Virtue Quest

How much of the world's weight should I carry?

I consider tolerance to be a kind of stop-gap, a second-best, a hand-me-down virtue at most. For example, if I said to my beloved, “Darling, I tolerate you,” I would deserve the slap I would receive. Tolerance is the virtue of bearing with some necessary but undesirable thing. It is not the ideal toward which I strive.

That said, tolerance is a real virtue, even if a secondary one: I would place it as a sub-virtue of Fortitude or Courage, as a form of patience and perseverance. But it is only virtuous when directed to something that is both undesirable and necessary.

It’s clear to me that other people don’t fall into the category of “undesirable.” A human being is, by his or her very existence, good. This particular person may be inconvenient or uncomfortable – or even dangerous – to me at this particular time. But what is undesirable is not that person’s humanity; the inconvenience or danger is what is bad.

What isn’t so clear to me, sometimes, is whether I myself fall into that “undesirable” category. (more…)

How can you mend a broken heart?

So there are a couple people in my life that make lots of bad decisions. (I don’t think they read this blog, but I won’t name names anyway.)

I’m not talking about decisions I disagree with, like choosing the creme brulee when there’s chocolate mousse on the menu. I’m talking about undeniably bad decisions, like burning bridges and painting yourself into a corner.

It’s hard to love someone in that situation, for two reasons. First, their bad decisions put up obstacles to receiving love; and second, I just stop wanting to love that person.

The limits of love

To love is to will the good of the one you love. (more…)

It takes practice to look this cool

Anyone who plays guitar (or, as I do, bass guitar,) develops calluses on their fingers where they hold down the strings. It doesn’t take long, maybe a week of playing a little every day; but that can be a painful week, and the strings feel like they’re cutting into the soft flesh at the tips of your fingers. It’s especially bad if you only play occasionally, because any calluses you develop fade away when you’re not playing, so they have to develop all over again.

Whenever I pick up the bass again after neglecting it for a month or so, it’s not just the physical pain I feel. I feel a kind of moral pain, that “I should’ve been practicing all this time.”

But when I do practice regularly, (more…)

The view from the top makes it look so easy!

More goodness from Pinckaers’ The Sources of Christian Ethics!

Following St. Thomas Aquinas, Pinckaers gives three basic stages of growth in virtue:

1. Beginner / childhood
2. Proficient / adolescent
3. Perfect / mature adult

Each of these stages essentially follows the growth in freedom of a person, and challenges the person to become more free in his or her life. Here’s how each stage works:

Beginning in virtue

The beginner needs to learn how the world works. This is the stage of getting to know – to know oneself, to know one’s abilities, and to know the world and the moral basis of one’s life in the world. The primary work of this stage is learning or, to use a more traditional word, discipline.

Now, it strikes us that discipline is something opposed to freedom, but when the freedom we seek is to live a fully human life, we start out in need of knowledge and in need of practice. Human beings need to be raised and trained and taught.

The goal of education is to lead the child to understand (and the educator must first understand this himself) that discipline, law, and rules are not meant to destroy his freedom, still less to crush or enslave him. Their purpose is rather to develop his ability to perform actions of real excellence by removing dangerous excesses, which can proliferate in the human person like weeds stifling good grain, and by guarding him against unhealthy errors that could turn him aside and jeopardize his interior freedom.

Moreover, this is only the initial stage of growth, just as practicing scales is the beginning and not the end of playing the piano.

Progress in virtue

The second stage involves internalizing the rules by seeing and acting on the reason the rules exist in the first place. It involves a certain testing of the rules – not to destroy them, but to understand them, just as a pianist might try out different formations of a chord or ask what happens when you add this note to it. This is the stage where virtues become, not actions that one follows because they’re imposed, but a kind of “second nature,” an ability that really is one’s own.

Virtue is not a habitual way of acting, formed by the repetition of material acts and engendering in us a psychological mechanism. It is a personal capacity for action, the fruit of a series of fine cations, a power for progress and perfection.

In other words, freedom and goodness cease to be mechanical exercises and become organic parts of us.

Perfect virtue

First off, Pinckaers warns (and I warn with him) that “perfect” here doesn’t mean the end of the road; rather, it means the fulfillment, and the completion of development. Probably a better word for today would be “mature” but St. Thomas used “perfect” so Pinckaers explains what he meant by it.

We can characterize this stage by two features: mastery of excellent actions and creative fruitfulness.

