Stewardship

JG Friend Bobdaduck had something wise to say about virtues.

there’s a virtue we have a sense of in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints because we reference it often, but we don’t have a concise word for it, so I’m not sure we realize we reference it so often, but I think its fair to say Latter-Day Saints have a more attuned conscience about this, which is the virtue of stewardship, or lineage, or of “magnifying your calling”, or of “multiplying your talents”

He went on to talk about that virtue of which environmentalism is a cheap, political shadow. The virtue that applies to every rich inheritance—culture, the land, heritage, your grandfather’s stories, art, heirlooms, the faith of your fathers, all of it—where we respect and preserve this rich inheritance and by so doing make ourselves part of it also. So that by preserving it it becomes our gift to posterity also, just as it once was a gift to us.

My thoughts went in a different direction. I believe ‘magnifying your calling’ and the other other bits about preserving and passing on heritage are a virtue synthesis. In other words, they are the combination of two “opposing” virtues into one whole. In this case, there is the virtue of obedience and the virtue of agency and independence. Magnifying your calling combines those. You humble accept the role that you are given and then you make it greater. You explore its limits and put your own indelible stamp on it. Making it your own by obeying the spirit of the calling utterly.

There is a larger virtue “opposition” here. Communitarianism and individualism. Tradition and innovation. Magnifying your calling is one important way of embracing these two poles at once.

AGENCY ———————— WILLFULLNESS

MAGNIFY YOUR ROLE

PASSIVE ————————OBEDIENT

The opposite of this synthesis is the vice synthesis of passive willfullness where you refuse to be satisfied by anything and throw a tantrum but don’t actually work to accomplish your wishes or even to clarify them in your own mind.