Just This: Prompts and Practices for Contemplation

by Richard Rohr

We are all temporarily inflated inside of any wonderful anything and become impatient, and even harsh, when anything gets in our path. Think of people on overstimulating vacations or the bored, irritated looks of people in line for food, entertainment, or an airplane flight. The search for “full fun” is its own form of dualistic entrapment. Such “pleasure cruises” can be even more dangerous than funks, precisely because we are not prepared to spot them as problematic. They are not, of course, bad or sinful in and of themselves, just dangerous in the way they create the need for “more of a good thing,” which is how we get subtly fooled and set out on a wrong track. I guess that is why fortitude, temperance, prudence, and patience were called the four “cardinal virtues.” Cardo, the root of cardinal, means hinge in Latin, and even faith, hope, and love are not effective or healing unless they are hinged onto fortitude, temperance, prudence, and patience. Again, the ancients were wiser than modern psychology might have assumed.