Americans first celebrated Labor Day in the 1880s during the height of the Industrial Revolution in America when immigrants were coming to America to fill the growing number of low-paying jobs in factories in American cities. The founders of Labor Day were Irish Catholics who were seeking better working conditions for the millions of American workers. Whole families, including children, worked long hours in unsafe and dismal factories for extremely low wages. Many of the immigrants arriving to America after the Civil War were Roman Catholics from all parts of Europe. Although their jobs were often the worst of the worst, they knew that work was nevertheless a blessing from God and therefore should be honored. President Grover Cleveland in 1894 made Labor Day an official holiday so that all Americans could celebrate work and workers.
American Catholic workers from the nineteenth to the twentieth century looking for validity in their jobs and commensurate recognition, mostly in terms of job security and good wages, joined labor unions and other organizations to promote the cause of American workers. One such promoter of Catholic work was Dorothy Day, a convert to Catholicism, who in 1933 helped to establish a movement and newspaper, The Catholic Worker, to fight for the recognition and the rights of the American worker.
There is Biblical and ecclesiastical support for the recognition of the worker, the value of work, and the rights of workers. In the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, issued under Pope John Paul II, the necessity and value of work is justified according to Biblical and Catholic doctrine. God’s work, human work, God’s Creation, and humans as creatures who work according to God’s will: these are important themes in the Bible. Adam and Eve were ordained to work, but as obedient creatures working according to God’s will rather than as creators of their own world in the absence of God. God made humans the stewards of the creation working within the guidelines, the will, of God.
There is no better source of wisdom for the value of work and no better model for the worker than the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who learned the trade of a carpenter, and practiced this trade during his life. He often commented on his role working to bring about the Kingdom of God. His life was therefore one of working with God’s creation to fulfill its potential, and working to bring awareness of God’ love for all creatures: these tasks are still considered worthy and holy by His disciples.
The Holy Family is a model of a working family. As Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church proclaims, “the family constitutes one of the most important terms of reference for shaping the social and ethical order of human work”. Work is the core that holds the family together both in terms of self-esteem of the different family members and the ability of the family to provide a successful and healthy standard of living. By extension, just as Joseph taught Jesus a trade so must all parents impart to their children the realization of the importance of work in human social and cultural existence and in God’s plan for His creation. “Idleness is harmful to man’s being, whereas activity is good for his body and soul.” Work in the family is for the stability of the family’s domestic economy of order, cleanliness, and health, as well as for the material basis to maintain an adequate standard of living to promote self-respect and family pride. For this to occur, as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states, adequate wages must be provided for substantial quality work. The modern industrial age has often seen exploitation of the poor by means of the wealthy; the Bible and the Church teach that it is incumbent upon those participating in our modern economy to treat workers, no matter their status, with dignity, rewarding their toil with adequate wages, and honoring their work as akin to God’s plan.
Jesus also taught, based on the Scriptures, that work is required for the fulfillment of God’s plan for Creation. Humans, as stewards of the creation, through work care for, protect, manage, and show love for the creation. This Care for Our Common Home has been a frequent theme in the writings of Pope Francis. Through work, he writes in the Encyclical Laudato Si, “each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations.”
Work is therefore not only a way to seek fulfillment in life, but work is also required by God to fulfill His benevolent plan for His creation.
A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange
When in 2016 Pope Francis visited Chiapas, Mexico, to demand rights for the indigenous people of Mexico, he was on familiar ground for champions of indigenous rights. Four hundred and eighty-one years earlier, in 1544, one of the great champions of promoting the rights of the American people, Bartholomew de Las Casas, became Bishop of Chiapas. Las Casas (1484-1566), a Dominican monk, spent decades trying to turn back the tide of genocide threatening to inundate the indigenous people of Mexico.
Las Casas is most famous for his Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he condemned the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America. The Spanish, beginning with the first voyages of Columbus, treated the indigenous people as inferior, subjecting them to brutality and enslavement in the encomienda system of labor, which was exacerbated by the many diseases brought among the indigenous people.
