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Introduction

The Virtues

While halfway through the journey of our life

I found myself lost in a darkened forest,

for I had wandered off from the straight path.

How I entered there I cannot truly say,

I had become so sleepy at the moment

when I first strayed, leaving the path of truth.

— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy¹

It wasn’t a dark wood. It was a ten-year-old Toyota with an odometer that had cracked 160,000 miles. The transmission had started talking to me, and the “Check Engine” light had been burning bright for months.

The guy at the oil change express had just warned me that the tires wouldn’t pass Pennsylvania state inspection. I could tell by the look on his face that he figured I ought to give it a wash one of these days as well. But the radio still worked, pulling in an oldies station that served as background noise while I chewed up miles on the parkway.

I was in an after-work-on-Tuesday kind of mood, when the new week has lost its novelty and Friday is nothing but a dim hope. I was listening to the oldies station, because anything newer just reminds me of a music video instead of a slice of life. The Beatles’ 1964 release of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” crackled out of the radio, courtesy of an antenna with more bends in it than a country road. I didn’t care. Even with static, it’s still rock and roll.

As I listened to the late John Lennon knock it out of the park, I slipped into the Wayback Machine. It was the summer after my sophomore year in high school. I was a fifteen-year-old kid at a “Record Hop” at North Eastham, Cape Cod, around mid-August. They played forty-fives off an old record player for the summer kids immediately after Labor Day at a town hall that had no practical purpose. If not for the summer folks, the Cape back then would have been nothing but dunes, crabs, and saltwater.

The guy running the show put on the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout.” Fifteen seconds into it, all the kids had stopped dancing and were singing the song at the top of their lungs. When it was over, everybody laughed and clapped.

Now this overweight guy with gray hair (and a bald spot in back) started coughing before he could get to the chorus. But he still laughed when it was over.

Time Bandit

Time. It yanks us through history before we even know we are in it. One moment I’m fancy free at a dance with buddies I’m convinced I’ll have for the rest of my days. And then I’m a thousand miles and decades away, an out-of-shape old geezer heading home after putting in another eight hours. And the string connecting it is a song John Lennon recorded in 1963 on a day when he had a terrible cold, which is what made those lyrics so raspy.

Climbing out of the Wayback Machine and sitting behind the wheel of my bucket of bolts, I wondered about the kind of kid I was and the kind of guy I had become. And I wondered about the kind of guy I wanted to be — maybe the kind of guy we all want to be.

But Dante found himself in a dark wood after he had “wandered off from the straight path.” It was the beginning of his journey, his Divine Comedy. Along the way he was blocked by the Leopard, representing fraud; the Lion, symbolizing violence; and the She-wolf, which meant, well, as the old moralists used to say, “concupiscence” — a Catholic word that we use for over-the-top sexual temptations because we don’t like to come out and say “over-the-top sexual temptations.” (Though, if the truth be told, “concupiscence” sounds dirtier.)

Dante’s literary pilgrimage — composed in the early fourteenth century and considered one of the “Great Books” of Western culture — was a guided tour through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Our pilgrimage is usually not so dramatic, though we often find ourselves in that dark wood. It’s an Everyman kind of feeling that for me seems to burp up to the surface in a car drive home after a rough day or on a bar stool in a town far from home. There are a lot of ways to describe it — it can be as simple as ennui, or as complicated as that “quiet desperation” the philosopher described as a man’s lot in life. But I prefer to call it the “what-the-hells,” as in, “What the hell am I doing with my life?”

Scripture tells us that the just man sins seven times a day. I think the just man gets a case of “what-the-hells” at least as often. It’s wondering why I do what I do, and why I can’t be the person I would like to be. It has nothing to do with a lack of, or certainly an abundance of, money, power, or sex — the great triumvirate of our sins and ambitions. It’s more like slipping away from a fundamental purpose and not being able to get back. It’s not about how I make a living, but how I live. It’s falling into the trap described by that heady theologian “Broadway Joe” Namath to the TV cameras over a game of eight-ball back in the 1960s: He was just trying to get by. It’s reaching a point, which I seem to reach seven times a day, where I know I can be better but have lost the ability — or the energy — to do so. Or even to figure out how.

When the rubber hits the road, what we really want out of our lives is happiness. Not three-beer happiness, I-got-a-raise happiness, or the-Steelers-made-the-playoffs happiness, but that quiet contentment that comes with living a good life. It’s not created by the circumstances of our lives, but rather it is the circumstances of our living. It’s how we walk the road, how we live the pilgrimage.

