Virtue of the Week: Fortitude

Fortitude: the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life. The virtue of fortitude enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions.  (CCC 1808)

We seem to have made quite a jump this week! Two weeks ago, we learned about temperance, and we learned that this virtue requires us to take an inward look and examine our own lives so that we may mortify those attachments or sins that prevent us from giving ourselves totally to God and to others. I encourage you, then, not to fall into the thinking that temperance is easy because it only requires us to worry only about ourselves. We practice temperance, ultimately, not primarily for ourselves, but for the other.

How, then, do we make the connection between temperance and fortitude? If the possession of every virtue is necessary for the practice of another, I think we can safely say that we need temperance to practice fortitude. The practice of temperance should ultimately endow us with a clear vision in which we see all things the way God sees them, even ourselves. When we see things in the light of truth and goodness, then, we should desire nothing else but to remain firm in the greatest difficulties and temptations. We should desire to practice fortitude.

How can we fail in fortitude? Or maybe a better way to ask the question is what is the negative spiritual quality that reveals to us our need to practice fortitude? I think we can fail in being spiritually lukewarm. When be become lukewarm, we indicate by our actions that we care very little for something. In our lukewarmness we are satisfied with doing the least possible. We do not dare, risk, surrender, persevere, or endeavor. This is not only because we do not care, but because we hold ourselves as the most important. We do not wish to inconvenience ourselves for God or for others because we fear rejection, injury, humiliation, or mortification.

Knowing this, we can examine the attitudes we may have towards many things in our lives. We should look at our time spent in prayer, our relationships, our study habits, even our hobbies. Are there aspects of our lives in which we do not give all we can? Are there areas in which we give more than we should because it is easy? While I do not think that the amount of time we spend in an activity is always an indicator of how much we care, I think that it can tell us at least when we care too little. If we do everything with love, then our gift will always be a total gift, and our time will never be wasted. We will not consider the cost of our effort because we will think of nothing else but the value of the other or the importance of what we do.

God bless you, ladies!
Marta