But before he became a champion of the Indians, Las Casas had been a part of the Spanish colonial system. A native of Seville, educated at the University of Salamanca, his father had sailed with Columbus on his second voyage in 1496, and brought home an Indian slave boy as a present to Bartholomew. Upon orders of Queen Isabella of Spain to free enslaved Indians in Spain, Las Casas freed the child and resolved to go to America to make his fortune. He accompanied Nicholas de Ovando on a voyage in 1502. Las Casas became a landowner exploiting the Indians for his own purposes. But slowly he changed.
When the Dominicans came to America in 1510, Las Casas resolved to take holy orders. When he arrived in Cuba in 1512, his reputation as a Christian working on behalf of Indian rights preceded him. For a time he believed that the encomienda system was actually good for the indigenous people because it offered Spanish civilization and Christianization. But he changed this point of view and became an opponent of converting people at the point of a sword. “Here I beheld such great cruelty as living man has never seen nor thought to see,” he wrote. “In three or four months, I being present, more than seven thousand children died of hunger, their fathers and mothers having been taken to the mines. Other dreadful things did I see.” (Quoted in Francis A. MacNutt, Bartholomew de Las Casas; His Life, Apostolate, and Writings (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1909), 331-2.)
Las Casas found allies in the Vatican and the Spanish Crown. He made several trips to Spain to argue his point of view before King Ferdinand and his successor King Charles V. He was made Procurator-General of the Indies to work on behalf of the Indians. The administrators and soldiers of New Spain, however, stood against him. He was opposed as well by scholars and theologians in Spain, notably Gines de Sepulveda. After Las Casas had been made Bishop of Chiapas, facing ongoing opposition among the Spanish to his humanitarian point of view, he sailed to Spain, and there confronted Sepulveda in a debate in 1550 watched by all of Spain. Las Casas argued against forced Christianization of the natives: “So enormous are the errors and scandalous propositions,” Las Casas argued, “contrary to all evangelical truth and to all Christianity that the Doctor Sepulveda has accumulated, set forth, and coloured with misguided zeal in the royal service, that no honest Christian would be surprised should we wish to combat him, not only with lengthy argument, but likewise as a mortal enemy of Christendom, an abettor of cruel tyrants, extirpator of the human race, and disseminator of fatal blindness throughout this realm of Spain.” (Quoted in MacNutt, Las Casas; 289-290.)
Las Casas became the unrelenting historian of Spanish atrocities, recording what happened in the Caribbean islands, in Mexico, in Central America, and in Florida. None of the noteworthy conquistadores escaped the vitriolic condemnation of his pen. He knew that neither would they escape God’s punishment. Las Casas’ meticulous historical recorded the crimes of Diego Velázquez in Cuba, Hernan Cortez in Mexico, Pedro de Alvarado in Guatemala, Ponce de Leon and Panfilo de Narvaez in Florda, and Hernan de Soto in the American Southeast, among others.
In the end, Las Casas fought a losing battle against human avarice and bloodlust. He and other missionaries, the Franciscans, Jesuits, and Dominicans, tried to ameliorate the rapine and death, but little could be done. God’s vengeance, however, was nigh.
“The injuries and loss,” Las Casas prophesized, “will be visited . . . on all Spain, because the tyranny wrought by their devastations, massacres, and slaughters is so monstrous, that the blind may see it, the deaf hear it, and the dumb recount it, while after our brief existence, the wise shall judge and condemn it. I invoke all the hierarchies and choirs of angels, all the saints of the Celestial Court, all the inhabitants of the globe and especially those who may live after me, to witness that I free my conscience of all that has been done; and that I have fully exposed all these woes to his Majesty; and that if he abandons the government of the Indies to the tyranny of the Spaniards, they will all be lost and depopulated—as we see Hispaniola, and other islands and three thousand leagues of the continent destitute of inhabitants. For these reasons, God will punish Spain and all her people with inevitable severity. So may it be!” (Quoted in MacNutt, Las Casas, 291-92) Such was Las Casas’ prediction of the fall of the Spanish Empire, which began soon after he uttered these words in 1550.
