Redeem the Time

Young men want to be great men, many times to the exclusion of being good men.

When applied to man, the term “great” has the luxury of being a tad more undefined, a bit more loose in definition, than “good” does. We all know the sorts of ways one has to be in order to be good; whereas “greatness” can be used as an excuse for all manner of vices. One naturally projects one’s own struggles onto historical examples of so-called great men, or thinks that one can make up for one’s sins by being great in other ways, or simply aims at a certain level of accomplishment without regard to what is good. Aiming for “greatness” conveniently allows one to ignore the goodness one ought to be striving for.

Good men are not tempted to vice because they have mastered themselves through habitual humility, a constant giving up of self, suffering rightly, hammering their desires into submission to reason, etc., etc. By means of these and other causes, the good man enjoys and delights in what he ought to enjoy and delight in. The young man could easily think such men are insensitive, dispassionate, unfeeling, cold, dumb, oblivious, boring, boorish, naive, brittle, fake, hollow, hypocritical and the like. In his blindness he does not realize that these words describe himself, or what his slavish desires have made of him.

Everyone who seeks to become a good man will go through periods where they see their faults very clearly—and marvel in fear that they did not see the obvious sooner. The experience produces fear because one wonders “what else don’t I see, if I didn’t see how much that was a problem?” To be a good man, one must persevere regardless—there are always more faults to deal with around the corner, most of which we likely haven’t even seen yet.

Purify our souls, and grant us moderation in all things! Virtue leads to the excellence and perfection of body, mind and soul—not to mention joy and delight surpassing earthly understanding—but it is attained only through the suffering of self-denial. There is no third way—the only other option is to embrace the pride that underlies all vices, remain enchanted and enslaved by cruel mimicries of preservation, action and perfection, and endure the ever-compounding, self-inflicted miseries of sin.

The impassable gap between the ease with which we can understand these sorts of things and the difficulty we have in practicing them, even in the most modest of ways, proclaims the necessity of grace.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

Sorry, but I’ll use any excuse to quote Dylan, and these particular lines come in handy on a regular basis.