Virtue by the numbers.

Advent again. A time when each and every Christian can be pregnant with a new life in the womb of the Spirit. But are inner quickenings going to result in a live birth? Will there emerge a new and transformed personality that can be recognized as characteristically and distinctly Christian?

All right, I admit that as a psychologist I'm obsessed with personal conversions, but this time I've been egged on by reading John Paul's Veritatis splendor. In chapter 1 the pope describes the Beatitudes as "attitudes and dispositions in life" that "are a sort of self-portrait of Christ." What an original idea, a spark of bright shining truth for sure.

Inspired by this, I quickly turned to the Beatitudes and read them in a new light. Yes--here is a portrait of a person hungering and thirsting for righteousness, mourning, peacemaking, being merciful, humble, pure of heart, meek, suffering persecution and false accusations; yet all the while receving comfort and joy in seeing God, being filled with righteousness, expecting to inherit the earth and the Kingdom. This is a winning personality (in all senses of the word) who refuses to dim or hide its light and who will not lose the savor of saltiness.

Heretofore, in my own reflections on Christian personhood, I had focused on the harvest of the Spirit as enumerated by Saint Paul. I keep a calligraphy copy of Galatians 5:22-23 pinned over my desk, next to my "Wordperfect Tips, Tricks, and Traps Keyboard Command Map," both at the ready for frequent consultation in a crisis. Inept as I may be on the computer, it's certainly easier to "Format" and "Control" a text than it is to "Format" and "Control" a text than it is to form a personality marked by "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." If you are surprised by the nonagonal list of the fruits of the Spirit, it may be that you have confused the nine-sided harvest with the seven gifts of the Spirit, namely, wisdom, understanding, knowledge, piety, fortitude, counsel, and fear of the Lord. The gifts produce the fruits, but they also help a Christian to actively achieve the seven virtues: faith, hope, charity, courage, justice, prudence, and temperance. Then you simply round out the Christian personality with the habitual performance of the fourteen spiritual and corporal works of mercy. You remember, admonishing the sinner, forgiving all injuries, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and so on. Yes friends, I'm afraid all of the above are going to be on the final exit exam.

While we're reviewing this optimal curriculum vitae, is there anything else we should prescribe as distinctively characteristic of a Christian personality? Perhaps a highly developed sense of wit and irony should be added, like the sharp by play we see Jesus demonstrating in certain gospel stories. God's affinity for merriment and play can already be accounted for as part of joy, and we know Christian love encompasses everything from the fiercest of erotic passions to the most tender of affections. Notice also how misguided the Stoics were in their personality ideal of apatheia; deep and strong emotions suffuse these lineaments of the Christlike personality.

What we don't see countenanced in any Christian personality profile are the vile aspects of human nature, all too familiar to us all. These come in petty and mean versions due to weakness as well as in dramatic large gestures by those who proclaim with Milton's Lucifer, "Evil, be thou my good." (Now there's a fundamental option for you.) Wicked persons, following the proud father of lies, easily end up enslaved by their own coldness, callousness, cruelty, hate, envy, avarice, and hypocrisy. Selfish isolation, gnawing despair, and inertia turn hearts to stone in the land of gloom. No one wants to be around the wicked, not only because they are dangerous, but also because they become so deadly boring.

Christ, on the other hand, is the Great Attractor, to borrow a term from the new cosmology. As the pope reminds us, Christ speaks to our hearts because he is "the image of the invisible God," "the reflection of God's glory," "full of grace and truth." The good news is that living a good moral life makes you free and deeply happy--even if you have to suffer and struggle on, groaning your way toward Christian maturity. If God became human, so humans could share in God's life, then Christians must come more and more to resemble Christ, increasing the family resemblance with every season that passes.

But hold on a minute. What about the idea that everyone should be becoming more distinct and different from everyone else? If the church means "here comes everybody," shouldn't we see blossoming the most complete variety and range of diverse personality types, temperaments, and lifestyle possible? Let a thousand flowers bloom in a riotous garden of human possibilities.

No, this path which sounds so promising fades out quickly, basically because as human beings all of us blooming in this garden grew from one specific sowing and there is a genetic limitation to the variation we can produce. The human species exist as a unit within a bounded range. We reproduce and multiply but we don't undergo speciation. This home-truth of the common human condition was made vivid for me when I learned that the scholastics had determined that angels, unlike embodied, reproducing humanity, would each and every one be a separate species.

Somehow, interest in angels seems to be staging a comeback in religious circles, but angelic psychology is not on my Advent agenda. Who cares what Gabriel thought (or felt?) when he/she/it(?) delivered the opening lines in our present drama? Mary's response, and our response, is the human interest story here.

Can I risk her terrifying answer, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word"? Bearing more fruit requires accepting more gifts. Our invitation to the endgame is at hand. Your move.