Fast forward to February, 2025. Pope Francis addressed the 7th Indigenous Peoples Forum at the UN echoing the words and wisdom of Bartholomew de Las Casas from almost five hundred years ago. Pope Francis said: “The defense of the right to preserve one’s culture and identity requires the recognition of the value of their contribution to society, as well as the safeguarding of their existence and the natural resources essential for their livelihood.” The Pope further prayed that “appropriate measures are taken to ensure that the human family walks together in pursuit of the common good, leaving no one excluded or forgotten.” (Vatican News: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-02/pope-francis-message-ifad-indigenous-peoples-forum.html) The Pope perfectly stated the sentiments of a man from a different time and place, who was not alone, if he had the loudest voice, in arguing simply that the Roman Catholic Spanish should bring Christian dignity, humility, fairness, and above all, love, to their dealings with the indigenous people of Latin America.
A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange
Roman Catholics have death ever on the mind. It is part of Christian theology, to follow the commandments and sacraments so to be prepared when death comes. But then, why do we still fear death? Why when death comes does it seem unexpected and much too soon? For Joseph Ratzinger, who grew up in Bavaria under the horrors of Nazi Germany, when death was ever present, thinking about the end of things, eschatology, was an issue to explore and to understand.
Ratzinger, when Professor of Dogmatics at the University of Regensburg, began a project working with co-author Johann Auer to write a two-volume work on Eschatology and Dogmatic Theology. Ratzinger wrote the volume on Eschatology, but by the time he was to work on the volume on Dogmatic Theology, he had been appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising, hence it remained unwritten. Eschatology is a brilliant and thought-provoking look into Catholic teaching on the afterlife: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory. Not all Catholics agree with his argument, and most Catholics doubtless have not read the book, as it is dauntingly complex. In what follows, I provide a brief synopsis and analysis of Ratzinger’s book.
In Eschatology, Ratzinger argues that the secularization of world thought beginning with the 18th century Enlightenment has negatively influenced the Church, so that many Christians believe in the secular promise of progress, hence Christians focus so much on the present that the future, death and salvation, appear as something unwelcome, to avoid, to stave off as long as medicinal miracles allow us to hang on to life. Happiness has to be squeezed through the ever-present moment. Ratzinger condemns modern philosophy and theology, which by accommodating current trends of thought and power struggles focused on the immediate and an unknown future, “emasculates Christian hope.” Ratzinger argues, rather, that Christianity a dialogue of present Christ and future occurring in Christ. Christian existence is the interaction between the historical message of the Gospels and present reality.
Ratzinger thinks that the historicity that began with Biblical criticism in the 19th century was embraced by Catholics in the 20th century because of Paul XII in the1950s and Vatican II. Tradition was lost. What was Catholic was lost. The critical historical method attempts to uncover what happened precisely at a time in the past without contemplating tradition over time. Catholicism after Vatican II focused more on the “theory of resurrection in death, and consequent rejection of the concept of the soul.” But Ratzinger argues, why therefore pray for the dead if “dying means an exit from time to non-time” and “nontemporal is straightforwardly identified with eternity”?
Human history, he argues, our own direction of life, has replaced, in our modern world, providential history. Hope based on faith has been replaced by hope in technology and futurism.
What Happens in Death?
Ratzinger begins his book arguing that the Bible, hence Christianity, does not teach what ministers and priests often preach, that when we die we immediately experience salvation, immediately either achieve bliss in Heaven with God or damnation in Hell with Satan. Rather, Ratzinger argues that Jesus returned in His resurrection, continues to return in the Eucharist, and will return in the future. Christ is “the world’s future in the world’s present.” He says further, “the walls separating heaven and earth, and past, present, and future, are now as glass.” The word eschatology does not refer to time rather to existence. Christianity is therefore “an ever renewed act of encounter.” For Ratzinger, the human experience of time occurs according to the ever-present Christ; when an individual dies, time continues on, and for the dead individual, “eternity is not commensurable with time, being of a wholly other order.” Ratzinger, heavily influenced by ancient Greek philosophy, finds with the Greeks a similar point of view to his own that death is not final, rather a passage to a different form of existence. “Man’s own truth is that he passes away, having no abiding existence in his own right. The more he takes a stand on himself, the more he finds himself suspended over nothing.” Christianity does not teach the soul’s immortality, rather “the resurrection of the complete human being and of that alone.”
