goods. And because I think the two are obviously very related. So St. Paul talks about this being idolatry, right? The greedy man being idolatrous. And St. John Chrysostom makes the point that if the greedy man, he's talking about the greedy man being idolatrous, and he says, if he's not offering sacrifices, material sacrifices in the way that we typically think of idolatry, he's consecrating much more by expending all of his energy, his power, and his time. by expending all of his energy, his power and his time. So for his sacrifice in this kind of idolatry, the greedy man is is immolating his very soul.

And that's the danger of it. And I'd like to tie, I think, actually love of money and greed tie very well into the last episode, into both gluttony and lust because There's this great quote by St. John Chrysostom about About greed and love of money and he calls them a bulimia of the soul He says there is no illness crueler than this incessant hunger that doctors call bulimia No matter how much one eats, nothing can alleviate it. Transfer such an illness from the body to the soul, what is more frightful? The bulimia of the soul is

avarice. The more it gorges on food, the more it desires. It always stretches out its wishes beyond what it possesses. So there's this constant insatiability. There's this constant restlessness that comes from greed. And it's the same kind of restlessness that comes from gluttony of just always wanting more and more, which is what the evil thoughts do in general. And then Larcher himself, Dr. Larcher, he says, and this is where I want to relate it to what I was sharing about lust, about this problem with seeing objects instead of seeing people. He says, love of money and greed further destroy charity and pervert

relationships with others by leading him whom they possess to see in his neighbor nothing more than an obstacle to the preservation of possessed riches or a means to acquire new ones. So we're just constantly seeing in people what we can get from them, how we can have more than them. And, yeah, St. John Chrysostom also says, for the avaricious, men are not men. So he's saying the same thing that Dr. L'Arche says here, is that we start to see our neighbors not as neighbors,

not as men, not as people, but as objects. And I have seen that my life of poverty as a monastic is incredibly freeing to not have this attachment to money. But I want to point out that even as a monastic, I'm not safe from this evil thought. No one is safe from this evil thought. Because for me, it comes in, so-and-so didn't put the scissors back at my desk.

And they know that the scissors are supposed to go at my desk, and now I need to cut something, and my scissors aren't there, and where are the scissors? Except they're not my scissors. The scissors belong to the community. They just happen to usually be kept at my desk. But the anger that comes when my scissors aren't there

is this anger of possession. And, you know, it's the difficulty that I might feel in giving away an icon that has special meaning to me or especially time. You know, when people ask me if poverty is difficult, it's not, it's never been difficult for me in a material sense. Like, I've never been very attached to money, but that's not because... I don't think that's because of some natural virtue in me or something like that. I think it's just because my attachments are in other places, and I'm very attached to

my time. So poverty of time is much more difficult for me than a material poverty. Because as a monastic, my time is not my time. But the reality is, and this is so St. John Paul II in his in his apostolic letter Oriental Illumin, the light of the east, he calls monastics a reference point for all baptized Christians. And I think this is one of the examples of a way in which monastics can be a reference point. The reality is your time is also not your time.

That's very obvious for me as a monastic, because if my superior tells me, go do this thing instead of the thing that you're doing, then I need to go do the thing that she told me to. Or if I'm in the middle of what's supposed to be our personal time, but someone shows up for a retreat during personal time or something like that, then I need to stop what I'm doing and show them to their pustinia, to their retreat house and things like that.

So I'm living out the reality that my time is not my own, but the same is true for all of you. But when you're in the world, it's easier to trick yourself into thinking I'm living out the reality that my time is not my own, but the same is true for all of you. But when you're in the world, it's easier to trick yourself into thinking that your time is your own. And so I'm really just living this reality that's the truth for all of us. I'm not saying that I live it well or I live it charitably.

I'm just saying that I live it. And this is true of the example with the scissors and the icon is these are ridiculous examples, but it's helpful to have these ridiculous examples to see what the evil thoughts do, what greed does when it's blown out of proportion. Like when we can magnify it and give this very seemingly silly example, then we can see, oh no, this is actually always ridiculous.

This is always silly. This is always unhelpful. And it's made clear by the fact that Mother Natalia is so annoyed when the scissors aren't at her desk. Please don't send me more pairs of scissors. We have plenty of scissors. I need to be detached when they're not at my desk. So I want to move from there into sadness because we're going to come back a little bit to some of those points in talking about sadness. So the fathers are clear that this is the passion of

sadness did not exist before the fall. However, the other part that they're clear on is that just because it came into the world as a result of the fall does not mean it's always bad. So there is a good kind of sadness, and that's the sadness that we feel over our sin, over evil that we experience, evil that we see, evil that we've committed. But the evil thought of sadness that they're talking about is the sadness that comes from the frustration of our desires or the sadness that comes from the loss of some sensible good or an injury. St. Maximus, the confessor, talks about the sadness that comes from a desire for some material or moral good that's possessed by others.

So this is the kind of sadness that I talked about in the episode that I don't know what Thursday called it, but it was about the dangers of comparison and the despair that comes from comparing ourselves to others is that we can be saddened because someone else has a moral good that we don't have. And I do want to be very clear here, because I know this is a very common problem, that I am not denying the existence of clinical depression. So please do not hear me as saying, if you have depression, you are just steeped in sin

and you just need to go to confession and then you'll be fine. That's not what I'm saying. There is a need for, I'm very much of the opinion that there is a need for therapy and that therapy is not the same as spiritual direction. I think the two are very related, right? Because as integrated persons, we have mind, body, soul. So mental illness is absolutely related to the soul and to the body. But I'm not saying that if you have mental illness that it's a result of your own sin or something like that. So please don't hear that. So a really helpful discernment here in trying to decide whether this is good sadness or

the evil thought of sadness is, this is probably overly simplistic, but I think it's helpful, is this moving me towards God or is it moving me away from God? Is it tying me down to the world? So for instance, if I'm sad over my sin and that's drawing me to confession and to the Eucharist and to prayer primarily, first and foremost, to prayer, then this is a good kind of sadness. If I'm sad because I've had this desire unfulfilled, I'm sad because I've lost this material good, that's tying me to the world. That's making me want not more time with the Lord. That's making me wish I had this thing that's here on earth. That I want to be more comfortable here on earth. And so that's the evil thought of sadness.

But I want to, I do want to make one nuance or one clarification about even the sadness over our sin. Because this can become despair, and that's super dangerous. And again, this is one of those things that the fathers are unanimous about is talking about the danger of despair. St. John Chrysostom says, The devil has no other weapon in hand more fearsome than despair. Thus we give him less pleasure by sinning than by despairing.

And I've talked about this on other episodes as well, right? Chrysostom says it's more dangerous for us to despair than it is to sin. He even goes so far as to say that we don't go to hell because of sin. We go to hell because of despair over sin, because despair is what keeps us from turning to God, right? When we're so turned inward over the sadness of our sin, when the sadness over sin brings us to the point where we can't look at the Lord,

then it's no longer a good. Anything that's not allowing us to look at the Lord is not a good. So, I didn't really think through how to wrap this up, if I'm being honest. I'm just going to end in prayer. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for those who are listening. I ask that you grant them and myself the strength that we need to fight against the evil thoughts of love of money and sadness. Grant us the graces that we need to not be greedy, to be directed towards you instead of directed towards the world, to have a love for you instead of a false love for ourselves. Help us to love you sincerely, to love ourselves sincerely, and to love our neighbors sincerely.

Help us all to grow in discipline, in charity, in prudence, in temperance, I ask all of this through the prayers of St. John Chrysostom, St. Nathaniel, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Basil the Great, the Most Holy Theotokos and all the saints, and through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.