S3:E26 – Your Place in the Story, Pt. 4 – Virtues: The Heartbeat of Reality

Podcast | Matthew Clark

Your Place in the Story, Pt. 4 - Virtues: The Heartbeat of Reality

by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

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For the last several weeks I’ve been reading a book by Stanley Hauerwas called “The Character of Virtue, Letters to a Godson”. I’d heard of the author here and there over the years, and I’ve even had another unread book of his on my shelf for more than a decade. I’m glad to finally be reading Hauerwas, and this book has been a joy to read.

Hauerwas was asked to be a godfather to a friend’s newborn son. The agreement was that he’d write a letter to the boy each year on the anniversary of the child’s baptism. In each letter, Hauerwas would commend some virtue, whether it be patience, truthfulness, courage, temperance and so on. For instance, he describes how kindness is cultivated by growing up in a family that is kind, or even by caring for their family dog, Connie.

Personally, I didn’t grow up with much talk of virtues, so the descriptions of how they’re developed and what they are has been fascinating to read. Especially in the context of real letters to a child from a caring adult, as I believe that authors do mentor us through their writing. Words on a page make the lived wisdom of faithful folks we may have never met available to us in such a way that we can experience a kind of real involvement through which the Holy Spirit joins our lives and blesses us.

That’s why Hauerwas’ explanations of the virtues have been such an encouragement. I feel like I am being addressed in these letters and accompanied by a friend on my own journey, as the Lord takes the raw lumpy clay of my own desires and gives shape and purpose to it. Hauerwas points out that you can’t really will yourself to be virtuous. It doesn’t work that way. Rather, virtues are formed in us through habits. He says virtues “ride on the back” of activities we discover along the way. For example, reading good fiction forms in us the virtue of empathizing with the experiences of others, which counteracts narcissism, which in turn means our desire for connection with others becomes possible. Even learning to play baseball or a musical instrument turn out to be practices that inwardly form patience, generosity, and joy. And I can’t help but think that the idea in Scripture (Psalm 115, for instance) that you become like what you worship is working similarly.

In fact, that was a very helpful place to begin to understand how the virtues work. Contrary to what I would have thought, the virtues don’t suppress or diminish desire, rather desire is apprenticed to the virtues in order that desire may develop and be directed rightly. The virtues train and nourish the passions, so that our passions can be given meaningful and life-giving roads to travel toward beautiful destinations that end in flourishing. In that sense, human desire and passion actually get their power by plugging into the virtues. Without virtue, desire is mostly aimless and impotent. Hauerwas says,

“[The Virtues] involve the habituation of the passions. The virtues do not so much control the passions as the virtues form the passions so that our desires become the source of what makes us capable of goodness.” pg. 77

I can’t help but think of Lewis’s little book, “The Great Divorce”, which depicts an imaginary trip for a busful of people from hell up to the outskirts of heaven where they have a chance to confront and reject their own sin and enter paradise. It’s a fun fictional experiment that allows Lewis to explore how humans either cling to or relinquish the things that hurt us. Basically, it’s a study in malformed loves, or passions that have not been trained by virtue, and it’s very insightful.

But the scene that powerfully illustrates how virtue actually empowers desire rather than diminishing it, involves a man with a little red lizard on his shoulder. The tiny lizard is lust, and though an angel sent to the man from the higher regions of heaven pleads with him to let go of lust, he can’t imagine living without it. Wouldn’t it kill him to have his desire squashed? Would it be unnatural? But, finally, the man admits that if killing the lizard of lust kills him, it would be better than living as a slave to perverted desire. Passion untrained by virtue led the man to a dead end, where death seemed more desirable than his desire. So that angel is given permission to kill the little red lizard, whose back he breaks and whose body he flings to the ground. But then something astonishing happens. The little lizard is transformed into a huge, muscular, shining stallion which the healed man then mounts and dashes off upon into the deeper realms of heaven.

