The Wise Ordering Of One's Life

Thomas Aquinas and the Order of Charity

In the Rune Soup world, we regularly remind each other to ask, “What is mine to do?” This accomplishes several urgent goals:

• It stops you. It slows you down.

• It accomplishes the inward turn, which is where all wisdom is found.

• It minimises the risk that you fall immediately into the dynamics of the Victim Triangle.

• It makes room for the Sacred.

Neither the disease nor the medicine are especially new. Long before Jordan Peterson’s “tidy your room”, Thomas Aquinas himself developed the Order of Charity:

The Order of Charity is a hierarchical system that explains how we should prioritize our love and obligations toward different people in our lives, based on their proximity and relationship to us. Aquinas argued that while Christian doctrine commands us to love everyone, it is both natural and morally correct to love those closest to us more intensely than strangers. He grounded this in both divine and natural law, citing biblical passages like 1 Timothy 5:8 ("And whoever does not provide for relatives, and especially for family members, has denied the faith") and drawing on Aristotle's concepts of natural friendship and moral philosophy.

In developing this framework, Aquinas established a clear hierarchy of moral obligations: God comes first, followed by oneself (since one must be spiritually healthy to help others), then one's parents and immediate family, then extended family, then fellow Christians, and finally all humanity. This wasn't meant to justify neglecting those lower in the hierarchy, but rather to provide practical guidance for resolving conflicts between competing moral obligations. Aquinas recognized that humans have limited resources and energy, and argued that properly ordered charity helps us fulfill our moral duties more effectively.

Here is the actual order:

1. God as the First Object of Charity

God is to be loved first and foremost in the order of charity. This is because:

• God is the source of all happiness and the principal "fellow" in eternal happiness.

• He is the cause of happiness and the First Principle from which all charity flows.

• Charity is primarily friendship with God, which then directs our love to others.

2. The Individual Self

After God, the individual comes next in the order of charity. Aquinas argues that:

• The individual's fellowship with himself or herself, with the "inner man," is most intimate.

• A person ought to love himself more than his neighbour out of charity.

• One should not commit any evil or sin, even to free a neighbour from sin.

3. Neighbours and others

Following God and self, our neighbours are next in the order of charity. This includes:

• All who are our fellows now and maybe our fellows for eternity.

• Those closest to us (family, friends) are to be loved more than those further removed.

• We should love all people in charity, but there is a wise order to this love.

4. The Body

Finally, the body itself is properly an object of charity. Aquinas reasons that:

• We may come to share in eternal happiness through the acts we perform in the body.

• The body is part of our person and thus deserves love, though subordinate to spiritual goods.

• (NOTE: At first glance, this may look like typical Christian ‘body hating’, but it is the opposite. You cannot give all your food to the poor at starve to death. Charity should not be extended to all at the expense of your health and vitality. This is, quite literally, a call to prioritise self-care as a form of charity.)

This order of charity ensures that our love is properly directed and balanced, with God as the ultimate source and end of all charity. It harmonizes particular love (for self and those close to us) with universal charity, explaining the concept of love of neighbour within a broader framework of love for God.

Modernising the text a bit: Sort your own shit out before rushing to intervene on behalf of the eternal Anonymous Victim. If you don’t, then your so-called activism is nothing more than a play-out of your own trauma. Most commonly:

• A profound discomfort around other people’s discomfort. Rather than simply holding or witnessing that energy, you are compelled to banish it so you feel better.

• Getting Daddy’s attention by being a good boy or girl.

• A belief that you fundamentally aren’t enough without the praise or visibility of being ‘caring’ or ‘good’.

• A trauma-based discomfort that things aren’t going “right” in the world and the resulting anxious-attached, co-dependent need to make sure everyone else is autonomically regulated before you can regulate. (Hello, former me!)

• And so on.

We’ve all met them. Activists who know how everyone else should live, who themselves live in their car. Obese, mask-wearing agitators for Big Pharma, insisting beaches and gyms be shut down. Ageing, straight Karens suddenly obsessed with trans suffrage. ‘Charitably’, we may say that their hearts are in the right place -and I do genuinely believe that- but the rest of them is a burning tornado of human garbage heading straight for a busload of orphans. I’ve been a member of Green parties in two countries and canvassed for them in three. That entire Thought Being is trapped in the Victim Triangle to the extent that ‘being abstractly concerned about trees somewhere’ is now no more than an inner-city hobby. ‘Think Global, Act Local’ has morphed into ‘Think Global, become willing stooges of literal Globalists’.