This is the ultimate goal: to be able to do whatever we do well, and to do it creatively. This is what Thomas Edison meant by saying that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The virtuous person has gained the freedom and the ability to bring inspiration to reality in spite of the difficulty or obstacles in the way.

This does not mean the end of learning or of growth; rather it means that learning and growth continue almost naturally, without great effort – because the virtuous person has learned how to learn, and has rooted him- or herself in good soil for growth. Virtue has become a stable foundation for the freedom to do what really leads to happiness.

And that’s a goal worth striving for!

Time to get up

I’d been having a pretty good month, till about the middle of this past week. I’ve been waking up on time, getting work done, keeping in touch with friends, praying regularly, and so on … but little things slowly began to slip. So, I haven’t really made my bed since Wednesday. I came in late to work a couple days this week – only a couple minutes late, but definitely late. And these past couple days off, I’ve spent more time watching telly and playing computer games than reading or writing, which is what I had planned to do.

The demon despair

Now, my tendency when I find myself slipping into bad habits is just to give up the fight.

That’s because I’m (first) lazy and (second) a coward and (third) prone to depression. Big whoop. I know plenty of people who can identify with those vices, and I know I’m not alone. But that doesn’t make it okay.

So, the question is, what to do about it. How can I overcome the temptation to despair?

I think the first step is to recognize that this isn’t just a minor foible. This is self-destructive behavior in a very literal sense. Despair is just a non-committal form of suicide, and I need to recognize it as a real and present attack on my life and happiness.

Doesn’t matter that the attack comes from within. I need to recognize it as a threat, or else I won’t meet it with the right attitude.

The monk’s solution

I heard a story once about a guy who walked past a monastery every day, always longing to be like the monks inside but thinking he wasn’t holy enough. One day, he met a monk who was sweeping the sidewalk. He asked the monk what he did in the monastery.

The monk said, “We fall down, then get back up. We fall down, then get back up.”

I always thought of that as a smarmy way of saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But I’m starting to take it a little more literally: think of a boxing match. If you get knocked down, you stand back up. You struggle to your feet by whatever means necessary. If you don’t the fight is over. You’ve lost.

I’ve read enough works by mystics to know that “spiritual warfare” is not just a metaphor for them. I think it can’t just be a metaphor for me, either.

A declaration of war

Therefore I’m declaring war on my vices. I may not win, but my plan is, like Galadriel, to “fight the long defeat.” Or like Rocky, to “go the distance.”

After all, virtue is not about perfection. It is about excellence. It is about settling for nothing less than one’s best.

Just get it done

One of my friends describes her life as “the daily grind.” She’s worried that she doesn’t have the joy or enthusiasm for things that she used to. She feels tied down, restricted by the work of just maintaining stuff in her life: job, home, relationships, and so on.

My experience is totally different: I’ve been bouncing all over the place so much in the past few years that I’m soaking up stability and regularity wherever I can find it. It’s comforting to me to punch the clock at work, to have a morning routine, to do things like fill the car with gas or hit the grocery store on the way home.

But I have some distance from the chaos of the last couple years, well, I’ll probably get tired of the daily grind myself. And maybe my friend will find some new inspiration in her life.

The only constant is change

The trick is to find some way to happiness, some way to excellence, regardless of mood or life circumstances or whatever. And this is where virtue comes in.

Virtue is constancy in the midst of change.

Virtue holds up the goal, the ideal, the good, and shows the path to strive for it. The good, happiness, never changes; even though the way to pursue it often does.

Sometimes it takes courage; sometimes it takes self-restraint. Sometimes it means stepping back to a more objective distance; and sometimes it means jumping into immediate action.

Sometimes virtue is sticking with a person through thick and thin, even when you don’t feel like it. And other times, virtue is making a change, even when you’re overwhelmed by fear.

How to know the right thing to do

It’s easiest to see right and wrong in the rear-view mirror: hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. But there are a few things we can do in the moment to make better decisions – even if they’re not always the best:

1. Know the goal: take some time regularly to sort through your priorities. Check your list with someone you trust. Give yourself a clear, concrete image of what you’re aiming for
2. Take inventory: before making a difficult decision, look around and double-check the facts of the situation. Ask if there’s anything you’re missing. Ask if you’re assuming something that isn’t really there.
3. Listen to your heart: if something feels very right, or very wrong, there’s got to be a reason for it. Look for that reason. Don’t dismiss it.
4. Follow your head: your heart can give you good information, but it makes lousy decisions. Leave the actual decision to your reason. Ask yourself how you can move toward your goal, toward happiness, toward excellence, in this situation here and now. And, if you’ve gathered all the facts, trust your reasoning. Do what you have concluded is good, no matter how you feel about it.

