“Treat Yo’self!”: When Small Indulgences Take Over
Deliberate Spite or Passive Aggression
Clinging to Our Narratives Beyond Their Usefulness
Half-Assing It, aka “Phoning It In”
Acknowledgments
Scripture quotations are from the following versions:
• Revised Standard Version of the Bible — Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition) (RSV), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
• New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition (NRSV), copyright © 1989, 1993 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
• New American Bible, revised edition (NAB), copyright © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. Used by permission of the copyright owner. All rights reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
• Psalm texts (except Psalms 117 and 119) are from The Psalms: A New Translation, copyright © 1963 The Grail (England).
• Psalm 119 is from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from the English translation of The Roman Missal, copyright © 2010 International Commission on English in the Liturgy Corporation (ICEL). Excerpts from the English translation of Liturgy of the Hours, copyright © 1973, 1974, 1975, ICEL. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise noted, quotations from papal and other Vatican-generated documents available on vatican.va are copyright © Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States of America, copyright © 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. — Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications from the Editio Typica, copyright © 1997, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. — Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Introduction
When Bert Ghezzi approached me about writing this book, I gave him a bemused look and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I am a walking, breathing billboard for bad habits, and a cautionary tale against little sins, unattended and left to run rampant.”
“Perhaps that is why you should be the one to write it,” came the response.
I knew that he was right. Who better to identify and enumerate the small and varied ways in which we sabotage our lives — body, mind, and spirit — than someone who is so self-evidently wallowing in them like a baby elephant in a mud puddle?
The book was meant for me to write because I am intimately aware of the fact that while the big sins we commit in our brokenness can often, and dramatically, impact not only our lives but the lives of others, it’s the “little sins” that leave us so mired and weighed down with self-recrimination that our ambitions and our best instincts become thwarted by our own disgust with ourselves. We don’t wait for anyone else to make a big “L” out of their thumb and forefinger and smack it to their foreheads to tell us we are “Losers.” We can internalize it all by ourselves, because when we are ensnared by the little sins we end up, on some level, hating ourselves. And that affects everything we do, and everyone around us, all the time.
Well, good luck trying to love your neighbor as yourself when you are really sick and tired of you. At best, and with God’s grace, you can manage to do something good despite yourself, but more often than not, the loving thing you try to do for someone else will end up enmeshed within your familiar web of little sins:
• Perhaps you’ll feel so good about what you’ve done that you’ll decide you should reward yourself in the worst way possible, by indulging “just a little” in behavior you know you should not do.
• Perhaps your ego will expect everlasting gratitude and loyalty from the person you have ostensibly “served.”
• Perhaps you will decide you could have done better, and bring