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The Virtue of Stability (Stabilitas) a Part of Fortitude - VirTrue Episode 46

VirTrue - Helping Man Grow in Truth and Virtue

We live in a culture that makes leaving remarkably easy. Don’t like your job? Find another one. Don’t like your town? Move. Don’t like your parish? Find one that suits you better. Don’t like the community around you? Build a new one online. Don’t like the person you’ve become? Reinvent yourself. Sometimes leaving is exactly what we should do. Sometimes God Himself tells us to go. But there’s a danger in becoming so accustomed to movement that we never remain anywhere long enough to put down roots. A tree that is continually transplanted never grows very tall. Our families need roots. Our communities need roots. Our parishes need roots. Our spiritual lives need roots. And yet Christianity isn’t a religion of staying safely where we are. God told Abraham to leave his country and his father’s house. He led Israel through the wilderness by a cloud. He called fishermen away from their nets. And centuries later, He called a former slave named Patrick to leave the safety of his home and return to the island where he had been imprisoned. The question isn’t simply whether we stay or whether we go. The question is: What is moving us? Are we being moved by reason and the call of God? Or are we being tossed around by every dissatisfaction, desire, fear, opportunity, and interior movement that passes through our hearts? And that’s why Stability matters. 🎙️ Intro Welcome back to VirTrue, the podcast where we explore the virtues that make us more fully human and more perfectly conformed to Christ. We are continuing our season on Fortitude. Last time, we began with Rest — Requies: learning to cease from activity when reason tells us that it is time to rest. Now we take the next step. Because once we have learned to stop, we have to learn how to stay. Today we’re talking about the virtue of Stability — Stabilitas. The Social Catholic is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new episodes and support our work, become a paid subscriber today! 🌳 Virtue Description: Stability What it is Stability is the virtue that roots us firmly in the good, so that we are not moved without sufficient reason, yet remain ready to move when reason and the will of God require it. Stability is not immobility. It is rightly ordered rootedness. St. Thomas Aquinas gives us an important principle when discussing Fortitude: “It is requisite for every virtue to act firmly and immovably.” — Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 123, a. 2 Virtue has a kind of firmness to it. If I choose the good only for as long as I feel enthusiastic about it, the good has not yet become firmly established in me. If every inconvenience causes me to reconsider my commitments, I am not rooted. Scripture gives us a beautiful image of this in Psalm 1. The righteous man is: “like a tree planted near streams of water, that yields its fruit in season.” — Psalm 1:3 Notice that the tree bears fruit because it is planted. Roots take time. We cannot continually pull a tree out of the ground, carry it somewhere else, replant it, pull it up again, and expect it to flourish. The same is true of human beings. We put down roots in families. We put down roots in parishes. We put down roots in neighborhoods and communities. We inherit cultures and traditions. We develop friendships. We establish patterns of prayer. We accept responsibilities. And by remaining, those things begin to form us. St. Paul uses precisely this imagery when he tells the Colossians to remain: “rooted in him and built upon him and established in the faith.” — Colossians 2:7 But Scripture also gives us the opposite image. St. James describes the person who lacks this firmness as: “a wave of the sea, driven and tossed about by the wind.” — James 1:6 And only two verses later he describes such a person as: “unstable in all his ways.” — James 1:8 That’s the contrast. The stable person is like a tree. The unstable person is like a wave. The tree can move. Its branches bend. It grows. It changes with the seasons. But it has roots. The wave goes wherever the forces acting upon it happen to send it. Stability does not mean never moving This distinction is essential. Sometimes God uproots us. One of the clearest examples is Abraham. God tells him: “Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.” — Genesis 12:1 Land. Extended family. Father’s house. These are precisely the things that ordinarily give a person roots. And God tells Abraham to leave them. Abraham’s stability is not demonstrated by refusing to leave. It is demonstrated by being sufficiently rooted in God that when God calls him somewhere else, Abraham goes. We see an even more complete image in Israel’s journey through the wilderness. In Numbers 9, the cloud of God’s presence rests over the tabernacle. When the cloud remains, Israel remains. Sometimes it remains for a day. Sometimes