You may recall that we’re considering the virtue of Temperance this week.  On Monday, we heard the story of the Fox who ate too much chicken and couldn’t squeeze back out of the henhouse. 

But, it would be a mistake for us to conclude from the story that eating chicken is simply bad and that all foxes must give it up.  C.S. Lewis makes clear that that’s not the lesson:

“One of the marks of a certain type of bad man,” he says, “is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.”

Aristotle’s definition of temperance is “a mean with regard to pleasures.”  That means the middle point—enjoying good things, just not too much.  Now, this doesn’t mean there aren’t any bad things to avoid—if you derive pleasure from hurting others, or cheating, or stealing, then those are vices and bad in themselves.  There’s no stealing just the right amount of stuff.

But Brother Reynard the Fox might need to give up chicken, not because it is a bad thing in itself, but because he just can’t help himself when it comes to chicken.  Yours might be playing sports, or reading, or painting, or talking with friends, or just chilling out doing nothing.  One of mine is eating sweets.  Temperance is one of the virtues that, in practice, may look very different for different people, and requires us to start by looking at ourselves.

And so, if we would be temperate, we must first recognize what good things we tend to enjoy a little too much.  We must begin by asking ourselves, “What’s my chicken?”

Have a wonderful day.