If any of this irritates you, if your first thought is to respond with, “Oh, so you’re saying we should just let Gazan children die in hospital bombings/trans people be marginalised from professional sports/the Amazon burn to the ground??” Then I know you have not asked what is yours to do; I know you have not made the inward turn.

Take a breath. No one said that. The Sacred never sounds like that. God is number one in Aquinas’s Order of Charity in the same way, and for the same reason, “What is yours to do” prompts an immediate inward turn. The Victim Triangle is fast. Reactive.

It has a higher dimensional sister, known as the Winner’s Triangle, described below, that can only be accessed after the pause, after slowness:

Let’s say your persecutor is a workplace bully. From Victim Consciousness, you can submit to the narrative that you are actually a victim and recruit others to collude with this worldview by insisting on rescue, with the deadly subtext that you are somehow ‘not enough’, somehow insufficient. (You are God, so that is blasphemy.) The higher-dimensional view of this unpleasant situation is to see your workplace bully as an initiation into a healing crisis of boundaries: You have made yourself a match to this situation to learn what is and is not acceptable to you, where your boundaries are, and how you police them.

The process looks broadly similar: Escalate to line managers, likely involve HR, call upon the support of friends outside of work, and so on. But in one of these triangles, you are a victim in a dangerous world, incapable of helping yourself. In the other, you are the hero of your own incarnation, an instantiation of God; the First Object of Aquinas’s Charity.

Now, unless you actually live in Gaza (or Southern Lebanon), like the workplace bully, Netanyahu has initiated you into a healing crisis of acceptable governance. What do you give your energy to that is ‘above’ you in the power structure? Governments across the West, on both sides of the aisle, have fallen in behind the Zionists.

This does not just mean you tap out a gay little email expressing your consternation to your nearest elected official. If we have learned anything from March 2020 to now, it is that these demons operate on a spectrum between “not caring at all about you” to “actively trying to murder you and your children”. I said crisis of governance, not government. Fuck those guys.

Magicians, in general, and -I would say- shamans, in particular, must be masters of the dimensional. They must know which thing goes where, in what domain a certain action belongs, and what must be moved or pushed here for something to happen there. From the Kogi of Northern Colombia to the Ngarinyin of Northwest Australia, we learn of the web of invisible agreements and obligations to the Holy Diversity that keep the whole thing running. Operating out of the Winner’s Triangle rather than the Victim Triangle is dimensional magic. It is the same set of actions and actors- a workplace bullying scenario- but your obligations are to the laws of the Hidden Kingdom, the spirit world. These obligations inform where -including in which dimension- and how you intervene. No one will see you do this with their human eyes. But the Holy Diversity will not only see but respond and support you in your doings.

One way to understand dimensionality is through Dr Joe Dispenza’s distinctions around the domains of matter and energy:

• Matter changing matter is hard. Effortful. Slow.

• Energy changing matter is easy. Effortless. Flowing.

• When you put your attention on matter, that's all that exists.

• The experience of the field is an open one, matter is a narrowing one.

For calamities and heartbreaks that are distant from you in space -the dimension of matter- it is improper to say, “I can’t do anything about it from here.” That is keeping your attention on matter only. Instead, say, “I can do different things from here”. We will return to this idea. But first, I am going to share Thomas Aquinas’s Prayer for the Wise Ordering of One’s Life. Apparently, he recited it every morning before an image of Christ. If you have a different framework for the Sacred, I want you to think about whatever ‘your’ version of that is and what a practice such as this might do to your energy field over time.

The full text of the Prayer for Ordering a Life Wisely, attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, is as follows:

O merciful God, grant that I may desire ardently, search prudently, recognise truly, and bring to perfect completion whatever is pleasing to You for the praise and glory of Your name.

Put my life in order, O my God. Grant that I may know what You require me to do. Bestow upon me the power to accomplish Your will as is necessary and fitting for the salvation of my soul.