for a month. Sometimes longer. Israel waits. But when the cloud rises, the Israelites break camp and move. They don’t get to say: “We’re bored here. Let’s see what’s over the next hill.” But neither can they say: “We’ve finally gotten comfortable. We’re staying.” When God remains, they remain. When God moves them, they move. That is Stability. And it raises an enormously important question for the spiritual life: How do I know what is moving me? Scripture does not tell us to trust every interior impulse. St. John explicitly warns us: “Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God.” — 1 John 4:1 Not every interior movement of the heart is God’s prompting. Restlessness is not necessarily discernment. Dissatisfaction is not necessarily vocation. Excitement is not necessarily inspiration. Fear is not necessarily a warning from God. Sometimes God really does say: Go. But until we have sufficient reason to believe that God is calling us somewhere else, Stability teaches us to remain faithful to the good already entrusted to us. Stability does not mean refusing to move. It means refusing to be moved by anything less than what ought to move us. ⚠️ Vice of Deficiency: Inconstancy — Inconstantia What it is Inconstancy is the failure to remain rooted in a good commitment because we allow lesser desires, fears, frustrations, attractions, or interior movements to uproot us. The inconstant person is always moving. Sometimes physically. Sometimes spiritually. Sometimes intellectually. Sometimes relationally. There is always another possibility. Another parish. Another community. Another job. Another spirituality. Another plan. Another version of ourselves. The problem is not that any particular change is necessarily wrong. The problem is that we never remain anywhere long enough to become rooted. We begin to interpret every discomfort as evidence that something must change. Our parish disappoints us, so we leave. Our community becomes difficult, so we withdraw. Family obligations become inconvenient, so we distance ourselves. Prayer becomes dry, so we search for another devotion. A commitment loses its novelty, so we begin looking for the next thing. And because Christians know that God sometimes calls people to change direction, we can even spiritualize our Inconstancy. “I just feel called somewhere else.” Perhaps we are. But perhaps we’re simply restless. This is why Scripture tells us to test the spirits. The stable person doesn’t refuse to listen to interior movements. He judges them. He asks whether this movement deserves to move him. Inconstancy skips that judgment. Like the wave St. James describes, it allows whatever wind is presently blowing to determine its direction. And eventually the inconstant person discovers something tragic: A life spent continually searching for better soil never develops roots deep enough to bear fruit. ⚠️ Vice of Excess: Stagnation — Stagnatio What it is Stagnation is an excessive attachment to our present place, habits, identity, or way of life that causes us to resist legitimate growth or movement when reason and God call us onward. Stability is not stubborn immobility. Roots exist for growth. A tree that is rooted but no longer growing is not flourishing. The stagnant person can take something genuinely good—home, tradition, routine, community, even a particular understanding of his relationship with God—and make remaining there absolute. “This is where I belong.” “This is how I’ve always done it.” “This is just who I am.” “This is how I pray.” “God has never asked this of me before.” Stability says: I will not abandon the good simply because something else attracts me. Stagnation says: I will not leave even if I ought to. That’s why Abraham matters. If Abraham had confused Stability with never leaving home, he would have disobeyed God. That’s why Israel had to watch the cloud. Remaining yesterday did not prove that remaining today was God’s will. And that’s why Stability ultimately requires attentiveness to God. Sometimes holiness means putting down deeper roots. Sometimes holiness means allowing God to pull those roots out of the ground and plant us somewhere we never expected to be. 👤 My Life * I was recently on a podcast with Kolbe Studios discussing this topic. * Moving can prevent us from putting down roots. * People can abandon their parishes rather than becoming rooted in them. * Moving can separate us from extended family and the relationships and obligations that give us roots. * We can also abandon the cultures and communities that provide us with a sense of rootedness. * At the same time, God often calls us out of our comfort zone. * St. Patrick is an example that has been on my mind: God called him to return to the island where he had once been imprisoned. * God does not always call us to remain in our current location. * He also does not always call us to remain in our current understanding of ourselves or our relationship with Him. * We need to be ready to move when God is calling us toward stability somewhere other than our current path. * But we also need to avoid abandoning the path we’re already on because we presume every interior movement of the heart is God’s prompting. * Captain America: * “Compromise where you can. Where you can’t, don’t. