I’m always amazed by how willing people are to share with me what they think would make the world a better place, whether as an extemporaneous reaction to current events or as a half-baked system of thought applied duplicitously – meanwhile, the cognitive dissonance of their personal world is more than self-evidently out of control. Jordan Peterson addresses this in his book “12 Rules for Life” when describing the person who has trouble keeping their own room clean and organized, attempting to tell the rest of us how the world should be cleaned up and organized. Such a person not only lacks credibility . . . astonishingly, they assume their credibility shouldn’t have anything to do with how they live their lives.
But even beyond the conspicuous virtue signaling of cultural posturing – the politically motivated will very often presume themselves to be the definitive arbiters of what a better world should look like, and how the greater good can be achieved. To which the early 19th-century English poet, William Blake would say “He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars, for the general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.” Which I take to mean that when good is ambiguously defined and broadly applied it becomes nothing more than a rhetorical device, attempting to claim the moral high ground.
But I’m also drawn to the idea of what it might look like to do good in the minute particulars . . . and not in grandiose gestures, or as a politically correct talking point – but rather, in the small details of every human interaction. Could it be that doing good can ironically become a self-serving distraction from what it might actually mean to be good? In a world where moral posturing and existential pronouncements have become the cultural avatars of what constitutes good – where being good becomes nothing more than a social affectation . . . devoid of any real virtue.
This clearly is a performative understanding of being good – believing that doing what is socially expected of you will make you a good person. No doubt, this is how most people think being good works. But such an approach invariably makes cultivating virtue an unnecessary step, as it places all the emphasis on external perception over internal transformation. This is the basic distinction between Jesus and the Pharisees – the Pharisees concerned themselves with the appearance of righteousness, and Jesus placed more value on genuinely being righteous. And if you read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) with this in mind, you’ll quickly discover that the economy of righteousness that Jesus is talking about is far more transformative than performative . . . because a genuine change of heart is what makes our actions genuinely good.
Within the Arthurian legend, the metaphor of seeking the Holy Grail wasn’t really so much an external quest, as much as it was an internal purification. The question of the Grail is: who do you serve by seeking it? Do you serve your own ego and ambition, tribal validation, or political advantage? Or do you serve the one who held the cup, declaring “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” ~ Matthew 26:28. It is the confession of my Christian faith to believe that the body and blood of Christ are transformative – allowing us to seek first God’s Kingdom and His righteousness. But I also believe this is best expressed in “doing little things with great love” ~ St. Teresa of Lisieux
This is how God loves us . . . and how we are to love others
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