The day I turned 50, I submitted my resignation letter to my department head and dean at the university where I'd been working and teaching for the past twenty years. The decision to quit was not made lightly — in fact, I'd been losing sleep over it for months, and during the countdown to my birthday, I felt completely torn in two. Only a last-minute, middle-of-the-night surrender to God in prayer made it possible for me to decide. Then I suffered months of self-doubt about the path I'd finally chosen.
Though my decision turned out to be the right one, the painful process that led up to it made me wonder: was there a better way to come to peace in situations like this? Was there a virtue, perhaps, that allowed one to "see," and thus decide, more wisely?
There was indeed, and its name was prudence. This was a surprise — I always thought prudence had to do with being cautious or self-protective. I associated the term with a narrow, insular way of perceiving the world.
Yet prudence is not only one of the four cardinal Christian virtues (the others are temperance, justice, and fortitude), but it is key to the others being virtues at all. Prudence in its original sense describes a kind of spiritual vision, the capacity to see and comprehend the nature of reality. This clarity of vision allows prudent people to discern the truth of a situation and to recognize what particular action they must take that will lead to the good. Then it enables them to follow through.
People can act bravely, justly, or well without prudence, but practicing the virtue of prudence means all our actions are rooted in this clear vision of reality. Otherwise, our motives are unclear: maybe, for example, we are simply pretending to be brave or secretly showing off our intelligence or even doing the right thing through lucky accident. On the other hand, if we try to establish a basis for our decisions by operating solely from principle, we also act imprudently, for no rule can possibly cover all the complexities of human relationships.
I liked this notion of prudence, but I could see two big impediments to it in our contemporary world. Not only do we have trouble believing that it is even possible to see the true nature of reality, but we also can no longer agree on what it is we are looking at.
First, thanks to Freud, we tend to think of our mental selves as divided into two realms: the thin, sunny strip of light we call the conscious mind and the immense, murky, impenetrable abyss of the unconscious that lies below it, bubbling away and occasionally tossing up chunks of pure chaos. How can we trust our vision when dark, unconscious forces are so insidiously at work in us?
Second, much contemporary thinking says it is impossible to see objectively no matter how we try. We are too shaped, we are told, by culture and environment, gender and gene pool to be able to envision things outside our own boxes. Thus, we have become skittish about passing universal judgments about anything, including what constitutes beauty, goodness or truth.
I realized that for prudence to become a modern virtue, we need first of all to resurrect the Christian cosmos in all its glory — that vision of an extravagantly beautiful creation resting in the hands of its loving and deeply involved Creator. Then we have to trust that God would not have invited us into His divine life unless He gave us the ability to see where we were going.
Finally, we must reclaim the ancient concept of who we are as human beings — people created in the image of God and thus people who have far more in common, no matter what our gender or cultural background, than we are currently led to believe.
Yet even with this view of the Christian cosmos in place, there is no fast track to wisdom. We come to have prudence through our willingness to attend, to listen, to pray, to deliberate, to ponder, to wait, to pass judgment, and then to act — regardless of how much pain a particular decision may cost us. Trying to live at this level of awareness can feel exhausting at times, especially in a society that so values spontaneity and impulsiveness. But such willingness to suffer for truth's sake is an aspect of love.
The good news is that when we sincerely try to do this, when we pray constantly for prudence in our dealings with one another, then grace upon grace is poured out upon us. Or as Christ assures us, "If you hold to My teaching, you are really My disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free" (Jn 8:31-32).
(Excerpted from By Way of Grace by permission of Loyola Press, 2007.)
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