Weekly Soul. Week 12 - Virtues
Today's meditation from Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living by Dr. Frederic Craigie.
-12-
We don’t live for happiness; we live for holiness. Day
to day, we seek out pleasure, but deep down, human beings are endowed with
moral imagination. All human beings seek to lead lives, not just of pleasure,
but of purpose, righteousness, and virtue. As John Stuart Mill put it, people
have a responsibility to become more moral over time. The best life is oriented
around the increasing excellence of the soul and is nourished by moral joy, the
quiet sense of gratitude and tranquility that comes as a byproduct of
successful moral struggle.
David Brooks
Michael Kent grew up among the few white
people in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Erie, Pennsylvania,
where he was bullied by black children and his mother was assaulted by a black
man. He became increasingly hateful of black people and eventually found a home
in the neo-Nazi white supremacist movement. He attended rallies, recruited
people to racist ideology, and was, himself, abusive and violent to non-whites.
He found himself in and out of prison for theft, drug and weapons charges. While
in prison, he acquired a collection of racist tattoos—white pride and white
supremacist symbols and swastikas (no, prisons don’t offer tattoo parlors, but
his buddies were creative with readily available substances and steel guitar
strings).
When Michael was released from serving his
last sentence, his probation was transferred to a black officer, Tiffany
Whittier. Fearing his violent past, previous probation officers had visited
Michael in pairs; Tiffany boldly came to his home by herself. This impressed
Michael. She wasn’t coming to judge him, she said, but he desperately needed a
more positive direction for his life. Over time, Michael came to trust and
respect Tiffany, and the two of them developed a relationship of
accountability, support and, ultimately, friendship. At Tiffany’s urging,
Michael took down Nazi paraphernalia from his walls and replaced it with more
positive images and, finally, underwent the painful process of having swastika
tattoos removed. He landed a job where he was the only white man in a crew of
over a dozen workers and came to value the friendship of his co-workers as
well.
Michael comments, “If you have a strong
support system, if you have people that believe in you in a positive way, you
can change. She gave me the strength and courage to do what I’m doing… and
changing my life because I know that if she can do it and believes in people, I
know I can, too.”
The journey of remembering who you are has
a trajectory. It is always a journey of becoming
who you are.
The unfolding of your life may not be as
dramatic as it has been for Michael Kent, but you are on a journey, too, are
you not?
Brooks uses the word, moral, not in
the sense of a starched and sectarian caricature of a moral life (no dancing,
please), but growing into an increasingly moral life in the sense of
manifesting greater “purpose, righteousness, and virtue.” He has also been
writing for a number of years about what he calls “résumé virtues” and “eulogy
virtues.” Résumé virtues at the markers of a public life that signify
achievement and success: becoming the regional vice president, being awarded
tenure, joining the mega producers club at your real estate agency. Eulogy
virtues are the markers of a life well-lived… the expressions of human
goodness, courage, integrity and generosity that are extolled, for many of us,
after we have moved on.
For me, there are some values and
qualities about my life… the “moral,” the “sacred”… that have remained fairly
consistent over the years. With allowance for the imperfection of being human,
I think I have always been absolutely devoted to my family, for instance. And
there are other ways in which I have moved, and continue to move, into
understanding and expressing who I am. I think I am more patient than I was
years ago. I reach out more to people I don’t know. My thoughts and energies
are more occupied with the project of looking for ways to make a difference in
the world.
How is this for you? What do you see of
the trajectory of becoming who you are? How are you a different person than you
were twenty years ago? Ten? Five?
“The best life is oriented around the
increasing excellence of the soul…”
Reflection
- Think of a story that reflects
a way in which you have grown in qualities of character, some way in which
you are different—more attuned to the “moral” and “sacred” values of who
you are—than you had been. Sit with this story and recognize the courage
and integrity that it shows.
- In the coming week, notice
moments when what you say or do reflects your growth over time.
- A vital element of Michael’s
story is the role played by Tiffany Whittier. So often, the growth in our
lives is prompted or inspired by someone else. Who has helped you to move
toward “more excellence of soul?” Give thanks for that person. For whom do
you pay the role of mentor and encourager?
Author
David
Brooks (b. 1961)
is an American journalist, writer, and commentator. He grew up in New York and Philadelphia,
raised by parents whose lives showed him the passion of intellectual curiosity.
At the University of Chicago, he struck up a relationship with the redoubtable
William F. Buckley Jr., who invited him to work as an intern at the National Review following graduation. He
spent several years at The Wall Street
Journal as an editor and essayist before coming to The New York Times in 2003, where he writes a twice-weekly op-ed
column on “politics, culture and the social sciences.” Brooks has published
several books of cultural commentary, including The Road to Character (Random House, 2015), which explores the
development of the signature personal qualities of several prominent Americans—Francis
Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy Day and others—from which the quotation
comes.
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