Virtuous Ancestors | Contemplify
Contemplative Friend,
This is the second of three emails (if you missed the first read it ) examining the question - Suffering is not new, so how did the ancestors of yesteryears cultivate meaning in spite of ever present suffering? After listening to the song of suffering in our lives and the world at large, today we look towards the virtuous ancestors.
Sitting heart-to-heart and screen-to-screen once again, I ask, do you have the courage to draw on the druthers of your ancestral past to chart a meaningful way forward in spite of the suffering? My home tradition, Christianity, has championed four cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Sounds underwhelming to some, but the exemplars of these virtues were vivacious change agents. They lavishly personified these virtues in their daily lives. Over the arch of history I admire the temperance of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the wisdom of Hildegaard of Bingen, the justice of Francis and Clare, and the fortitude of Tertullian. These are ancestral examples, but modern ones are aplenty; Bryan Stevenson (justice), John Lewis (fortitude), Beyonce (wisdom), and John Dear (temperance). The visible fruit is half the story. The daily participation in Mystery’s doing and undoing is the creative art of cultivating virtue for the sake of resounding the Divine within.
This is not virtue signaling but celebrating the virtues revealed behind the mystical shades of unknowing.
This a rallying cry for a virtuous life. By now I trust that you don’t see the virtuous as goody two shoes. They are the culture makers, swayers, and shakers. The virtuous are not the cogs who keep the machines going. The cogs keep the status quo by unquestionably singing their part in the soundtrack of suffering. A virtuous cog is an oxymoron. Humans were never meant to be cogs. We are meant to be virtuous. It is the virtuous who imagine alternative ways of communicating, creating, and being in place and body. A life braced by meaning and resiliently shaped by suffering. The virtuous see the suffering world and look for ways to help out by becoming out of being. This is why a cog is never really a cog, but a virtuoso in waiting. A cog becomes virtuous through attention and practice. Cogs begin to show up differently in their bodies and communities. They begin to butter the milquetoast of their lives. They might even continue to look like a cog to the outsider, but their lived reality burns with a creative becoming*.
The modern virtuosos I named do not exist outside of personal or systemic suffering. Their virtuous becomings broke through the suffering songs and diverted culture in surprising ways. This is contemplative activism. I am under no false pretense that I am going to be the next Beyonce or John Dear. I am in the process of becoming myself. And so are you.
*The great Gary Snyder said he truly learned to meditate when he started participating in long drawn-out city council meetings.
Tomorrow we will reflect on cultivating virtues in our being and becoming.
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At the edge of suffering, may you find meaning.
In the midst of suffering, may you find virtue.
Heeding the rallying cry,
Paul
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P.P.S. The postings to kindle the examined life in a quarantined world are still being glued together daily under Quarantined Qontemplative at the Contemplify basecamp.