Christ and History
Ratzinger’s thought has a sophisticated philosophy of history that is completely at odds with what modern historians believe. The Bible teaches that “each and every human being [and animal] is a suffering being. The moment of death is not our first experience of finitude.”“Death is ever present in the inauthenticity, closedness and emptiness of our everyday life.” Suffering is therefore a means to find God. Death becomes “purifying and transforming.”Ratzinger points to Psalm 73, where the despair and inequality of life is found in the relief and happiness of God in Heaven. Here one finds communion with God, which is the essence of authentic life: “communion with God is reality”—more real than death.The desire for immortality occurs when one finds communion with God, in Love. It is going beyond self-existence.
Scripture, he writes, does not support the idea of a sleep of death that occurs between dying and end of time; rather those who “died in Christ are alive.” Likewise, the idea of a dualism of body and soul is not supported by Christianity; rather the unification of body and soul, even after death.” The idea so popular among Christians of an eternity with a beginning is no eternity at all. Someone who has lived during a definite period of time, and died at a definite point in time, cannot simply move across from the condition “time” into the condition “eternity,” timelessness. “The resurrection [is] a pledge to the future of man and the cosmos, and in this sense a pledge to space, time and matter. . . . In the resurrection, God proves himself to be the God also of the cosmos and of history.” The Last Day is not the “moment of individual death” rather “the shared ending of all history.” There is no interruption in life between death and the end of the world.
Ratzinger’s thought on death and time was heavily influenced by Aurelius Augustine, the author of Confessions and The City of God. Augustine taught that the past is recalled in the present, it is past in its quality in the present; likewise with the expectation of the future. Humans experience time as a movement, not just of physical bodies, but the spiritual component of humans allows for a different, deeper experience than a mere physical body. “In human consciousness, the various levels of time are at once assumed and transcended, rendering that consciousness temporal, in a way all its own.” Humans externalize time by memory and anticipation. Also, human love experiences this temporal process, so that “the fabric of shared humanity is a fabric of shared temporality.” Humans, per Augustine, have therefore memory time shaped by our temporal experiences. When we die, memory time separates us from biological time, and we retain this memory for the “possibility of purification and fulfillment in a final destiny which will relate us to matter in a new way. It is a precondition for the intelligibility of the resurrection as a fresh possibility for man.” Augustine (and Ratzinger) believed that death does not end our memory, but there is a continuing reality.
“ln the man Jesus, God comes in one and the same in a human and in a divine way. His coming transcends the logic of history, yet concerns all history. Human activity carries on with its own kind of objectivity, but a new dimension is opened up pertinent to human existence and thus to all the world. The divine coming compels man to adopt an attitude of watchful readiness which looks out for the Parousia of Jesus and thus prevents history from falling into a self-enclosure which would condemn human existence to meaninglessness and purposelessness.”
The Salvation of All Life
One of the most compelling and controversial arguments in Eschatology is Ratzinger’s discussion of the “dynamic unity of the entire created world.” Humans are anima forma corporis, an essence, an indestructible life form; human is “the creature . . . for whom the vision of God is part and parcel of his very being.” Ratzinger was also heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas’ theology of creation: “nature is only possible by virtue of a communication of the Creator’s, yet such communication both establishes the creature in its own right and makes it a genuine participator in the being of the One communicated.” Further, “the claim that the whole of God’s creation, in whatever form, will enter upon its definitive salvation at the end of time is so palpable that any reflective systematization of the biblical data must do it justice.” Further, “no part of God’s creation is too insignificant to be made perfect.” “God is faithful to his whole creation.” “By announcing a new heaven and a new earth, the Bible makes it clear that the whole of creation is destined to become the vessel of God’s glory. All of created reality is to be drawn into blessedness.”
