“The ultimate and principal good of
man is the enjoyment of God.”

• A Sloth Eats A Dude
• A Sloth Eats A Dude Dog
• A Sloth Eats A Dude Guy

• The sloth bear (Melursus ursinus) is a myrmecophagous bear species native to the Indian subcontinent.It feeds on fruits, ants and termites.It is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, mainly because of habitat loss and degradation. It has also been called 'labiated bear' because of its long lower lip and palate used for sucking up insects. It has a long, shaggy fur, a mane around the face.
• Viewers eat up the mystery and constant guessing game that is The Masked Singer, so it's no wonder that many theories have already come out about the contestants on The Masked Dancer, including the Sloth. Even with just a couple of clues to go on so far, viewers have managed to dredge up a few.

Eating sloth meat is taboo for a large number of the tribes living in the sloth’s habitat. The average tribesman in the animal’s range eats just 0.064 sloths annually. Sloth bears are listed as a vulnerable species mainly due to “degradation and the loss of habitat” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. And brave Umer said.

I imagine that if you are like me, it is one thing toagree that our goal should be the attainment of bliss in heaven with God (andan easy thing to agree on, at that), but quite another thing to live our liveswith our eyes fixed on God rather than on ourselves. Since the Fall of Adamand Eve, we’ve all had a battle against sin on our hands. Sin takes our eyesoff our heavenly goal and redirects them toward far less worthy things.

St. Thomas wrote that “inordinate self-love is the cause of ev­ery sin” (I-II, 77, 4). “Inordinate” means disordered, unrestrained, and inappropriate. It means love of the lower, bodily, animal self over one’s spiritual soul; love of simple pleasures, of money, of false gods of every sort in place of love for God.

The Deadly Sins & Our Gaze of God

All sins remove our gaze from God and place it on ourselves in one way or another. Lust, for example, has always been very good at tempting us to accept far less than the best. Through lust we fixate on people’s bodies and remain blind to the souls within them, made in the image and likeness of God.

Through gluttony we live to eat, ratherthan eating to live. Through greedwe obsess about obtaining worldly things. Through anger we lash out at those whokeep us from our sensuous and worldly goals. Through envy we are saddened by thethought that others may have more things or more fun than we do. Through pride we most directly anddeliberately shift our goal from serving God to serving ourselves, doingeverything ourway.

Sloth

All six of the classic seven deadly sins mentioned above divert us from our ultimate end. As I peer over Thomas’s broad shoulders, I see him writing about yet one other deadly sin most relevant to our first lesson: “Sloth is not an aversion of the mind from any spiritual good, but from the Divine good, to which the mind is obliged to adhere” (II-II, 35, 3).

Sloth then, is the sin that provides the most direct obstacle. It takes our minds off the divine good, which is God. This may seem a bit surprising to some. In our day, sloth probably first calls to mind “laziness,” as can be found in many dictionary definitions.

Acedia, the Root of Sloth

We’ll have a true grasp of sloth if we understand it through the word St. Thomas himself used for it — acedia, the Latinized version of the Greek word akedia, meaning “without,” and cedia (or kedia, if you prefer the Greek) coming from kedos, meaning “care” or “concern.” The deadly sin of sloth is a spiritual sloth that says, “I don’t care — about the things of God.”

Thomas further defines “sloth” as “an oppressive sorrow” and as “a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to do good” (II-II, 35, 1). Sloth is a spiritual apathy, a sadness or boredom about the divine good of God. This lack of passion for serving and enjoy­ing God is the antithesis of our first life lesson, and yet it is, in some sense, the first life lesson of the popular culture around us.

We can see this in the culture, and within ourselves, when we look at the sins that accompany, serve, and flow from sloth. St. Thomas, borrowing from St. Gregory the Great, notes that each deadly sin has a bevy of “daughters,” so let’s look now at sloth’s sorry brood.

Sloth’s Daughters

Wanderings Towards Unlawful Things

Sloth’s daughter running rampant in our culture is that of “wandering of the mind after unlawful things” (II-II, 35, 4). Thomas agreed with Aristotle that “those who find no joy in spiritual pleasures have recourse to pleasures of the body.” In our day of extreme “separation of church and state,” observe how the vast majority of the most heated political debates involve precisely the “pleasures of the body.”

So many minds in our culture have wandered so far toward unlawful pleasures of the body, re­jecting God’s laws, that it is quite fitting to see this as a worship of false gods, and unfortunately, the chief false god appears to be Molech, who relished the sacrifice of innocent children (Lev. 18:21, 20:1-5; 2 Kings 23:10; Jer. 32:35).

Hopefully our minds have not wandered far from spiritual good in pursuit of bodily pleasures, but we still need to exam­ine our consciences to track down and bring home our own wandering, prodigal minds. Spiritual sluggishness is not for the lazy alone. If we become overly obsessed with our work or some hobby or special interest, or even our cell phones or social media accounts, we might be extremely physically active, while mired in spiritual sloth.

Other Daughters of Sloth

Thomas names other daughters of sloth. It would do us well to see if they lie lurking lazily in our souls.

