Virtue and Goodness

Devotional Classics, Blaise Pascal, Excerpt from Pensees

"To make us happy [true religion] must show us that a God exists whom we are bound to love, that our only true bliss is to be in him, and our sole ill to be cut off from him." (p.172)

I said to the LORD, "You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing." (Ps. 16:2)

I am delighted by this one thought: the gifts that God gives are so I can recognize and come to enjoy his goodness. What if God gave me good things, but was not really that good in himself? I would think he was bribing or tricking me. So his gifts are not good unless he himself is good.

Not only that, but that when I come to understand something true, it also brings me to love, admire, and worship God all the more. If the statement "The truth hurts" were always true, then I would not come to love the one who is the foundation of all truth and reality very much. The truth hurts only inasmuch as I come to find that reality and truth are what I run into when I am wrong. "True religion" brings me to a God I am "bound to love."

I can now seek him beyond and through the gifts he gives, taking them as pictures of his goodness. Without his goodness beyond the gifts, they could just as easily be bribes or distractions. When they bring me into a real relationship with him, they add to the bliss of knowing him by becoming signs and images of his great love for me and his great ambition to make me like Jesus.

A few months ago I gave Dawn a little statue of a couple dancing together after I had gone off to a spiritual retreat. I intended that the gift remind us both of the centrality of our relationship to my spiritual formation and work with God. I hoped that the gift would be a reminder of my love for her and my aspiration to be together in our life work for God.

When the goodness of God does not underlie the gifts I receive, I am always drawn to finding more gifts. They feed and exacerbate a hunger I have for true love and true goodness while not filling it. They can even blind me to God himself because of the intensity of my hunger. Somehow, my blind hunger for God becomes the very thing that keeps me from him when I try to live on mere desire. It is only when the consumption of mere gifts from God brings me to hopelessness that I can look beyond them and see that my "sole ill [is] to be cut off from him."

The continual embracing of God's goodness beyond his gifts begins with thankfulness. It moves on to worship. With worship comes virtue. Virtue is the imitation of the goodness of God admired in worship and embraced with thankfulness. If I do not walk with virtue, can I say that I have truly seen the goodness of God?

Lord, grant me a continuing vision of your goodness as I walk and live in this world. Let each breath, each sight, each word, each sound be the overtures to your goodness. As I become more aware of the goodness that lies beyond each thing, let me become good as you are. I know my gifts will reflect what is in me. Let it be virtue, my imitation of your goodness in the life you've given me to live. Amen.