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July 12 - August 4, 2020
that little voice inside him that tells him he is inferior and must, therefore, prove himself to himself.
When she spoke it was only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient retort he had first formed the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things while she talked.”36
Ethan’s love, both for his wife and for Mattie, falls short. If he had loved and not merely lusted for Mattie, and if he had sought for her good, he would have wanted what was good and right for her—the chance for a lawful husband, not an illicit lover.
Love seeks the good of the other. Lust does not.
While chastity is formed in and sustained in community, lust “thrives in privacy and alienation, and lustful people often feel alone.”
Frederick Buechner explains that “the hunger to know someone sexually is the hunger to know and be known by that person humanly.”
It is probably not coincidental that the technology that makes pornography omnipresent is the very technology that is isolating human beings from one another more and more and generating greater loneliness.46 Ethan’s lusts are rooted in his loneliness.
Marriage is not only about mutual companionship and romantic love, but it is the institution “out of
which cultures and societies are formed.”
Unlike abstention, an act of an individual, chastity is a form of community, and chastity depends on community.
The ancient monastics took their vows of chastity within a community. Whether or not we realize it, we do as well.
The secret ingredient to most success is diligence.
The word diligence comes from a Latin word that once meant “to single out, value highly, esteem, prize, love.” From this meaning, diligence later came to mean “attentiveness” or “carefulness.”
Sloth involves not only a lack of effort but also a lack of care.
Aquinas considered sloth to be “an oppressive sorrow,” which “so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing.”
This is why Aquinas defined sloth as “sorrow for spiritual good.”3
It is a mortal sin in “robbing us of our appetite for God, our zest for God, our interest and enjoyment in God. Sloth stops us from seeking God, and that means we do not find him.”4 Paradoxically, then, the busiest people can be the most slothful.
Being busy is easier than being good.
Human excellence varies from person to person, whereas rules do not.
Although applied to a goal, diligence itself isn’t measured by outcome.
The relative luxury of twenty-first-century American life compared to most of human history has made us soft.
“All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out; but the Prince whom I serve and honor is merciful, and ready to forgive.”8
am blessed in lacking any natural talents that would allow me to excel at anything without painstaking effort and practice.
Allegory doesn’t just contain symbols, as many literary works do, but it is wholly symbolic.
But an allegory, like all stories, shows rather than tells.
Like the parables told by Christ, allegorical stories didn’t have to be true; they pointed to truth just as Christian’s companion Hopeful
points the wavering pilgrim to the truths of Scripture as they both cross the River of Death before finally entering the Celestial City.
In other words, allegory requires and assumes the exercise of diligence by readers.
The Puritan (or Protestant) work ethic is the indirect offspring of a doctrinal emphasis on the role of the individual in his or her own salvation, sanctification, and Scripture reading.
The most significant sense of progress in Pilgrim’s Progress is its overarching theological theme: sanctification.
Anyone can raise a hand, repeat a prayer, and go forward to the altar, but only a truly regenerated heart will bear the fruit of sanctification and persevere until the end.
Such diligence requires care and attention, which, in turn, depend on the cultivation of godly desire. Pilgrim’s Progress is an invitation to the reader to practice diligence in both the reading and the application.
The essence of patience is the willingness to endure suffering.
N. T. Wright points out, we “applaud patience but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.”2
But while suffering is inevitable, we can choose how we bear it.
Evil and suffering should result in a righteous anger.
Patience is a virtue, not in overlooking wrong, but in refusing to do wrong in overcoming wrong.
Patience is not inaction. As the Bible says in James 5:11, patience is not passivity but perseverance.
Anne is not the doormat Griselda who passively accepts the wickedest of wrongs. Nor does Anne succumb to the vice of wrath in spite of recognizing the suffering she and others around her experience as the direct consequence of evil or foolish decisions.
She has come to recognize that time is required “to be wise and reasonable”13 and is wise enough to recognize when she is not.
Patience is a virtue only if the cause for which that person suffers is good.
We cannot—in the name of patience—ask someone to endure abuse, since the cause of such suffering is evil, not noble.
Anne questions whether firmness of character is always ideal, arguing that “a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute one.”20
Austen’s novels show that the antidote to counterfeit virtue is self-knowledge. Constancy depends on self-knowledge, “a recognition of a particular kind of threat to the integrity of the personality in the peculiarly modern world.”
“The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride. Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit, for anger resides in the lap of fools” (Eccles. 7:8–9).
“Those who believe in God and the creator and in the eventual triumph of his good purposes for the world will not be in a hurry to grasp at quick-fix solutions in their own life or in their vocation and mission—though they will not be slow to take God-given opportunities when those arise.”
“I know, however, only my own thoughts and am intimately aware of only my own needs, which naturally incline me to put myself first. The result is frustration that I’m not first, and this strongly tempts me to be impatient.”
decentering of self that is necessary to achieving the habit of patience.
Her irony resides in the way that she makes her characters and her readers see and say more and other than they intended to, so that they and we will correct ourselves.”
T. Wright says that patience is required in order to attain the other virtues.33 “Patience is one of the places where faith, hope, and love meet up,” he writes.
