In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning’s reading, from Ephesians 4, beloved in the Lord, begins, “Walk worthy of the vocation with which you have been called.” In reading that the past week, the text that comes to my mind by way of comparison is from the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of John. “Work while you have the light, lest the darkness overtake you. He who walks in darkness does not know where he is going.” So, working and walking. In connection with these texts, beloved in the Lord, let me speak to you this morning about three psychological vices. That means this is going to be a negative sermon. Three psychological vices. Now, when I speak to you about virtue, I take the material from books that I’ve read. When I speak to you about vices, I don’t need to do any research at all.

The first vice, which I’m describing as a psychological vice, that is to say, it pertains to the soul, the psyche, the soul—we talked about that at vespers last night. And I do wish more of you had been at vespers last night. In fact, the attendance was really quite pathetic. You would have thought we had a dying parish from the meager attendance last night. However, we did have good quality. The first of these psychological vices is laziness. Laziness, yes, sheer laziness.

I don’t think we give enough attention, frankly, to the book of Proverbs. The book of Proverbs is a book written as a handbook to teach young men the disciplines that’ll get them through life. Young men. I think it’s also useful for young ladies to read it, but it was written for young men, who seem to be much more given to laziness. In fact, I’m really quite astounded these days at the sheer ignorance of so many young men, because nobody taught them anything. I’ve been meditating on this a lot this past week, and I hope you don’t get too much of the negativity of my meditation. I actually find eight-year-old boys—eight-year-old boys!—who cannot tie a square knot. Now, that is child abuse. [Laughter]

It’s important that we learn to do things and that we work. I’m thinking, of course, about other things besides the soul, but I’m going to concentrate on the soul. You see, God expects Christians to work and to do works. We’ve got a bad history in Western theology, and since Western theology has infected Western culture, the Orthodox are meeting it now in ways we’ve never met it before. The big heresy in the West was always that of justification by works. The Orthodox have never worried about that; it’s not a problem in the Orthodox Church. We have no theories, as they’ve had in the West, no theories about a treasury of merits, for example. In fact, that theory finally gave rise, by way of rebellion, to the Protestant Reformation. The Protestants correctly—correctly saw that that is raw heresy. There is no treasury of merits against which the pope can write checks to get you out of purgatory faster. Christian works has actually nothing to do with merits; it has nothing to do with deserts. It’s just what you do if you’re a disciple of Christ.

The opposite of these works is laziness. There are other words for it. We must be convinced that lethargy is a vice. It must be resisted at all costs. Boredom is a very serious sin! If you’re bored, you are spiritually sick, and you’re capable of healing yourself. Laziness is a disgrace. It’s a disgrace in the theological, etymological sense; it’s the opposite of grace. In fact, literally, dis-grace disses grace.

The exhortation we receive in this season, I believe, is from the mother of Jesus herself, who tells the servants at Cana, “Do whatever he tells you.” We’re supposed to do things! “Do whatever he tells you.” You see, God can make wine out of nothing, but he prefers to start with water. And I wonder how much wine we have deprived ourselves of simply because we neglected to fill the jars with water.

I won’t say that the tradition of the prayer of quiet is a heresy; it’s not. It’s a very sound thing, the prayer of quiet. But you don’t start with the prayer of quiet. It is astounding to me how many people expect the prayer of quiet within six months of their chrismation—or within ten years of their chrismation! I’ve had so many— It’s happened so many times. People come to me and say, “I’m really having a hard time getting to pray.” I say, “Well, how many of the psalms do you know by heart? Memorize about 30 of them, then we’ll talk about this. That’s a start.” The purpose of monastic novitiates is that monks could learn the psalms by heart, because the presumption is that you’re never going to get anywhere until you put the psalms into your heart. You don’t even try for prayer of the heart until the psalms are already there.

It’s important to avoid this. And the sin that’s involved here has a technical term, in Greek called akedia or akadia. I remember first running into that when reading John Cassian at the age of 18. It was really quite a wonderful thing to read John Cassian at the age of 18 and discover a name for what I was experiencing: akedia, which is a combination of depression—and depression, by the way, always comes from anger; it always does. Anybody who’s depressed, beneath it there’s always anger. It was certainly the case when I was in the period I’m talking about. It is important to have a habit of personal prayer by way of fighting against this combination of depression and internal laziness.

