Besetting Sin

Today

I've recently been having conversations with my brother about the nature of sin. I mentioned the idea of the "besetting sin" - the flaw that tracks your every action and how to recognise and tame it.

I said that I thought that mine is vanity. David wanted to know how this is defined - here we go then:

Vanity, Noun.  Excessive pride in or admiration of one's own appearance or achievements

The question, as with many other "sins", is the extent to which it is bad or harmful and the extent to which it is empowering. "One element of vanity", I said to David "is self-respect; what makes you put your best self forward because of how you'll appear to others. That's a good thing, surely." I never slob around in a dressing gown or PJs, always being bathed and fully dressed before breakfast; after all you never know who might see you with your hair uncombed and without proper supporting underwear...

In My Day

My mother frequently said "Julia, thy name is vanity". What drove her to make this unhelpful remark and why was I singled out for this? Do I have this tendency to think too well of myself? Looking back, I see that I was  very aware of the external layers, the presentation layer. I loved to dress up and to feel that I looked pretty.

I can remember many of my dresses and how much I loved them and the way I felt wearing them. I was very conscious of how I appeared and by extension, conscious of how others appeared.

It was a delight to twirl around, gazing at the effect. I loved to act, provided that the part I played was capable of being made to look good - if I was a witch, it had to be a glamorous witch.

This near-obsession with my appearance came from pride in, rather than admiration of myself, I think. I don't know to what extent it was "excessive". There was always a dichotomy between how I felt inside and how I believed I looked to other people.

Mamma made it clear that Beatrice was the pretty one and that I, at best, could be called "handsome" - not an epithet to thrill a girl. So I think that the vanity came from trying to reconcile these two differences. The surface layer was a sort of disguise to fool the world into thinking that I was better-looking than I really was. I certainly identified with the Ugly Duckling but somewhere deep inside feel that I am still waiting for that swan moment.

I'm not sure that all this fooling of others really fooled anybody or gave me any real underlying confidence to match my exterior ebullience.

It's taken me a long time to see that I was actually rather a cute child and not a bad-looking teenager and to understand that external prettiness evens out as you get older.

Not that any of this stops me wishing that I was drop-dead gorgeous, buying too many clothes and shoes and dyeing my hair.

What I am not now sure of is whether this quality of mine is really vanity at all but some other unnamed sin.