His comments are an astonishing argument that all life is united in God, which is not terminated in death, rather is fulfilled with the coming of Christ.
Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven
Ratzinger’s discussion in Eschatology of heaven, hell, and purgatory is a riveting discourse on theology and the Bible. “In death, a human being emerges into the light of full reality and truth.” Hell is “a challenge to oneself. It is a challenge to suffer in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ in solidarity with his descent into the Night.” Hell is the consequence of the personal decision by each individual who pushes God away. But there is hope, offered by God. The sufferer must, however, relinquish control, and accept God’s will.
Most people die to purgatory, which is part of a historical process uniting the alive with the dead because “everyone exists simultaneously in other people. What happens in one individual has an effect upon the whole of humanity, and what happens in humanity happens in the individual.” “Even,” he writes, “when they have crossed over the threshold of the world beyond, human beings can still carry each other and bear each others’ burdens.” Purgatory then is “unresolved guilt, a suffering which continues to radiate out because of guilt. Purgatory means, then, suffering to the end what one has left behind on earth—in the certainty of being definitively accepted, yet having to bear the infinite burden of the withdrawn presence of the Beloved.”
Here, he argues that purgatory is the continuation of history, even after death—such an idea would make most modern historians squirm in their seats!
Heaven is the final achievement, but it is not a departure, rather a “new mode of presence to the world.” Heaven is when we participate in the “new mode of Christ’s existence.”
Death and Love
Throughout all of Ratzinger’s writings is the emphasis on love. This is revealed in the encyclicals he published as Pope Benedict XVI. The reader finds much of his book Eschatology reflected in these encyclicals. In his first encyclical, Deus Caritas est, “God is Love,” he emphasizes that love is the force that unites life and death, all creatures, the challenges of purgatory and the blessings of heaven. His comment in Eschatology that “Christ brings time to its completion by leading it into the moment of love” is the theme of his encyclical on love. The themes of Eschatology are also found in his second encyclical, Spe Salvi, “In Hope We Are Saved.” As he wrote in Eschatology, “eternal life does not isolate a person, but leads him out of isolation into true unity with his brothers and sisters and the whole of God’s creation.” His final encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, “Charity in Truth,” we find a theme emphasized in Eschatology, that “I come face to face with my own guilt vis a vis the suffering members of that body as well as the forgiving love which the body derives from Christ its Head.” This involves “love beyond the grave.”
Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, was a superb scholar, a deep thinker, who at the same time was open to all emotions, all feelings: the wonderful combination of these two different characters is clearly revealed not only in his encyclicals, but in the book Eschatology, as well.
A version of this article appeared in Catholic 365
Thomas Merton spent his life contemplating his purpose in the world, trying to discern how his desires and ambitions fit God’s plan. Born in France in 1915, Merton was well-traveled, a convert to Catholicism, and by his own admission was wild as a youth before he settled down and determined to join a religious order. Initially he sought to join the Franciscan order, but being denied, he ended up with the Trappists, living most of his life at the Abby of Gethsemani in Kentucky. His joined the Abby in 1941 and stayed there until a few months before his death in 1968. Besides his role and work as a monk, Merton’s true profession was as a writer. He wrote numerous books, the most famous being The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948; most his books were about his own spiritual journey, and he became quite famous, though he felt guilty for his fame. He was a true recluse, seeking most days to be alone with God. He kept a daily journal in which he reflected on his life and relationship with God.
Merton worked to fulfill the Great Commission in three ways: first, as a monk in daily prayer for others; second, through his books and articles, in which he reached out to religious and nonreligious trying to strengthen the faith of the former and turn the latter toward God. Third, and most unique, was his work to bring the Great Commission to the Creation. This is after all what Jesus commanded, according to the Gospel of Mark: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” Unlike Matthew, who writes that Jesus proclaimed that his disciples “go and make disciples of all nations,” Mark uses the Greek word, “ktisis,” which literally means “creature” or “creation.” How does one preach to all creatures, to the whole creation?