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move, it is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye, and say, ‘No, you move’.” 🌎 The World Modern life makes Inconstancy extraordinarily easy. For most of human history, place was something largely received. Your family was nearby. Your community knew you. Your parish was your parish. Your neighbors were your neighbors. Your local culture had customs, expectations, feast days, stories, obligations, and memories. Modern mobility has given us tremendous freedom, and much of that freedom is genuinely good. But freedom to leave can gradually become an inability to remain. We can select communities almost as if they were consumer products. If one doesn’t meet our expectations, another is available. That mentality can even enter parish life. We stop asking: How can I help this parish become holy? And begin asking: Which parish best satisfies what I want from a parish? The same thing can happen with family, friendships, work, neighborhoods, and spiritual communities. But Stability isn’t nostalgia for a world in which nobody ever left home. Christianity is missionary. The Apostles went to the ends of the earth. Missionaries crossed oceans. Families sometimes have serious reasons to relocate. God calls people into new vocations and new responsibilities. The problem isn’t mobility. The problem is becoming a person who is always available to the possibility of somewhere else but never fully present to the place where he actually is. Our culture gives us unprecedented ability to choose where we will live. Stability asks whether, having chosen, we are willing to belong. ☘️ Example Saint: St. Patrick Who he was St. Patrick was born in Roman Britain around the end of the fourth century. As a teenager, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders, carried across the sea, and sold into slavery in Ireland. For years he lived far from his family and homeland, tending animals in captivity. Eventually Patrick escaped. He returned home. After everything he had endured, we might expect his story with Ireland to be finished. It wasn’t. Patrick later describes an extraordinary experience in his Confessio. He saw a man named Victoricus coming from Ireland carrying letters. Patrick took one and read its heading: “The Voice of the Irish.” As he read, he perceived the people among whom he had once lived calling him to return and walk among them again. Patrick eventually did. The land of his captivity became the land of his mission. Why he fits Patrick shows us that Stability cannot simply mean staying where we are. He was uprooted against his will when he was enslaved. He rightly left when he escaped. He returned home. And then, when he discerned God’s call, he left home again. But this time Patrick wasn’t being carried away by someone else’s violence. And he wasn’t wandering because he couldn’t settle down. He was being sent. Then he gave himself to the mission he had received. Patrick therefore gives us both sides of Stability. He doesn’t remain merely because remaining is comfortable. And he doesn’t move merely because movement is exciting. His life forces us to ask the question at the heart of this virtue: What is moving me? Sometimes God says: Remain. Put down roots. Become faithful to what I have already given you. And sometimes God says: Go forth from your land. Patrick teaches us to become rooted deeply enough in God that we can do either. The Social Catholic is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new episodes and support our work, become a paid subscriber today! 🙏 Act of Stability O my God, I am sorry for the times I have been moved by restlessness instead of reason, and for the times I have refused to move when You were calling me forward. Give me the grace to put down roots in the good You have given me, to test the movements of my heart, and to follow You faithfully whether You ask me to remain or to go. I will remain when You ask me to remain, and I will move when You ask me to move. Amen. 🙏 Closing Prayer Lord, bless us with faith, hope, love, prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice that we may live as you intended man to live, in all virtue and righteousness. Help us to flee from sin, and avoid all temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Protect us with a spiritual hedge in front of us, behind us, above us, below us, to our right, and to our left, within us, and all around us, and seal it with the precious blood of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Help us to keep you in everything that we think, say, and do. Amen. Go out and fill the world with virtue. Deus Vult! Get full access to The Social Catholic at socialcatholic.substack.com/subscribe