Grant to me, O Lord my God that I may not falter in times of prosperity or adversity, so that I may not be exalted in the former, nor dejected in the latter. May I not rejoice in anything unless it leads me to You; may I not be saddened by anything unless it turns me from You. May I desire to please no one, nor fear to displease anyone but You.

May all transitory things, O Lord, be worthless to me and may all things eternal be ever cherished by me. May any joy without You be burdensome for me, and may I not desire anything else besides You. May all work, O Lord, delight me when done for Your sake and may all repose not centered in You be ever wearisome for me.

Grant unto me, my God, that I may direct my heart to You and that in my failures, I may ever feel remorse for my sins and never lose the resolve to change.

O Lord my God, make me submissive without protest, poor without discouragement, chaste without regret, patient without complaint, humble without posturing, cheerful without frivolity, mature without gloom, and quick-witted without flippancy.

O Lord my God, let me fear You without losing hope, be truthful without guile, do good works without presumption, rebuke my neighbour without haughtiness, and — without hypocrisy — strengthen him by word and example.

Give to me, O Lord God, a watchful heart, which no capricious thought can lure away from You. Give to me a noble heart, which no unworthy desire can debase. Give to me a resolute heart, which no evil intention can divert. Give to me a stalwart heart, which no tribulation can overcome. Give to me a temperate heart, which no violent passion can enslave.

Give to me, O Lord my God, understanding of You, diligence in seeking You, wisdom in finding You, discourse ever pleasing to You, perseverance in waiting for You, and confidence in finally embracing You.

Grant that with Your hardships I may be burdened in reparation here, that Your benefits I may use in gratitude upon the way, that in Your joys I may delight by glorifying You in the Kingdom of Heaven.

You Who live and reign, God, world without end. Amen.

If you want a short one, here’s mine:

Lord God, grant that I may know what You require of me in order to bring to perfect completion whatever is pleasing to You.

Aka what is mine to do, sprinkled with a little subtext from the Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

(Sidebar: People think this line gives them carte blanche to embarrass themselves on amateur singing programmes, but it is actually a warning: If you resist what the Cosmos is trying to bring into being through your incarnation, you will be promptly composted.)

Let’s overlay what Joe Dispenza says about matter and the field with the Order of Charity: All things being equal, matter affecting matter is in play in the circles closest to you. As you expand out, the dimension in which you intervene shifts from matter to the field.

Some hypotheticals chosen from right across the political spectrum, so that you may find something to please and irritate yourself in equal measure:

• If you’re a parent worried about little girls getting disheartened by the current politicised state of professional sports, find, fund or start an under-9s girls self-defence class. (When I was a kid, we had a local female police officer run something like this for a time out of a neighbouring school.)

• If you’re worried about trans exclusion from sport and the discourse around it, start an all-gender croquet tournament or something that celebrates competition while largely nullifying physical differences. (I will still lose, but you should nevertheless invite me. Croquet is awesome.)

• If you’re worried about the understandable anti-Israeli sentiment spilling over into anti-Semitism, link up with the growing number of anti-Zionist Jewish groups sprouting up all over the West (and in Israel, actually).

• Nodally intervene to express your opposition to the Gaza genocide: Book in-person meetings with your local elected official or call in under false pretexts if they’re on local talkback radio and have them explain their complicity to your face. Ask them calm, specific questions about the information they are receiving, how often they review it personally and who specifically is pressuring them to say what they are saying.

• Worried about fires and deforestation in the Amazon? Take complete sovereignty for the cultivation of your own animal protein, or have none at all. (This has been my exact journey these past two years.)

Note that these all fall under ‘matter affecting matter,’ but their target is the field. These are all rituals designed to bring about field shifts. These are always available to you. Once you make that inward turn and ask, you will find surprising paths opening-up within and before you.

Here we find ourselves once again at the closing of a calendar year, and with it the season of promises and resolutions and diets starting tomorrow. I want you to think about what kind of change you may actually experience and be if you incorporate some version of this prayer into your daily practice for 2025. This could even be its own new year’s resolution. Now might be just the time for the wise ordering of your life.