Jerry has taken off for the weekend, so I'm not listening to the steady alternation of scraping and sanding as he battles the paint on the west outside wall of my house. The paint on that wall has been a disgrace for, oh, about the last eight or ten years. It's cracked and flaking so badly it was falling off the wood. I'd tried to scrape it myself, but the old paint is truly remarkable stuff. So I hired Jerry, a local housepainter, who thought he could probably scrape the wall in a couple of days, and the north wall too while he was at it, and then it's just a coat of good-quality primer and a final coat.

Well, Jerry started Tuesday, with a high-pressure water gun, guaranteed to strip a house down to the bare wood in no time. It took off some of the flakes--not many, but some. Meanwhile, I started to strip my lovely gingerbready front porch, where much of the detailing is obscured by years of paint. The only really effective way to remove this stuff is to burn it off with a heat gun. It turns into a viscous goop, somewhat like half-melted plastic, which can be painstakingly dislodged with a scraper. I don't mind doing the work, but it is highly labour-intensive. It will take me a couple of weeks to do the porch. God only knows how long it will take Jerry to finish the west wall, but he's determined to do it. I have the sense that he's decided that this &#$@# paint isn't going to best him.

The neighbourhood is fascinated. One thing that makes me feel somewhat better is that, watching Jerry struggle with the paint, people in town are revising their opinion of my laziness. It's not that I couldn't be bothered to scrape and paint the house; it's that I couldn't scrape and paint the house. And I've finally found out why. A elderly friend of his, who'd stopped by to watch Jerry work, picked up a chip of the old paint, turning it over in his fingers and studying it. "You know what this stuff is," he observed. "Pure linseed oil."

Oh. Okay. NOW it makes sense.

This house has always had a certain elegance; it's not large, but it's clearly a member of the architectural gentry. And the owners who painted it years back probably bought The Best Paint - linseed oil, with white pigment. None of this cheap whitewash or milk paint for them; only the good stuff, the stuff that really wears. And this paint wears. Oh, does it wear. It hardens into an unbreakable film, in fact. Digging hot paint-goop out of bulls' eyes on the porch, it reminded me yet again: the best is the enemy of the Good in more ways than one.

Probably this came to mind because this week, one of my own overgrown virtues had tripped me up, got me into a situation that isn't particularly good for me. I had forgotten a fundamental lesson: while it's important to keep an eye on our less admirable traits, so we can watch what they're getting up to instead of letting them do godknowswhat behind our backs, it is equally important to beware of the tyranny of our strengths. Our weaknesses and errors may trip us up, but ohboy, what a mess Evil can create if it gets its mitts on our virtues....

It's more problematic because we think our strong points are a Good Thing and are apt to overinvest in them, feeding and watering them and letting them burgeon, unpruned, into a rank, lush growth. We do this for the same reason that we don't look too closely at our weaknesses: ego. For example, I am a good cook. It feels soooo good when I cook up something special for a friend, and get that look of pleasure and gratitude in response. My ego purrs with happy satisfaction. Of course, I can then spend all my time in the kitchen, neglecting what I'm less good at--housework, for instance. And I can refuse to let anyone else learn to cook, or turn up my nose at their efforts, which is not good for them, no?

But what my paint really made me think of was the ways in which our strengths come between us and the Great Commandment. Self-sufficiency, for example. It's a very good thing, but take it too far, and you forget that you need God and others, and that is not good. Or psychological strength and charisma--these can too easily pull a person right off the spiritual rails. Or intuition--just watch people leaping to "insights" about other people, which insights are often not insightful at all but psychopathologizing and judgmentalism. I could say much the same things about (say) innovation and tradition, or sensitivity, or any other quality. All things in moderation, as dear Aristotle said.

I'm reminded of something that I ran across years ago, when I was taking a course in nutrition. Some people believe that if it's a good thing to take (say) 50 milligrams of niacin a day, it's better to take 200 mgs. Which isn't a serious problem, because the excess niacin gets flushed out by your kidneys, but it is rather a waste of perfectly good niacin When, however, it's Vitamin A, which is not water-soluble, the excess starts doing liver damage. Just because a thing is good in itself, or good for you, doesn't mean you should take it too far.

All this sounds so blatantly obvious, I'm asking myself why I feel any need to say it at all. Maybe because looking back over my own life, I see too many times when I've taken a good thing to such extremes that it ended up rounding some sort of corner and turning into a very bad thing indeed. Patience, for example, when what the situation really needed was confrontation. Humility, when that meant turning myself into a doormat. Fortitude, when I should have been breaking down. A while ago, I finally figured something out--it took me much too long, but there you are: Acting out that notable passage, 1 Cor. 13, is absolutely spot on 85% of the time; the other 15%, it's the dumbest damn thing a person can do. The problem, as always, is in "the wisdom to know the difference."

Virtues taken too far cease to be virtues at all; they may be only manifestations of spiritual pride. They may be our attempt to force God to approve of us and to prove to ourselves our superiority to the guy over there. Or they may be our excuse for not dealing with the stuff we know we should be doing, and are too frightened or lazy to address: "I don't have to tackle my problem with anger because I am such a nice guy that people should just accept it."

Any good quality must be in line with common sense. It must be honest, not overblown or assumed in defensiveness or pride. It must include a little flexibility, a willingness to make exceptions, an honest and humour-streaked recognition that living beings don't work in straight lines and black-and-white. Any virtue needs to be able to bend--and to accept the inevitability of failure. Above all, any virtue has to include a strong sense of our own and others' hard-wired humanity. Otherwise, we run the risk of taking that virtue around that particular corner, where the Best begins to oppose the Good.

Of course when Jerry finishes the strip job, I want him to put on good-quality paint, something that will last a while. But I also want that paint to scrape down well, when the time comes for repainting the house. In the meantime, time to go clean up the paint chips.