And that’s the idea. The righteousness that training in virtue makes available actually transforms our puny perversions of passion and desire into huge, muscular shining creatures upon which we can travel from the outskirts of reality deeper into its vibrant glory. Virtue limits in the sense that it sets a course, which means we’re free to actually get somewhere. Whereas, aimless desire seems free to go anywhere, but in the end is only really free to fold back in upon itself and get nowhere.

So that’s a little bit to clear up a common misconception about virtue. And reading Hauerwas has been helpful in that way, but another thing that has been very encouraging is a certain thread that I’ve noticed running through every letter and every virtue he’s described. And that thread is gratitude. What makes virtue possible seems to be a recognition of God’s virtue-saturated gift of love toward us. In that sense, all virtue is a way of returning our lives to God as an offering of love, as a response to the great love God first poured out on us. Thankfulness is the life-blood of virtue.

For instance, patience is gratitude for the fact that God has supplied time for us to know his love, God’s kindness toward us teaches us that we can be kind. God has been truthful toward us, so we can afford to tell the truth. God has been vulnerable and brave by opening himself to us in friendship, so we can be courageous and respond as friends, too. Jesus has demonstrated God’s humility and love for humanity by becoming one of our kind, so we can be kind and humble.

In fact, one of the themes in this book is that the virtues are actually indicative of our true origin and our true nature. The virtues are, in fact, what we were destined for. These are the truest things about reality itself, which pours forth from the Life of the Trinity. The heartbeat at the center of all Creation is kind, truthful, courageous, hopeful, generous, faithful, constant, and joyful. These are the unshakable and super-abundant things in this universe, because they originate in a life that is bigger than and encompasses all created reality.

Which brings me to what struck me so strongly this morning. This little quote from Hauerwas:

“That we are creatures of such a God, a God that would become one of us, means we are a people who believe that we do not live in a world dominated by scarcity. Our Lord is a Lord of abundance whose love of the other makes our love of another possible. We’re able to give (and receive) because we’ve been given all we need [in order to be] generous.”

The practices that we habituate either form virtue in us or malform us. And the story we inhabit puts us in touch with habits that form those virtues. The story Christians inhabit and the habits Christians practice are based on a vision of reality as being created and ruled by a Lord of loving abundance. Which means that God’s people don’t have to be scared about scarcity, because scarcity is ultimately and simply not true of reality. We can afford to be vulnerable, because God is rich in vulnerability. We can afford to be kind, because the Origin of the Universe has proven through Christ that God is abundantly kind.

That means, that as we find our place in this most beautiful story we discover that the whole world, indeed all of created reality, has at its heart a God who is abundantly good and virtuous. And as we form habits that form virtue in us, we are simply becoming more attuned to reality, to perfect love, where fear and scarcity have no place.

This is what Jesus came to clear up. Do you remember his story about the widow and the unjust judge? That’s a story where Jesus acknowledges the people’s misconception about God. They’d been thinking the heart of reality was primarily stingy and begrudging. The widow can’t get the judge’s help unless she just pesters him to death by beating on his door. The judge only helps to get her off his back. Jesus says they’ve got it all wrong, the Father is nothing like that. The truth about reality is better than they ever could have imagined. The virtues, then, prove to be a way that we enter into the truest thing about ourselves and our world, which is the loving abundance and endless joy of our beautiful God.

Closing Prayer

LORD, root us deeply in your beauty, goodness, and truth. You are the super-abundant source of all that makes life wonderful, joyful, and hopeful. The story you have invited us into is, in fact, nothing less than your very life, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That means that we do not have to be scared of scarcity, since it is an untrue narrative. In you, Jesus, we have unimaginably abundant life. We have every reason to be a people constituted by gratitude. Holy Trinity, direct us into activities and practices that inwardly form the shape of your divine nature within a people called by your name, so that we may bless the world you fashioned with a living recitation of the story you are telling through our very lives. Amen.

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