Prudence, the underrated virtue

Joey and I are long time members of All Saints’ Episcopal Church.  We love the All Saints’ community, and are glad to be able to be part of it.  Several years ago (could be five, could be six –  I can’t believe it has been that long) a new rector (priest-in-charge) came to All Saints’.  Our rector is a wonderful man: thoughtful, caring, good administrator, and he loves a good football game, and a glass of beer.  Joey and I have had the pleasure of getting to know him as we participated in parish life.  He preaches every few weeks (we have several priests who rotate the preaching responsibilities), and I very much enjoy his sermons, but the best spiritual guidance I have received in a long time came from something he wrote in our parish newsletter.

All of us have heard life described as a journey.  And, with every journey comes encounters with crossroads which force us to make decisions. Oftentimes when we reach one of life’s crossroads — in our job, in a significant relationship, or in any vital area of our life where we are confused about our direction — we turn to God to help us decide the best thing to do.  But, since God rarely offers explicit directions for our journey, we frequently find ourselves agonizing over what God’s will is. Or, when tragedy strikes, well-meaning (if misguided) people may try to comfort us by saying that God’s will ordained this catastrophe.  What is God’s will anyway?  And, more to the point, what is God’s will for you?

Now, many people tend to think of God’s will as “that big computer in the sky” that has a billion bytes for every human being — from Adam to the last person on earth.  This means that with every second of every day there is a command called “God’s will” for every human being on earth.  And, if this is believed, then it is only natural to dismiss any and everything that happens
as simply “God’s will.” We seem to long for a conscience that is automatic, like the metal detectors in airports.  Then we would have no dilemmas; everything would be black or white.  But, of course, we would be like robots if that were really the case. Sure, there are some “automatic” situations — for instance, when we run up against something described in one of the Ten Commandments.  And God has given each one of us some positive commands that hold all the time — like love, forgiveness, prayer, and honesty.

But these guidelines, which might be called the “general” will of God, do not tell us precisely how to meet the needs of our spouse while still attending to our own, or whether one should gamble family finances by starting one’s own business.  They do not tell us which school to send our children to, or how to be active in our church and in our community without shortchanging family time.  They do not tell us the most healing way to apologize, or the most comforting words to say to a child dying of cancer.  In fact, if you think about it, most of the time it’s a question of applying some general principle to a concrete situation.  You love your child:  Is the extracurricular activity hurting his studies?  You love your spouse:  Should you go along with her plan to invest in a new business venture?  You love your mother:  Should you bring her to your home to care for her better?

Many of you have probably seen the poster of Jesus that I have hanging on the wall behind my desk which reads, “He died to take away your sins.  Not your mind.”  Another way of getting at this issue is to ask questions like:  If God gave us a mind, doesn’t he want us to use it?  If God gave us a free will, doesn’t God want us to decide not just piddling things like where to hang the picture, but just which way to go at all the crucial junctures of life — vocation, home, work, community?  If God gave us imagination, does God want it to lie unused, like a Stradivarius in the attic?

Someone suggested a very practical definition for God’s will which went something like, “God’s will is what you prudently decide.”  Now, I know that “prudence” is often considered a rather “wimpy” virtue.  It often describes the life of someone who always does the safest thing, doesn’t make any waves, and doesn’t ever take any chances.  Remember the old saying, “Hang your clothes on a hickory limb but don’t go near the water”?  Yet, I would contend that true
prudence is not timid but is simply (though it is not simple) deciding on the proper means to an end.  You want to determine the best educational path for your child.  What is the proper, loving way to fulfill your purpose?  You want to help bring peace to a situation.  What is the most loving thing to do?  It won’t always be the “easy way out.”

It has been said that the verdict of conscience is nothing else but the verdict of prudence.  Author Joseph Pieper says that prudence has two faces.  One is turned to what’s real:  who you are, where you are, what ability you have, even what time it is.  The other is turned to the good — prayer, justice, peace, etc. — that you want to bring into concrete reality.  In some cases it’s easy to see what to do.  But how do you love the Lord your God today, in your present situation?  How should you honor your parents?  How should you keep holy the sabbath?  How do you translate “Lord, I love you” into “I’ll volunteer to serve the poor”?

Except for unusually important decisions, or the obvious ones, most of us wander around like shoppers in a new department store.  We zigzag between deliberating, searching for facts, half deciding, then going back, then forgetting the whole thing for a while.  Maybe it all becomes clear one moment in a flash.  Maybe we bumble along until we’re forced to decide.  It seems that’s life.  But one of the main purposes of life is to be prudent:  to form our conscience like Michelangelo forming “Moses” out of that stubborn block of granite.  By the grace of God we gradually acquire a more or less consistent way of searching for the facts, deliberating, deciding, and doing.  It’s not automatic, but habitual. And we may not like to use the word, but we’re being “virtuous.”  We are acting like the free and intelligent human beings God made us to be.  Prayer is not a mindless activity and using the Bible to affirm what we want is misusing it.

For all who believe, a prudent decision is the eye of faith focused on this moment.  God is always calling us to seek truth and to do the loving thing.  St. Augustine sums it up when he says, “Love, and do what you like.”  Now granted, most of the time, indeed, we seek God in the dark.  But that’s what trust means:  going on, day in and day out, making the best decisions we can, and trusting — that is, knowing for sure — that God makes them his own.

Your Servant in Christ,
Mike+

This was quoted from the November 2008 issue of Saints Alive!, The Rector Thinks Out Loud, written by the Reverend Mike Adams, rector.