The power of virtue - Patrick Kelly

Patrick is a student at Xavier College. This is a reflection he gave for the MacKillop House Mass, June 2011.

‘Virtue conquers all’. All of you here should be able to instantly recognise the motto for our house. But I wonder how many of you have actually considered it, thought about what it means. Have you considered what a ‘virtue’ is? Have you pondered how much is ‘all’? What about the strange concept of how something as abstract as a virtue can conquer anything let alone everything?

When I first began thinking about the motto, I wondered if I should look virtue up in the dictionary and then be able to wrap up this reflection in a short quote from our friends at Oxford. But then I looked deeper and realised that a virtue is impossible to define in a sentence or even in a reflection at a house Mass. A virtue is something that encourages us to do the right thing, to stand by a mate, to think about others, to not throw an elbow when the umpire isn’t looking. But even this is not all a virtue is. Virtue is that indefinable something that you see lingering around good people like a cloud of perfume. They stand out from the crowd not because of how they look but how they act. A virtue is action. Without action the virtue is in itself meaningless and withers away.

One of the things a virtue can do is ‘conquer’—triumph over adversity, overcome ‘all’. When you are faced with an upcoming test, virtue can help you by encouraging you to study that little bit more rather than waste your time trying to get a bigger kill streak on COD. On Saturdays it can help you try that little bit harder in kicking the extra goal that changes the outcome of the game. Virtue can also aid you in the quad at lunch or down the street after school or even when you’re at a party with your mates getting armadilloed. Virtue can help you break up a fight, prevent a friend from doing something stupid or even just make them smile. Virtues can be as clear as a Collingwood supporter’s mouth is of teeth or it can be as subtle as sunlight on a winter morning.

St Ignatius in his Prayer for Generosity gives more examples of virtue. ‘To give and not to count the cost’ is not a comment on how we should run a business; it is telling us how we should lead our life. St Ignatius is asking us to find compassion within ourselves to do things for others when it has no benefit for us. ‘To fight and not to heed to the wounds’ is not so much a call to recklessly engage in combat but a reminder that sometimes doing the right thing can be difficult and that even if it is a challenge we should continue doing it. ‘To toil and not to seek for rest’ may seem like an excuse to stay up late but really it’s a request to always be ready to do what is right. ‘To labour and not to ask for reward’ is about performing acts of kindness for their own sake not because we get Ignatian Service Hours or something else in return.

Now I’d be the first to say that I am not always the most virtuous person. I can be selfish at times, and when I don’t think I can be downright thoughtless. But I do try to act with virtue. When my mum has had a busy day running around after my sister, my brothers and myself, I try to help her a bit. I stack the dishwasher; I might get my younger brothers to do their homework or just make sure mine isn’t all left to the last minute.

Now, this isn’t the high and mighty sort of virtue that you hear about all the time. This is the sort of virtue that actually makes a difference in people’s lives. When I see my mum able to put her feet up at the end of the day I know that she is able to rest that little bit extra because of what I have done. This may not seem like much, but to my mum it means a lot. And that is what a virtue is. It is something that to one person means a lot—not the person acting with virtue but the person to whom it is directed. Improving the day of one person by just a bit can make all the difference in life.

In the gospels, Jesus asks those before him to perform what seemed like the impossible—to love their neighbour as they loved themselves. This would have been a direct challenge to everything they knew about virtue. At the time it was considered a virtue to walk past the Samaritan on the road because he was a filthy foreigner. If you got too friendly with a tax collector or too near a lady of negotiable affection you were ‘unclean’. Yet here was Jesus telling them to play nice. To shake hands and be friends. The true strength of these words is lost to many nowadays. It is the equivalent of asking an American super-patriot to befriend a member of the Taliban. It wasn’t the done thing.

Jesus, however, knew the power of virtue and how, given time, it can conquer anything. We today are being asked to do the same thing. We are being called to use the power of virtue to love God and each other. If St Mary MacKillop could use it to revolutionise the education of the poor in Australia and get sainted even though she had been officially kicked out of the church, then we too can use a little bit a virtue and overcome the challenges we face.