Preaching to the creation was what Thomas Merton was able to do. One of the ways Merton was able to accomplish this difficult task was his ability to recognize the logos in individual creatures in God’s creation. The logos, the word, is, according to the Gospel of John, the creative presence with God at the beginning—“through him all things were made,” John writes. The meaning and significance of such an idea is far beyond what humans can understand. Merton knew his own limitations, but he also had a discerning mind, and a love for all creatures. He spent days and nights, usually alone, in the forests and meadows of the Abby at Gethsemani, where he watched the sun and moon, felt the breeze, the cold of winter and heat of summer, focused on the many animals that lived nearby, watching the moment of all things–birth, growth , and death. He was a child of wonder in his investigations of the natural world. This empathy he felt toward all things was the gift he possessed to fulfill Christ’s commission to bring the Good News to other members of the Creation. The missionary must gain awareness of the Logos as the creative presence in all things and by this awareness the missionary, by care and by love, spreads the Good News.
The means to the end of fulfilling the Great Commission was Merton’s recognition that Love is all, the creative act, the way that God communicates with all aspects, all individuals, in reality—“the reality of now–the unreality of all the rest. The unreality of ideas and explanations and formulas. I am. The unreality of the rest. . . . Butterflies dance together . . . The trees are fresh and green in the sun . . . Small clouds inexpressibly beautiful and silent and eloquent over the silent woodlands. What a celebration of light, quietness, and glory!”
The simplest acts of life and death in God’s creation became to Merton eloquent testaments to God’s love, the presence of the Logos, the ultimate expression of God’s truth. “Today it was wonderful,” he wrote. “Clouds, sky overcast, but tall streamers of sunlight coming down in a fan over the bare hills. Suddenly I became aware of great excitement.” Starlings rose from the meadow in great numbers, startled by a predator soaring high above. A hawk attacked and grabbed one of the birds in its talons. Merton, knowing he was witnessing one of the great wonders in nature, turned to God in prayer, but he was distracted by the hawk ripping into the captured starling, gorging itself in a bloody repast. He realized the hawk’s important role in the nature of all things, saying to the bird, “I wonder if my admiration for you gives me an affinity for you, artist. I wonder if there will ever be something connatural between us, between your flight and my heart, stirred in hiding to serve Christ as you, soldier, serve your nature.” Merton realized that the hawk by his actions praised God, doing what he was meant to do. The many animals Merton saw that day, he realized, “sanctified” God by their actions. An amateur birder, Merton observed a Tennessee warbler, and “felt very close to God or felt religious awe anyway. Watching those birds was as food for meditation or as mystical reading. Perhaps better. Also the beautiful, unidentified red flower or fruit I found on a bud yesterday. I found a bird in the woods yesterday on the feast of St. Francis. Those things say so much more than words.” What a gift, he thought to himself, that God had given him in allowing his senses and mind to be completely entranced by these natural wonders.
What was more, Merton felt a great anonymity in watching birds that were themselves anonymous, without names, yet each one known by, cared by, God. Such, he believed, was the role of the missionary, to bring knowledge of God to others, if only by observing them, caring for them, understanding them, loving them, then to move on, to depart, to become as anonymous as the creatures he witnessed.
There was something holy in the night to Thomas Merton. Many evenings into the night, or awakening early, long before dawn, he sat alone and felt and watched the symphony of being playing before him: the dampness of the cool night air, the rising fog, the path of the moon, the crickets singing a mystical song, the early morning birds marking their territory or singing out for a mate, the silence of the snowfall or the drama of the thunderstorm—all wondrous, all musical, all magisterial, songs of life, of creation, of which he was a part, merged with all creatures, all things made by God, and he could feel the presence of the Logos, and he knew that God was with him.
In such a way Thomas Merton united himself with the thousands of missionaries who came before him, those Spanish, French, German, English, Polish, and more–missionaries who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, bringing the Good News, fulfilling the Great Commission. They mostly came to other humans, to the American Indians of South, Central, and North America, but they came as well to all creatures, all Creation, in America, bringing their thoughts and minds, their senses and awareness, to the beauty of the American natural environment. And seeking to understand this environment, to live in it, suffer in it, die in it, these missionaries of old brought their whole being to bear in spreading the Word to all things, all of America. And Roman Catholicism imprinted itself on the American environment and on the American people. It was truly Catholic, truly universal, this spiritual presence that spread throughout the land.
