Virtues Essays

Virtues:

Wisdom: Good judgment, the ability to perceive people and situations correctly, deliberate about and decide on the correct response.

Wisdom is more than knowledge.  It’s a conscious thought, one that comes after deliberating on a subject.  It’s a thorough understanding that includes the whys for the decision being made, not just the whats.  It is a deeper understanding of the root causes, the history, and the background.  It’s understanding when to speak and when to stay quiet and when to share your knowledge so that it will have the greatest impact.  Wisdom is being able to speak on a topic with authority, and having your authority on that subject respected.  This doesn’t mean that you have nothing left to learn on a subject, but rather that when you speak it isn’t simply filling a silence but meaningful.  Wisdom isn’t always having the answer, but being willing to find it.  Wisdom is one of the keys to effective leadership, but also to being a good member of any group, since it allows you the chance to think about what people are doing or concerned about.  It’s perception on a deeper level, being conscious of the world and the beings in it as you move through it.

Piety: Correct observance of ritual and social traditions; the maintenance of the agreements, (both personal and societal), we humans have with the Gods and Spirits. Keeping the Old Ways, through ceremony and duty

Of all the virtues, this is one of the most difficult for me.  I’m not sure if it’s because I find it difficult to engage in regular anything with my schedule, or if it’s a personal reaction from years of forced Sunday morning mass attendance. 

To me, piety is spending time with my altar, it’s remembering to thank the house spirits when I find my keys, it’s laying out an offering and all the little things we do to constantly remind ourselves that we are not alone in the world, that there are other beings all around us.  For me it is also being out as a pagan.  It is being a face and a voice where I live and work that says that pagans do exist and we’re not all nutters.  It’s doing outreach and living the life, not just talking the talk.

Vision: The ability to broaden one's perspective to have a greater understanding of our place/role in the cosmos, relating to the past, present and future

I see vision as a compliment to Wisdom.  One cannot have deliberate thoughts and understandings without the ability to place oneself in the cosmos.  This was especially important for the priestly and ruling classes of the ancient PIE cultures who were responsible for the welfare of the people.  Without the ability to know the past and learn from it, it is impossible to make a better future for your clan/hearth/grove/kin.  

I also see vision as a creative force.  Having vision can also be the ability to create a future that you want to live so that you can direct your energy into manifesting that future.  For example, I envision a thriving pagan community to raise my family in; one that has other families that worships together, that gets together to celebrate holidays and milestones.  Through the vision, I can see the steps I need to take to bring it to fruition. 

Courage: The ability to act appropriately in the face of danger.

Where wisdom comes from the brain, courage comes from the heart.  It’s born in those moments where your body wants to flee.  When your heart is pounding so loud it drowns out other sounds.  Coming as I do from a Northern hearth culture, I hear so often about the warrior mentality.  I don’t deny that it takes courage to risk your life in battle, but I don’t think warriors have a monopoly on courage.

Part of that is because warriors (in whatever branch of the military) are trained for that role.  They know what they’re supposed to do in most of the situations they face and most of them train until it’s reflex, because it they have to THINK about it, then they won’t do it.  Much like tornado drills in school, you learn what to do in a situation before the situation arrives so that when it does, you ACT.  Does it take courage to be a warrior? Yes.  I won’t dishonor those who serve and say it doesn’t.  It absolutely takes courage and commitment.  But there are other places you see it, too.

When I was a freshman in college, I was part of the organizing committee for our campus’s Take Back the Night march.  Seeing rape survivors stand on the steps of the college building and take the mic and share their story, even to an audience that was supportive, took courage.  For some, it was the first time they’d admitted what had happened to them.  That courage allowed them a chance to begin to heal. 

So while I agree with the definition given above for courage, I think I would change it.  I would add to it that it’s the ability to act in the face of whatever situation you are in rather than letting others make choices for you and accept the consequences of those actions, whatever they may be.

Integrity:  Honor; being trustworthy to oneself and to others, involving oath-keeping, honesty, fairness, respect, self-confidence.

To me, Integrity is about being ones word: not just keeping it, but being it.  So often people make excuses in their attempts to keep their word, but integrity has no room for excuses.  That’s not to say that one always does what they say they will do when they say they will do it.  Life happens.  That’s why I make a distinction between keeping your word and being your word.  There are times that Life keeps you from keeping your word.  But if you’re being your word, you own up to your lack of integrity and then go about doing what you have to do to set things right and restore our integrity.  Sometimes this is done through weregild, sometimes by simply going back and doing what we initially said we’d do, or negotiating a different outcome. 