A Little Scripture

We all remember the story of the rich young man. It is mentioned in similar form in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In the Gospel of Luke (18:18–30), the rich young man is identified as an official. Jesus has just told the disciples not to prevent children from crowding around him: “… whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (18:17). As if on cue, a rich man approaches Jesus and asks him what he must do to gain eternal life.

Jesus replies that the man already knows the answer to that question: Keep the commandments. The rich man replies that he has done all of that from his youth. He presses Jesus, like a gambler wanting the sure thing. What more can I do? What will guarantee eternal life?

It’s easy to imagine Jesus pausing for a moment and reading the man’s soul. A fellow who confesses to keeping the commandments perfectly might not have quite the right impression of himself. So Jesus responds that if keeping the commandments is not enough, here’s what you need to do: Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come follow me.

You can almost hear the music going flat in the background. Like the old rock song from Meatloaf, the rich fellow thought he could do anything for love, but he couldn’t do that.

Jesus watches him walk away and remarks to his disciples, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!” (18:24). To which the disciples respond, “Then who can be saved?” And Jesus gives an answer that just about sums up Scripture: “What is impossible with men is possible with God” (18:27).

Which gives me a lot of hope.

The thing that always strikes me is that Luke, Matthew, and Mark tell us that the rich official, or the rich young man, walked away sad because he had a lot of stuff. The usual explanation is that he fell short: He couldn’t bear to part with his riches. But I always thought that he was sad for a deeper reason. He wasn’t being offered an impossible task. He knew he could do it. He could give it all away; he could live the great life, starting right then and there. But he decided not to.

So he was sad, not because he couldn’t do it, but because he could. He had pressed Jesus for an answer, and Jesus had told him what he could do to make the run for sanctity. And he gave the Meatloaf response.

Benign Mediocrity

When given the option for greatness in life, it’s easy to opt out time and time again, until it becomes a habit. And it has nothing to do with preferring money or power or sex. It has to do with a more subtle temptation: benign mediocrity. It’s more comfortable to be ordinary than a saint. Or at least, that’s what it’s comfortable to believe.

A lot of our little battles in Dante’s dark wood are created not just because we choose sin but because we avoid good. Good seems too hard; mediocrity seems so easy. We look at what we admire in others and decide we just don’t measure up — without realizing that the key to understanding the great life is that it’s not just how we are created to live but the way we want to live. Dante puts it right:

How I entered there I cannot truly say,

I had become so sleepy at the moment

when I first strayed, leaving the path of truth.

And “leaving the path of truth” is so easy to do on the pilgrimage. It’s not always a matter of some great sin, some great wrong that yanks us off the path. It’s usually just becoming “so sleepy” that we lose our place, as in a book we don’t earmark for the next time we pick it up.

When I wore a younger man’s clothes, I had a little patter to get the ladies giggling. I’d explain to them that the key to understanding men is that none of us has layers. It was my “Shallow Man” theory, meaning, what you see is what you get. Women make the mistake of looking for depth in men when there is none, I’d tell them.

“What are men really thinking?” a lady would ask.

And my answer would be: “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

It got the laughs because it fit every silly caricature of men, from Curly of The Three Stooges to Dagwood Bumstead. And it is absolute nonsense. As Pascal wrote, “Man is infinitely more than man.”²

I know a lot about the collected works of Oliver Hardy but not much at all about the English novelist Thomas Hardy, except that he abandoned novels to write poetry. The explanation I read, described ironically by the novelist Stephen King, is that “fiction’s goals were forever beyond his reach, that the job was an exercise in futility. ‘Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,’ Hardy supposedly said, ‘the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.’”³

Hamlet and Ahab have nothing on a bus driver or a bank teller. Not when it comes to the richness and complexity of what we think, feel, believe, and experience at any given moment of our lives. Nope. There’s no such thing as the shallow man, no matter how shallow he might behave on occasion. Granted, when I’m eating a bologna, egg, and cheese sandwich — called a “Pittsburgh Steak Hoagie” at a tavern I frequent — while channel-surfing for The Simpsons reruns, I’m not exactly King Lear. But I’m also not a bag of bones. None of us is.

Wisdom From an “Old Feller”

Dredging the mall for the detritus of the consumer culture for male clothing is not usually my idea of a good time, which is why I dress the way I do. But when my wife decides that the ten-year-old shirts are old enough, she insists on my presence. So I go.

