The Many Guises of Virtue
The standard advice is informative, but it is not always directly applicable.
Gardening metaphor and some other interrelated thoughts follow, but here is this week’s epiphany: Getting up with the alarm is not always a virtue.
I was humming along with Mag-90, not winning any awards but consistently pleased with how solid the reflections are each day, and then I hit Day 23. From a few paragraphs in, talking about magnanimity and fortitude:
What might our “big soul” look like when it’s lived simply? It’s the small, yet virtuous choices made each day. We wake up when the alarm goes off. We ask how another is doing, rather than complaining about our day. . . .
The list is good. The observations are not wrong. And just previously (same day’s devotional) was this Mother Theresa quote, which began:
“We are at His disposal. If He wants you to be sick in bed, if He wants you to proclaim His word in the street . . .”
So there is no moment when the book says, “Yes you absolutely have to get up with the alarm, that is the only way to fully love Jesus.” It says on the same page that sick-in-bed might well be your vocation! In which case, you are staying in bed.
The difficulty I was having is that I have been attempting for years to follow advice that is suited to normal people. St. Josemaría Escrivá? Would like you to get out of bed. St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori? Out. And frankly it’s not even bad advice on a purely natural level.
There are many other similar recommendations, whether for spiritual discipline or just general wellness, that assume:
Your health is consistent and predictable, and in fact it is physically possible and prudent to set a regular sleep schedule and stick to it.
Your vocation and state in life allow for a regular pattern of activity from day to day and week to week.
So my struggle was that I was constantly heeding well-founded advice in attempting to put together a plan of life that would be entirely reasonable . . . if only I were living someone else’s life.
This is not to say that such advice is irrelevant — there is great help in having a reference framework, if only for being made to acknowledge a problem exists if it turns out to be ridiculously impossible to adhere to what ought to be very easy, obvious patterns of good clean living.
Anyway, it was an insightful moment for me, realizing I’d been playing someone else’s fortitude game, and that my path to holiness will not always like the textbook sample.
This is where we point out: Your personal vocation as an evangelist will not necessarily look like the textbook example.
This is good. It means that you have been chosen to cover a portion of the Great Commission that other people won’t get to. Possibly a weird, tiny, unwanted portion? But it’s yours.
Okay and the gardening story. Look at my tomatoes:
Gardening people, please ignore the part where these are not in fact the loveliest, healthiest vines that ever were. Just notice the giant globs of not-rotten red fruit.
This photo was taken this morning, January 26th, and yes it’s been a cold, cold winter these last few weeks. Here is the thing that stunned even my father-in-law who grew up in a farming family and whose life has been spent eating the tomatoes grown normally on land not that far from my little suburban barren: Apparently in my yard, tomatoes are a winter thing.
I had to switch to growing them in containers with store-bought dirt because the soil in my neighborhood has some horrible tomato disease (the neighbors confirm, it’s not just me), and then I had to figure out how to extend the growing season, because the plants were just hitting their stride on setting fruit when the first freezes kicked in, despite starting as early as possible in the spring.
—> I have a clear fire-resistant vinyl tarp that makes a poor-girl’s sun room out of my garage-office-storeroom, and was able to just squeeze in a spot for a couple potted tomato plants on dollies, so that they could be sheltered from the freezing weather but still get sunlight whenever possible.
This is not the normal way.
My in-laws think I’m nuts and don’t understand why we we’re incapable of tomatoes in the summer like everyone else.
I only persisted in this quixotic journey because the SuperHusband takes such joy in homegrown tomatoes.
And now, after nearly thirty years of attempting the thing? We’ve done the thing. Weirdly but effectively.
PS: Bulk antacid tablets do great for an affordable source of calcium if your tomatoes happen to need that. As mine do.