It was great fun to appear on Pat Oedy-Murray’s “The Virtuous Life” radio program on the Annunciation Radio Network out of the Diocese of Toledo. The conversation mostly focused on the phenomenon of homeschooling and how it is that roles have been reversed and homeschoolers have become the normal kids.
The host also asked about the origins of “Inspire Virtue.” As the host of a show called “The Virtuous Life,” her question was apt. The short answer is that virtue is a path that invites us to excellence, an invitation that is rare to find in our current climate. Bumbling about in daily activities plagued by character flaws and equally flawed spouses, children, and cashiers at the grocery store, mediocrity is the best we can hope for. There is just no getting out of this track alive.
Virtue is a way of recognizing what is in our control. Habits, the substance of the virtues, accumulate over time and can have compounding effects on our state in life. Nota bene: in this fallen world, the virtues may not assure you of wealth and health. They’ll go a long way to both in many instances, but even in those rare Job-like times that they do not, our interior lives will be all the better for it. As Richard Lovelace so memorably put it in “To Althea, From Prison”:
Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron bars a Cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage.
If I have freedom in my Love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such Liberty.
No matter the circumstances beyond one’s control, training the mind and progressing in virtue will be their own reward. It is not, as is so often mistakenly believed in our culture, a matter of “white-knuckling it,” forcing ourselves to do the “right” thing against our every impulse. Rather, virtue contains within it sweet rewards. Good habits lead to good feelings, reinforcing right action.
In our current age, obsessed as it is with injustices, pollution, and oppression, there is no way out. We are left to posture in caring deeply about things that are approved to care about, wracked with delusion or shame when confronted with the reality of our failures. We primly type away on our internet-connected machines expressing deep concern for the products used to manufacture our disposable straws all while blasting away untold volumes of heat and energy in running the hidden servers powering all our deeply important caring.
Bill Maher, who in a world that’s jumped the shark is now legitimately quite funny, brilliantly contrasted the professed environmentalism embodied in that happy little ray of climate-disaster inducing sunshine known as Greta Thunberg and the unrestrained porn-inspired consumerism expressed by mega-celebrity Kylie Jenner. You can’t have your Soylent Green cake and eat it too. There are only possibilities for someone who claims to care about the source of their battery power and the destination of their trash yet lives a hedonistic life of mass-market materialism. Either that person will be fully delusional, ignoring how she lives and how far that is from her proclaimed ideals. Or she will feel a deep sense of dissatisfaction and shame at recognizing how she wants to live is so different from how she actually lives.
Virtue is the way of maintaining the ideal, becoming perfect, but recognizing the slow, plodding progress of us mere mortals. With virtue, we can patiently withstand our faults and those of others as we make our way ever onward and upwards.