On one of those trips to the mall, I begged off for a few-minute break from the sensory overload of trying to pick out a shirt from a stack of fifty and escaped to the sunlight. I sat down on one of the metal benches outside, and an old feller sauntered by and asked if I had room to spare. I always have room to spare for an old feller.

He was dressed in Early Retirement — a pair of striped shorts, white T-shirt, black socks, and sneakers off the clearance rack of a department store. He was a mall walker, putting his time in not so much for the exercise as for something to do. He sat down not for a break but because I looked like a guy who would listen and not interrupt. He was right.

The wife had died before him, which always leaves a man bewildered. It’s like the natural order of things is disrupted. He was living alone, but his daughter was nearby, and she stopped by four or five times a week. He made it sound like an imposition rather than a blessing.

The old feller lived on a little bit of a pension, from a steel mill job that went belly-up before he was done with it, and Social Security, which got him grumbling about the government and the Republicans. He had a grandkid, and I got the impression that a son-in-law was not part of the story.

We sipped some coffee and surreptitiously eyeballed a pretty young thing walking by.

“You know what keeps a man going?” he asked me.

Thinking I was the straight man in this one, I responded, “Guilt, debt, and responsibility.”

“Where’d you get that bit of philosophy?”

“From a comic strip,” I admitted.

“You know what I’d do if I had fifteen thousand bucks?” he said, picking out a number that to him was as impossible to imagine as a million bucks. “I’d go to Alaska. I was there in the military back when I was a kid. I’d go back in a second.”

I think his dream of Alaska was more focused on youth than the frozen tundra. There’s always a good time to be had back then, whether we’re an old feller walking the mall or a twenty-six-year-old pining over a lost love from senior year of high school.

One thing that can make us old fast is thinking that we are getting old. Mitch Robbins, the Billy Crystal character in the movie City Slickers, in the throes of middle-age angst, laments the potbelly, the surgeries, the hearing loss, till finally “you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering, ‘How come the kids don’t call?’”

“And one man in his time plays many parts,” I thought, scrounging a line from an otherwise wasted college education. Shakespeare described the stages of a man’s life, from infancy to its final moments. He concluded:

… Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.⁴

Shakespeare wrote that for laughs. We don’t laugh much when we read it today.

The old feller got up and did a little stretch. He’d buy a lottery ticket that afternoon, he said. He was feeling lucky. One big hit, and it was off to Alaska.

“You know what keeps a man going?” he asked again.

Still expecting a punch line, I answered, “Alaska?”

“Nope. It’s what the nuns told us — faith, hope, and love. Most of all love.”

“I think Saint Paul said that. Lennon said that too,” I admitted.

“The Commie?”

“No. The Beatle. All you need is love.”

Then I wished him good luck on the lottery. And good luck on life.

Wisdom from Saint Paul

When Saint Paul saw that “the time of my departure has come,” he wrote to Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:6–7).

Saint Paul speaks well to men:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandments, are summed up in this sentence, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. (Romans 13:8–10)

What Paul is discussing for us here is what we call virtue. The nuns spoke of the theological virtues — faith, hope, and love. And the cardinal virtues, the moral virtues that are faith, hope, and love lived: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. All these virtues Paul has defined for us in Romans. He has defined for us how we are to live, answering that eternal question of men: “What the hell am I doing with my life?”

Which was the point Jesus made to the rich young man.

Virtue is classically defined as the habit of performing actions for good. These virtues we either naturally gain and acquire by the repetition of good acts (the cardinal virtues) or come to through the grace of God (the theological virtues). The virtues are how we are meant to live. They are what we admire in others and hope to find in ourselves, if only through a mirror darkly.

Many of us have spent years trying to convince ourselves that life based on the virtues is too hard, involving more change than any one person can accomplish. But with grace, the sacraments, and the “repetition of good acts,” this great life — a life for which we all strive — is not only attainable but easier than the opposite.

It’s said that the natives of Rome sometimes feel oppressed by the city’s very history. It’s hard to think of yourself as a unique child of God in a city where a thousand-year-old piece of sculpture is the new stuff. You can get lost in time that way. Time becomes the enemy; history, a sad tale from our early memories to the dust that we will most surely become — “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

But as Pope Benedict XVI once explained, we can never get lost in history, never get lost in time, if we understand our simple task: “Be seeds of holiness scattered by the handful in the furrows of history.”⁵ Even John Lennon never managed a lyric like that.

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.