Sharing My Life (5/1/07): Virtues and Vices

For some reason I have found myself thinking a lot about vices and virtues this month. Traditionally there are 7 virtues (Humility, Generosity, Chastity, Meekness, Temperance, Love, and Fortitude) and 7 vices (Pride, Greed, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth) and each pair can be compared. Pride is self-confidence taken to the extreme and Humility is confidence in new selves as reveled through Christ. Greed is our love of money run amok, while generosity is seeing money for what it really is, a means to an end and nothing more. Lust is our natural sexual desire taken to the extreme and Chastity is containing that same sexual desire within healthy boundaries until it can be fully expressed healthily in context of marriage. Anger is really our desire to control life lashing out uncontrolled, while Meekness is realizing that God is really the One in control after all and acting as such. Gluttony letting our desire to consume control our lives and bodies, and Temperance is learning to control that desire and others. Envy desires what others have while Love sees them for whom they really are. Sloth is doing nothing believing it all to futile anyway and Fortitude is seeing what needs to be done and doing it, knowing that God will help us do what we cannot. Each vice can be seen as a perversion of the good things God created in each of us, while each virtue is learning to express that good thing in healthy ways. In that light, one can almost see evil as merely the perversion of good, yet that might make one discount evil. While I do believe that evil is good perverted, that perverted good is still very potent. A jagged blade can still cut through flesh and bone and a poison can still weaken a person even when neutralized. In our daily lives, I think, we take strides each day either in the way of virtue or the way of vice. The question is do we let our desires control us through vice or gain control over them through virtue and Christ at work in us.