• Sluggishnessregarding the commandments. To keep our eyes on thegoal of God, we need to ask ourselves if we are doing the specific kinds ofthings He commanded us all to do, such as honoring His day by going to Massevery Sunday.
• Faintheartednessregarding spiritual obligations. Do we give our full effortand attention to spiritual obligations, in things as simple as speaking to Godin prayer as well as in things as difficult as publicly standing up for theright to life?
• Despair. Are wespiritually apathetic and despairing be­cause we doubt that God could showforgiveness and mercy to sinners such as ourselves? To do so is to doubt God’sloving power and mercy and to accept not the best but the worst as our lot.
• Spitetoward those who lead others to spiritual goods. Have we been spiteful to those who stand up boldly to do God’s will?Have we disparaged the priest who dares to give powerful sermons oncontroversial topics or our neighbors in the pew who are willing to take apublic stand to pray at an abortion center and offer counsel to women incrisis?
• Malice. Hopefully we donot openly detest the spiritual goods of God, as do some of the most virulent“new atheists” who describe a Christian upbringing as child abuse, but do we doanything to defend the Faith when it is attacked in our presence?

If sloth or any of its sinful, self-serving daughters have a home in our hearts or are expressed in our deeds, it is time to root them out and pulverize them to dust, because they are keeping us from our ultimate goal, and they might well be hindering our loved ones, too, as they look to us for guidance.

The Sloth of Secularism

Alas, sloth has other powerful allies that quite directly strive to remove our eyes from the goal of God and bring them down to gaze upon the world. One term for this worldly view that cham­pions sloth in our time is the ideology of “secularism.” The word derives from the Latin saecularis which means “of an age, or a generation,” and it has long referred to “worldliness” in Christian usage. Secularism is a worldview with no place for religion and, therefore, no place for God. Those with a thoroughly secularist worldview will certainly spend no time trying to conquer sin as a first step toward loving God.

The influential philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that it is not sin, but rather the sense of sin, the very notion that it is possible to behave in a way that is contrary to God’s will, that leads to man’s unhappiness.

By 1973, the eminent psychiatrist Karl Menninger would come to write the book Whatever Became of Sin?, arguing that increasing societal problems, the growing incidence of mental dis­orders, and increasing unhappiness had resulted from the growth of secularism and the rejection of the concept of sin in modern culture. Four and a half decades have passed since then, and our problems continue to mount, as more and more people seem to flounder, having lost track of the meaning of life.

Although I hope and pray that every one of my readers still has a zest for life, we might also ask ourselves how a downplaying of the dire importance of sin in acquiescence to the social winds of the times has grown within the Church herself, not to mention within our own souls. To root out key obstacles that keep us from the enjoyment of God, we must pulverize not only the sloth that would turn our hearts from God but also the secularism that seeks to divert and poison our minds and our Church as well. When we refuse to accept sloth into our hearts and secularization into our minds, we ready our souls to accept only the best, the things that lead us to God.

✠

A Sloth Eats A Dude

This article is adapted from a chapter in Dr. Vost’s latest book, 12 Life Lessons from St. Thomas Aquinas: Timeless Spiritual Wisdom for Our Turbulent Times. It is available as an ebook or paperback from Sophia Institute Press.

image: Adam Jan Figel / Shutterstock.com

When a New Yorker is dropped in the middle of the Amazon and only eats fruit and yucca for weeks, the temptation to eat adorable animals becomes unavoidable. So says Redditor and UWS resident Aaron, who posted photos of his journey to Peru to prove that he in fact 'begrudgingly ate such natural wonders as armadillo, turtle, crocodile, toucan,' and yes, 'a f*cking sloth.' He describes the taste as 'one of the few absolutely disgusting animals we ate. It was really, really tough, and there really wasn't that much meat.' Also, the sloth in the photo above holding a human hand (not Aaron's) is alive, but wouldn't be for much longer.

Aaron told us that the trip he went on three years ago was vastly different than what he had planned on. 'I'm a composer, and I became friends with this director who invited me to Peru. He told me I'd just have to pay for airfare, so I took him up on it.' Aaron says the plan was to go to Iquitos, a relatively bustling town of 400K. The group of travelers, who he described as a 'rag tag bunch of white dudes,' ended up only spending a single night there. After a 20-hour boat ride to Pévas, and another hour or so by canoe, the group landed in the tiny port village of Ampiyacu.

'The chief and his sons and these other two women loved us, but most of the village didn't seem happy we were there,' Aaron says. 'It's not that we felt unwelcome, but you go to touristy places, you go to local places, and then you go to places that you're like an anthropologist. It was a completely different culture.'

After eating nothing but yucca and fruit 'which literally fell off the trees, everywhere,' the group hungered for more substantive sustenance, but had to hunt for it themselves, which means the tastier varieties seemed out of reach. 'There were packs of boars, you could smell them, but the one time we encountered one this Brazilian guy we were with told me to run. He was legit, so if he runs, I'm running,' Aaron says. 'We ate what white dudes in the Amazon could catch.'

Aaron personally never killed any of the animals, and the only one he caught was the turtle. 'The villagers were making fun of me for catching it. They'd put it down, and leave it in the same place, then come back and grab it and say, 'Hey, look! I caught a turtle.' It tasted truly revolting.' Crocodile was much more palatable: 'It was definitely the tastiest. Somewhere between chicken and shrimp.'

The village was so remote that what was supposed to be a two-week trip turned into a month, after Aaron missed his flight because there were no boats. Aaron says he ended up telling members of the Peruvian military that he was a doctor, so he could get a lift to a port with a guaranteed ride. 'That was the luckiest thing. I dunno if they bought it or not, but we got out.'

The sloth Aaron ate isn't endangered, and apparently eating sloth isn't unheard of, but doesn't he feel terrible that he ate such an adorably slow animal? 'I can't rebut the cute animal part, but I did come away having a different appreciation for the fact that we're so disconnected from what we eat. In New York people love their foie gras, and their veal, but you don't have to look at the cute animal or the tortured animal.'

Here's hoping Kristen Bell doesn't see this article.

A Sloth Eats A Dude Dog

A Sloth Eats A Dude Guy

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