For me, it’s the last two that always are the hardest. My feelings cloud my thinking; or my thinking pushes down my feelings. But I keep trying to learn from my mistakes, to go back and try to do better next time. Even small progress is better than no progress at all.

Building a habit of faith

It’s easy to see how faith is a theological virtue; but I think there is also a natural virtue of faith. It is the habit of believing or trusting in anyone’s ability to do any good.

I bring this up because I sometimes get depressed about my own failures or, more accurately, my not living up to my own expectations. I think, “By this time, I should be making six figures” or “Why haven’t I found Miss Right?” or “Holy crap, am I still living with my parents?”

When I’m in such a mood, it’s hard to trust anyone else. I reject compliments. I turn all Scrooge-and-Grinch-like. I get into arguments way too easily.

Faith and trust

It’s hard to trust others when I feel like I can’t trust myself. When I cease believing in my own ability to do good – or even to do any better than I have in the past – then I lose any basis for believing that anyone else can do good either.

I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that any experience of others I have is based on my own past experience; so, if I only have experience of disappointment, then I don’t really know how to believe or hope for something good.

The second reason is that I myself am the standard that I measure the world against. Sound kind of egotistical, but I think it’s just the nature of being a subject, of having a first-person perspective. So I look at others and I compare what I see of them to how I feel inside myself and then extrapolate to how that other person must feel or think or whatever.

So, if I’m feeling like a disappointment in myself, like I’m untrustworthy, then I don’t really remember those times when I actually fulfilled a trust placed in me, and I can only see people around me as better than me or the same as me.

Envy and lack of faith

When I see people as the same as me, or even as worse than me, it’s easy to understand why I don’t trust them. They’re even less trustworthy than I am!

But those I see as better than me, because I see them acting in good and noble ways, I tend to regard with envy. I tell myself that they’ve received some benefit, some gift or ability that has been denied to me. I envy them, and don’t trust them because of spite.

And I think that’s the ultimate problem I have in practicing natural faith: I keep referring to myself as the standard. But faith requires me to open up and let other people be other than I am – to let them be themselves. And to trust that they really can be themselves without conforming to my standard for myself. Moreover, to trust that they might have some insight into the world, even into me, that I don’t have.

Faith means remembering that the world does not revolve around me.

Theological faith

The gift of faith, as the Christian tradition articulates it, forms the basis for relating to God as a person. But it is not all that different from the natural virtue I’ve been describing. As Thomas Aquinas says somewhere, “Grace builds on nature.” (Anyone know where he says that? I admit I don’t know!)

Faith is the foundation of any personal relationship: trusting another to be him- or herself. And trusting that they also trust me to be myself: just one person among billions … yet still unique.

Patience is a virtue

I used to describe myself as unemployed. Then I started calling myself a freelance writer. Then, last week, I had a pretty good job interview during which the interviewer as much as told me I’d be hired, once the proper hoops had been jumped through.

So, being the impulsive person that I am, I started looking for one of those big-ticket items that one can acquire only when one has legitimate employment. I went apartment hunting.

The problem, of course, is that I do not as yet actually have the job I have almost been offered. Hoops remain to be jumped through. And apartments seem to require (for reasons beyond my willingness to imagine) actual solid proof of employment. As if anyone else in the financial sector operated that way!

Patience accepts reality as really real

Now, patience is not just the virtue of waiting for things that you have to wait for. It’s the virtue of waiting, well, with patience. That is, it’s holding on to a basic peace and tranquility while waiting. It’s a refusal to become anxious or unreasonably fearful.

In short, it’s accepting the reality that the world does not revolve around me.

Overcoming anxiety with patience

For about two and a half days, I was poring over internet apartment listings, visiting the actual apartments, making lists and budgets and comparisons … and talking to friends and family in hopes of finding some justification for immediate and unnecessary action.

Funny, they all counseled me to wait.

And, when I actually allowed myself to listen to their advice, I found (to my dismay!) that they were the reasonable and correct ones, and that I was letting my desire and anxiety run away with me. I had to remind myself of the facts of the situation. I had to bring myself back down to reality.

And reality, as it so often does, brought me back to peace and set me free from my fears.

I won’t say that I’ve become a patient man. But I will say that I’ve learned a lesson in patience. I am growing, slowly, in the virtue of patience. And I must remember to be patient while I grow in that very virtue.