In the Christian life, we’re given stewardship of time and psychic resources. To each of us, St. Paul says this morning, grace has been given according to the measure of the giving of Christ. There’s a metron, a measure of it. We don’t get it all; we just get a measure of it. And we’re supposed to make use of that measure. This measure takes into account the resources of the soul, psychic resources. That’s why it’s important that the resources of the soul be used well, that they not be squandered or wasted. And for that reason we never take on burdens we’re not supposed to take on. It is really quite remarkable how people take on burdens they’re not supposed to take on at all. In fact, I’m really quite convinced that this is the besetting sin of the Orthodox Christian: to take on burdens that you’re not called to take on, which brings me to point two: the assumption of burdens we’re not obliged to carry and we’ve been discouraged from carrying.

I guess my best example of that would be the vice, the psychological vice, of passing judgment on other people, assuming some sort of stewardship over somebody else’s soul. As a priest, I am sometimes obliged to pass judgment. It’s probably the hardest part of becoming a priest, but it comes with the territory. It was in the small print of my ordination contract. Very few of us have to do that. Parents do; parents do have to pass a certain judgment and have stewardship over their children.

But look how often we assume we’re not supposed to carry. When we moved to Chicago 21 years ago, the first thing I noticed is that everyone in the city who’s driving seems to be certifiably crazy. [Laughter] It’s a city of 5,000,000 people, all of whom or most of whom have their hands on a lethal weapon. The last thing in the world I should do is get impatient with them, not that anything’s going to happen, because, I mean, I might yell at them in the car, but they’re not going to hear me, but I’m taking that burden on myself if I do that. I’m going to let 5,000,000 people determine whether or not I have a good day. You know, that’s kind of stupid, to use a theological term.

Passing judgments on things that we’re not obliged to pass judgment, that’s an unnecessary burden, and it’s always wrong, because passing judgment on others requires getting into their heads and knowing what they’re thinking, knowing what they’re feeling. But you see, sweet people, human beings are not machines. I might be able to diagnose what’s going on under the hood of my car. I can do that a lot better when the contents under the hood of the car was easier than it is now, when all you had to do was—if you understood combustion engines, you could do it in those days; now you have to know all sort of computer systems.

You see, we can hardly make more than a modest stab at understanding ourselves. So why do we fantasize that we can understand other people and pass judgment on them? Yet we do this all the time. Indeed, we’re encouraged to do this. When I watch the news, which is about the only TV we watch in our house, is the news, I’m astounded how many people are expressing opinions as though dogmas on subjects on which they are totally unqualified. How many actors and entertainers have told me that the world is going to be destroyed in twelve years? How do they know that? You see, when I was a boy, people were saying things like that, too, but usually it was someplace in Tennessee, where they went up on a mountain and waited for the end to come. What qualifies to even have an opinion on this matter? I’m not going to say anything about global warming now, except that even the scientists all seem to be quoting one another, and I have absolutely no way of knowing whether any of it’s true or not, but also suspicious, because a lot of money is involved, and as soon as money is involved, then I get very suspicious.

It’s hard to watch more than an hour of the news without somebody on there psychoanalyzing either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Pelosi. And they’re not qualified to analyze either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Pelosi, and yet they do it with reckless abandon, and they give this out as a matter of dogma. Aside from politics—and I certainly don’t want to get into politics today—we waste vast psychic resources trying to explain our friends, our co-workers, and even members of our family. That is such a waste of time, and it is absolutely futile and it’s frustrating. I have lived with the same woman for—well, it’s been some time now. [Laughter] About half a century? She’s a complete mystery to me! I’m not sure I’m so much of a mystery to her, but if, after all these years of living with my wife, I don’t understand her, I’m always finding deeper levels of complexity, a rich complexity, that I didn’t know about before, that I would ever pass judgment on anything that has to do with her, is really irresponsible. See, this is all just a counter-productive waste of precious time and limited psychic resources. And if I can’t pass judgment, if I’m unqualified to pass judgment on somebody with whom I am one flesh, why would I presume I could pass judgment on what goes on in anybody else’s head or heart?

This is a serious symptom of what Scott Adams calls Loserthink. That’s the title of his new book, Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America. It’s all that Dilbert philosophy. Adam suggests that the villain here may be William of Occam. I was very struck by that, William of Occam. William of Occam was a Franciscan friar. I think he was a priest, but I can’t imagine he heard confessions; I can’t imagine he did. He would have known more. He lived from 1287 to 1347. He taught at the University of Oxford. He was a disciple of Duns Scotus, Duns the Irishman.

