Making the Gods a Priority

When's the last time that you went out of your way for the gods?

Hospitality, Courage, Generosity: even in our times of political incivility and social dissolution, we find these ancestral virtues admirable.

Piety, not so much.

Piety: making the gods a priority in your life.

Piety is a little-valued virtue in our day. When you look at the way that many supposedly pious people act, one can certainly see why we've come to view piety as ostentatious, restrictive hyper-religiosity.

But the ancestors felt differently. For them, piety was among the foremost of virtues.

A sense of piety is a way out of the anthropocentric world of so much of contemporary culture. It reminds us that human beings aren't everything; it keeps us connected with the rest.

Piety isn't just about saying prayers and making offerings, although that's part of it too. When Earth and Sea, River and the Winds, are numbered among your gods, the implications just go on and on.

To take only one example among many: I'm wont to say that in this household, we recycle religiously.

Many, I suspect, would take this as a hyperbolic usage meaning assiduously. And certainly that's true, too.

But really, I mean it literally.