There are not many people looking today for how to be prudent. Prudence is distinctly ugly sounding and of all the virtues the least likely to inspire a child’s name.
Prudence has gone the way of privacy, reticence, and chastity.
In Anthony Trollope’s masterful concluding work of his parliamentary series of novels, The Duke’s Children, he presents the reader with a great and prudent man who is also a private man. This great political leader can hardly stand any private matter, even the most trivial, to become subject for public gossip.
You cannot help but long for a time when such privacy was possible for the great and taken for granted by the many.
All the news is fit to print. Any subject is acceptable for conversation since there is no longer such a thing as polite company. Perhaps there are still mannerly restrictions in front of the man or woman whose confidences are being betrayed, but since most conversations are now on-line this matters little.
There is no going back to privacy as a broader culture, but such a a time guarantees the rise in popular appeal of the close-mouthed man. In an era with too many reticences and too few confessions, the open-hearted person became the subject of novels and of wide admiration. In an age when secrets were too easily kept, we feared knowing too little.
Perhaps a future candidate for President will be more like Coolidge as a result, than like Clinton.
But God have mercy on us all, we are more likely now to fear knowing too much.
The man who can keep a secret and refuse to turn every personal event into a blog post and the woman who will not write all she knows on an easily forwarded email are going to be precious indeed to friends and to society. The man who is no Lancelot, so interesting until commonplace, will be as nothing next to his son, the Galahad. The Galahad has nothing to fear and nothing to hide due to the mystery of his chastity and charity.
Privacy, quietness of mind, will only be possible where a man is chaste, charitable, and humble. A chaste man has learned humility through countless failures. He knows that the libertine, especially the pathetic new media rake who declines by himself using a public medium, has no privacy. There is no secret to being base. Falling down is easy to do. . . and in an age without secrets we now know that all sin is alike.
There is an absolute equality to overindulgence, but therefore no privacy.
This is why there has never been a greater need for the old virtues, recognized by pagan philosophers and Christian saints, of moderation, chastity, and charity. Moderation will not speak when others will speak and so leave a mystery. Chastity allows for the mystery of what could be and charity is always a mystery.
The true lover need never explain, because nobody in love is foolish enough to believe the public could possibly understand the glories of his beloved.
Is there hope for us to have privacy when many of us have erred? We are all children of the age when it is almost shameful to have no great testimony of failure. My own life is best summed up by the prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”
However, as a sinner pleads for and receives mercy, he also develops that intimacy with God that cannot be shared with anyone. He slowly learns moderation, stillness of spirit, and a little (so little!) chastity of spirit. This is a private thing, full of possibilities, mysterious, and holy. It fears nothing, because it comes from perfect love.
The privacy that a figure in Trollope could demand is no longer possible in public matters, but a man’s soul can still be freed. It is most free when it loves . . . which is intimate and unspeakable. It is most free when chaste . . . because the gossip is too base to be interested in chastity. He will always make much more of Lancelot and ignore Galahad, but it is to Galahad that will be given the most private of visions of the Beloved.
Thank God that mercy is available for u all to begin again. We can find privacy in a public place when we forget our dignity and who is watching and pray with the publican: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”