William of Occam is the enemy of complexity. He tried to eliminate complexity. His idea was to keep things as simple as possible and not to create elaborate arguments. He had this preference for simplicity. Why? Because Aristotle says that simplicity is better than complexity. Aristotle said it, so it must be true. That makes no sense to me at all. In order to simplify a thing, Occam gave us what he called his novacula, his razor: Occam’s razor. My impression, frankly, is that Occam’s razor was dull the first day he used it. [Laughter] Occam’s razor says that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily, that the simplest adequate answer is commonly the correct answer. This is sometimes called the law of parsimony: simplify things as much as possible; don’t find complex answers for things. It says that when choosing between two hypotheses, one normally picks the one with the fewer assumptions. That principle— And it is a principle; there’s absolutely no way to prove it: you either accept it or you don’t, and if somebody enunciates something they take to be a principle, if it really is a principle, I expect it to be self-evident. I don’t see this as self-evident as all. But it’s useful, I suppose, in physics and in engineering, wouldn’t you say, Paul? That the simplest answer is usually the right one, in physics and engineering?

But Occam’s razor is completely useless in psychology. People are not simple. Human beings are infinitely complex. I’ve had a lifelong dislike for William of Occam because I’ve had a lifelong abhorrence of nominalist philosophy, and Occam was one of the chief proponents of nominalist philosophy, which says that we cannot know realities; we can only know the names of them. I refer you in this matter to a book called Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver. In the college where I taught back in the ‘60s, Bellarmine University, down in Louisville, in the first semester of college, every single student was obliged to read Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver traces almost all contemporary problems back to William of Occam, which is kind of curious. One can easily make that argument, and Weaver does quite eloquently, but I really wonder if so simple an answer might not itself be an example of Occam’s razor—which brings us to point three.

Mechanical models of the soul. You know, mechanical models are invariably wrong with respect to human beings. They’re deceptive, but we use them all the time. Now we’re starting to examine the human mind and the functions of the human mind on the model of the computer. What an impoverishment of the human mind! The only thing in a computer are laws of mathematics that we put there, that’s all. And to reduce human activity simply to mathematics?

But we use metaphors like this all the time. One of my favorites—it’s a favorite because I hate it the most—is the expression “blowing off steam.” The other day I was talking on the phone with somebody I love very much, and he was very, very distressed about certain things happening in his life, and he had reason to be distressed, because people were being… were being very unjust. But he was talking to me while he was driving, and he was yelling at other drivers. [Laughter] He was interrupting what he was saying to me to yell at some nut who pulled in front of him and stopped when the light was green. I asked him quietly, “You don’t have enough problems? You’re going to take on all of that? You’re going to take on the burden of all of that?” And he said to me, “I’m just letting off steam.”

Well, I didn’t pursue the question with him any further, because I didn’t want him to wreck the car, but what I should have said to him, if I had— well, I shouldn’t, but what would be correct to say to him was: “You are not a steam turbine. You’re a human being.” If you’re under pressure, and you are, just keep in mind that you’re using pressure in a different sense. Human beings don’t come under pressure the same way you put pressure into a boiler. That’s only a metaphor. You see, beloved, we’re not steam generators. As soon as you say, “I’m just letting off steam,” it’s something like the calliope on the steamboat, just letting off steam, so that the boiler won’t explode: just let off steam. But in spite of some evidence to the contrary, human beings are not locomotives, nor are they Mississippi steamboats. It’s completely deceptive to imagine that when you “let off steam,” you’re lowering the pressure. You never are! Never. You increase pressure by “letting off steam.”

That’s a burden you don’t need to assume. That’s a vice of the psyche, which has to be eschewed, to be liberated from. There’s the great song about “laying down my heavy load, down by the riverside.” The riverside is baptism. That’s where we’re going to lay down our heavy load. You see, the baptized person lays down his heavy load. There are certain burdens he doesn’t have to carry ever again. Meanwhile, his psychic resources are to be spent on those things which build up and cultivate the soul. We have stewardship over limited resources: the resources of the soul, because the soul is that which must not be lost. The soul is that which is worth all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory thereof. It’s the soul that Christ came to address himself to and to save. Amen.