One example of this is the disillusion of a marriage.  I was married in the Catholic church back in 1999.  When my ex-husband and I went our separate ways after 15 years, one of the things we did was mutually release each other from our marriage vows.  That way, we both acknowledged that the initial oath was changed and no longer binding on us, and we were free to renegotiate our relationship as friends.  It took maturity to face this change in our status without getting into the fights that are so common in a divorce, but I think part of that is because we were both very conscious of the need to keep our integrity intact and be true to ourselves.

Perseverance: Drive; the motivation to pursue goals even when that pursuit becomes difficult.

Perseverance is one of the virtues that I struggle with the most, probably because I have been lucky (or perhaps unlucky) enough to have most things in life come relatively easy for me.  It’s said that we appreciate the things we have to work for, and I think that’s probably true.  When things come too easily, we don’t have the investment in them that facing down a challenge gives us.  When we’ve poured our blood and sweat and tears and doubts into something that we didn’t think we would be able to achieve, the victory is that much sweeter. 

So for me, perseverance is staying on the course through obstacles and completing the task we set out to do.  That doesn’t mean that the path might wander, or we might end up someplace or with something we didn’t expect.  We don’t always know what the outcome is going to be, and the more complex the task, the more likely we’re flying blind into it, but having a goal and pushing towards that goal no matter how circumstances try to keep you from succeeding is true perseverance.

Hospitality:  Acting as both a gracious host and an appreciative guest, involving benevolence, friendliness, humor, and the honouring of "a gift for a gift."

When I think of hospitality, it makes me spend time thinking about the differences in society today from the time of our ancestors.  Part of what made hospitality a code of conduct was that the world was a different, wilder place.  Traveling was difficult.  Expecting help from a stranger could easily mean the difference between life and death.  As the guest, you were grateful to the one who took you in and gave you shelter, and you knew that some time you would be called on to pay it forward.  At the same time, in taking in a guest, you were giving up something that your family might need to survive the long cold season in the hopes that, should you need it, someone would do the same for you. 

Because of this, hospitality builds bonds of community.  This can be among a grove, by passing hosting duties around for events or study sessions, but it can also be between us and the Kindreds by the sharing of a gift with the hope that when we need something, it will be given in return. 

Moderation: Cultivating one's appetites so that one is neither a slave to them nor driven to ill health (mental or physical), through excess or deficiency.

Moderation calls for us to find balance in our lives, and in all aspects of our lives.  As someone who tends to enjoy the extremes of life and living on the edge, this is one of the lessons I most need. 

While most of the time, discussions of moderation seem to focus around alcohol or food and the unhealthy lifestyle that results in the overindulgence of those two substances, I think in the case of our spirituality we need to instead look at overconsumption in general.  As an Earth Based spiritual path, American Consumerism pushes us towards gluttony in all aspects of our lives and in ways that our PIE ancestors didn’t experience.  Moderation calls for us to question our actions in all aspects of our life if we really need that or is it an indulgence.  That’s not to say that it’s wrong to indulge.  It’s not.  It’s part of what makes life enjoyable.  But if we always indulge, if the indulgence is no longer a treat, then we can’t be said to be living in moderation.  There is a lot of talk in the environmental movement about things like carbon footprints and the waste we leave behind.  Those who practice moderation in their lives would, theoretically, tax the resources of the planet less whether that’s in producing less trash, eating food that is less resource intensive to grow, or just eating less period the way moderation is usually talked about.

Fertility: Bounty of mind, body and spirit, involving creativity, production of objects, food, works of art, etc., an appreciation of the physical, sensual, nurturing.

Fertility is the (perhaps imperfect) word we use in ADF to discuss the force of creativity that comes to us from the divine.  Whether that’s bearing children in the more traditional/scientific sense of the word, or whether it’s creating art, fertility is often a painful process that requires we grow and give something of ourselves to the world around us.  Where moderation was striving for balance, fertility is embracing the energy of the world around us to inspire us to new heights.  Moderation allows us the resources to become truly fertile whether in health from getting the right amount of sleep and food and water, or in resources so that we have enough abundance to have the time and materials to create.

That said, I don’t much care for the use of the word fertility for this virtue.  As a woman who has suffered multiple miscarriages and been labeled ‘infertile’ it makes it hard to embrace the term in the way ADF means.  And while I do understand the importance of producing the next generation to our ancestors, and I am going through the process of adopting a family myself, I still think that some variation of ‘Creativity’ would be better than fertility.  We could still talk about the joy and pain of laboring to bring forth the ideas and works that bring value and meaning to our lives.