So the journey begins.
Prayer
Lord, let me live each day with the knowledge that I mean something. I have work to do in this life, more to accomplish than I will ever know, if I keep your commandments and live by the virtues you have given through your grace and the virtues I practice from morning until the last light of evening. Let me spend my waking hours seeking an example, finding an example, being an example. And give me faith to believe, hope to bear, and love to endure. Amen.
Part One
The Cardinal Virtues
The cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude form the basics of a virtuous life. They form the way that we look at the world and the way we act in the world. They are what we admire in others and try to cultivate in ourselves.
The cardinal virtues, in the classical sense, are the summation of a morally good character. We learn these virtues as we practice them.
Chapter One
Prudence
Prudence: the virtue of using intellect and conscience to search out the true good in every circumstance and to choose the morally licit means of achieving that good. It is the virtue of divorcing personal desire from the judgment of whether an act is right or wrong. It is seeing truth and pursuing it. Prudence is reason and discernment made in kindness and truth.
•••
Dave Swallow expected a catastrophe to occur when the clock would strike the New Year on January 1, 2000. He wanted to be prepared. And he was prepared as no Boy Scout ever dreamed.
Dave was from Fort Wayne, Indiana. His story was told in a late-September 1999 issue of The Fort Wayne News Sentinel, just a few months before the second millennium ground to a halt. He was caught up in the Y2K end-times scare.
We were warned that as the curtains closed on the twentieth century, all hell would break loose. With computers running our lives, as well as our cars, and with all of them programmed only through the year 1999, everything subject to their electronic razzle-dazzle would fizzle out like a flat beer. Planes wouldn’t fly, the power company would collapse, coffee makers would quit — really apocalyptic stuff.
The Y2K scare created its own little boom in the waning months of the second millennium, based on a mixture of theological millennialism and pseudoscientific harum-scarum. It created a subculture in America, with suckers waiting to get soaked and the soakers waiting for the suckers.
Dave lived by himself in a pleasant enough middle-class home in Middle America. It was a home with a lot of room to spare for just one guy. That’s the space Dave converted into a Y2K storehouse that would make a paranoiac snug and smug. He was prepared for a Cormac McCarthy novel. If the end of civilization was coming after the first New Year’s kiss, Dave was not going to be caught short on the necessities.
According to the newspaper story, Dave had crammed his house with, among other things, more than 1,000 cans of food, 18 boxes of Band-Aids, at least a ton of charcoal briquettes, 1,500 pounds of propane, shelf after shelf of toilet paper, 9,500 plastic cups, 268 rolls of paper towels, a mountain of disposable razor blades, gallons of mouthwash, and 216 cases of beer — all the flotsam and jetsam of modern American life, crammed into one little home on a corner at a busy intersection.
Dave was on a trip with a friend the summer of 1999. They had just enjoyed a solid Midwest breakfast together. As they walked back to his truck, Dave suddenly keeled over. He was as dead as a doornail before he hit the ground, victim of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three. Which is a reminder that the old rock song warning “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” can be overstated.
Dave needed a little touch of prudence.
Dear Prudence
Prudence has taken on a certain meaning in our times different from the classical sense. Contemporary conversation defines prudence as an older aunt in comfortable shoes making choices that are so sensible that they ooze boredom. The word then gets tossed together with prudery, and that aunt takes on a disdainful pucker while she frets about hemlines and pick-up lines.
Prudence is actually a very straightforward guy’s virtue. It means living in the truth, not as a self-righteous jerk but as a guy who wants to look at himself in the mirror every morning without fearing that he’s sold-out. Prudence doesn’t mean living on a prudish straight and narrow with visors on, but it does mean living in society and culture by thought-out, reasoned principles that don’t fall prey to conventional wisdom. A prudent man looks for truth, finds truth, and lives truth. No matter where it leads him.
It’s easier said than done, my friends. It can even make watching football a challenge.
I’m thinking back to one of the most well-known moments in the history of the Super Bowl, and I’m not referring to David Tyree gluing a pass from Eli Manning to the side of his helmet to set up the Giants’ upset of the New England Patriots in 2008. I’m referring instead to singer Justin Timberlake’s tearing off part of Janet Jackson’s outfit during their halftime songfest at the 2004 Super Bowl. This momentarily revealed Ms. Jackson’s breast, on live network television, to a legion of football fans who had not sensibly retreated to the kitchen for beer and pizza during the game’s intermission.
Mr. Timberlake explained — in a line perilously close to the late Ron Ziegler’s claim that certain Watergate explanations from the Nixon White House were “no longer operative” — that a “wardrobe malfunction” caused the overexposure. Ms. Jackson later admitted it was a prearranged malfunction. Which seemed obvious, as Mr. Timberlake crooned these immortal lines just before tearing her outfit: “I’ll have you naked by the end of this song.”
The producers of the halftime show issued the ubiquitous nonapologetic apology for tastelessness: “We apologize to anyone who was offended.” Which implies, of course, that the offense was merely in the perception, not in the act itself. A coward’s apology if there ever was one. Ms. Jackson and Mr. Timberlake’s little show was tastelessness forced on an unsuspecting audience that included a lot of children.
Bad taste has become virtually epidemic in American culture. Parameters are now defined by the unrestrained libido of a male high school sophomore and the sense of humor of a six-year-old enchanted by scatological jokes. If you watch television, it can seem that the most highly paid, creative minds in America offer a celebration of our culture centered on underwear fetishes, sex, and intestinal gas, in no particular order.
We see an intentional coarsening of our culture, time and time again proving that we have defined deviancy down. One former television executive was arguing after the wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl that this was a tempest in a teapot. “After all,” he said, “it’s not like child pornography or … uh, uh, uh …” He was stuck. Other than blatant child pornography, he was hard-pressed to define what exactly we should consider offensive anymore on television. That’s the sinister aspect of all this. The culture keeps defining deviancy down, and after a while there’s nothing left to define as deviant — including child pornography.
At some point the prudent man has to make choices.
Prudent Saints
Cradle Catholics grew up with the saints. At least they did when I was growing up, just prior to electricity and running water. Converts might think that this familiarity with the saints was a good thing, but it had its drawbacks. Bad enough when your mother asked why you couldn’t be more like your brother, your cousin, or that annoying kid right up the street with the perfect grades. We also got, “Why can’t you be more like Saint Francis of Assisi?”
But somewhere along the line, the saints got sidetracked in our lives — or, at least, in my life. Perhaps the good sisters idealized them so much that I forgot that they were real flesh-and-blood