(RNS) — Elizabeth Oldfield spends a lot of time thinking about sin.
Not the finger-pointing, fire and brimstone, shape-up-or-go-to-hell approach to human failings. Instead, Oldfield considers sin a way of talking about all the things that keep us from living a good life.
Admitting you are a sinner, she says, can be really good for you.
“I am constantly surprised to have found myself writing a book about sin and then trying to offer it in public as a useful, humanizing, liberatory way of thinking about ourselves,” said the host of “The Sacred” podcast and author of “Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times,” a book about how paying attention to the seven deadly sins transformed her life.
Those sins — greed, lust, sloth, envy, gluttony, lust and pride — still haunt the modern human and often make us miserable, Oldfield argues. A former BBC researcher who spent a decade running Theos, a Christian think tank, in London, Oldfield said the book came out of her longing to find solid ground in a world filled with polarization and spiritual distress, where despite once unimagined abundance, people are often isolated, distracted and anxious.
“I want depth. I feel the need for roots, for core spiritual strength,” she writes in the introduction to “Fully Alive,” published earlier this year by Brazos. “As I look at the future, I want whatever is the equivalent of Pilates for my soul.”
Oldfield spoke with RNS about her book, her quest to find a better way to live and why sloth is more about doomscrolling than being lazy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve said the word “sin” has been a victim of bad branding. Why do you think it’s important to give sin a second look?
For me, it goes back to the underlying logic of the universe. I think everything is about relationships. That’s the deep logic of my tradition, that we are made by a creator who values relationship before anything else. Human beings are made for relationship — we are made by each other. We are made for each other.
Therefore, the way we flourish is in relationship with others. But obviously, that doesn’t go that well very often. There’s fracture everywhere we look. There’s disconnection and withdrawal and worse. And for me, that’s what sin is — withdrawing and disconnecting from these relationships that we’re made for.
In the book, you argue that there’s freedom in admitting that we are not as great as we think we are, and it opens a door to make amends. Is that right?
It feels more psychologically livable to me to have this framework of sin and forgiveness. We need to keep them coupled together — a lot of damage has been done when they get removed from each other. When you have no accountability, no sense of justice, and you just focus on forgiveness or the grace or mercy end of things — that there’s risk to that. There are also huge risks if we just focus on judgment, imposing sin on ourselves and each other.
But if you can say, I have disconnected, I have withdrawn, I have broken relationships, but I am in a story which means that doesn’t have to be the end of things, then there is a way forward. And that way forward is through reconciliation and repair and forgiveness.
Tell me a bit about the sin of sloth. In the book, you relate it to your cellphone addiction and define it not as being lazy, but being distracted.
I thought sloth is just like, lying around watching Netflix. But the Latin word acedia, which is usually translated as sloth, is much richer than that. It’s this sense of spiritual apathy, of failing to attend to what’s important and wasting your life. That was a real dagger in my heart.
When I’m just passively consuming content created by global corporations, am I actually rejoicing or resting? Probably not. What I am doing is just numbing and collapsing and distracting myself from my real life.
One point of the book seems to be that we all play a part in creating the world around us, which is especially clear when you talk about greed. We sometimes think of greed as someone else’s problem and not our own.
My tradition has this very painful claim that the love of money is the root of all evil. I used to think it was a moralizing buzzkill. It was dour and Puritan and restrictive and hair-shirty. And maybe it’s all those things. But maybe it’s the medicine that we need. Maybe when the tradition claims things don’t make us happy, it knows what it is talking about.
You sometimes sound exasperated at your inability to live up to the ideals of your faith. You essentially say, “I’m going to stop writing about this because it’s making me depressed.” There’s a way to be a better person, but it’s going to be hard.
What I’m trying to argue is that we were made for relationships — and that when we try and live in ways that align with that, we will actually become more fully human, more fully alive. We grow up our souls. But the process of doing that requires letting go of a lot of these temptations towards self-protection, accumulation, tribalism, numbing — you know, treating other people like objects in our sex life, resisting community, all these temptations. This quite rigorous and demanding spiritual path is the only one that I have found that makes me feel fully human.