All quotes from Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange
Divine Providence in the life and thought of King David as revealed in the Psalms: the
Psalms as the poetry of Providence, in that, throughout the Psalms, God the Logos
interacts with time through the person of King David, to bring about His will; David’s gift is to be able to see this at a time in the first millennium BC when very few people, save the prophets, could. God’s love and will are the same. God loves David, and knows David’s actions and thoughts, and witnesses whether David’s actions and thoughts conform to God’s will, and God blesses accordingly. If God does this for David, he does it for every human. “Thou hast traced my path . . . , and hast foreseen all my ways.”
King David and his story and responses to God as revealed in the Psalms, interspersed throughout Providential History, reveals that sense, so completely shown in Psalm 139, that God knows all, involves Himself in all, lives and things in the cosmos.
According to Psalm 139 of the Old Testament, “O Lord, Thou hast proved me, and known me.” This psalm is a wonderful source of essential knowingness, a source of truthfulness, a source in which a person knows God and knows that God made him/her, makes the individual human self.
Ironically, it was written by King David, a warrior, murderer, adulterer, and conqueror who was also a poet and singer of extraordinary talent and sensitivity. He composed verse and hymns to express piety and love, fear, the search for redemption, the need for deliverance. He knew that God knew. His awareness of God’s awareness is most profoundly stated in this psalm. “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine up-rising: Thou understandest my thoughts from afar.”
God’s love and will are the same. God loves David, and knows David’s actions and thoughts, and witnesses whether David’s actions and thoughts conform to God’s will, and God blesses accordingly. If God does this for David, he does it for every human. “Thou hast traced my path . . . , and hast foreseen all my ways.”
God is with David always–whether awake or asleep, He is part of him, as He is part of all the Creation. David was exceptional only in that he had such a profound awareness of God’s presence in every moment of his life. “O Lord, Thou hast known all things, the last and the first.”
God does not form the word on the tongue, but God nevertheless knows. Such awareness allows David the insight to be able to speak and act in a way that is apt to conform to God’s will. God is present in the past and future, before and after, in the previous step and the forthcoming step. Awareness of this is a sure guide in taking the multifarious steps of life.
“The knowledge of Thee is too wonderful for me; it is very difficult, I cannot attain to it.” The greatest counter to hubris, David knew, was the realization of the supremacy of God’s knowledge and the overwhelming gulf separating David from God. He could not come close to God or His knowledge. Rather, he must wait upon God. “O Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit?” David imagines the ways a being could escape from Being, and it is impossible. One cannot hide from God. If I imagine that I can hide in the dark, the dark is but light to God, who sees all.
“For Thou, O Lord, hast possessed my reins; Thou hast helped me from my mother’s womb.” God has been with David always, even from the womb, and has held onto his path, directed him, as David ran along through life. “Thine eyes saw my unwrought substance, and all men shall be written in Thy book.” God formed the flesh and bones and spirit, brought David out of the depths into the light, and composed the record of his life in the book of life.
“I awake, and am still with Thee.” It is not a dream, this utter connection with the Lord. Though the knowledge of the relationship is intuitive, found deep within the self, in the innermost being, nevertheless daily, upon awakening, Being is among us.
“Prove me, O God, and know my heart; examine me, and know my paths.” David has proven his devotion to God by the point of his sword; the blood dripping from his enemies is his testament to his faith in God. And he asks God, “See if there is any way of iniquity in me, and lead me in an everlasting way.” Bloodshed on behalf of God to David is not iniquity, but such are the king and warrior’s way. As the Hebrews came to know God more fully, and as the descendants of David grew to accept God’s will and ways, to accept defeat as well as victory, no longer was the sword needed. And Jesus counseled His disciples: put away the sword.
God, outside of time, seeing all simultaneously, means that there is an existence that is not of our momentary, exclusive time, but of all times and places. The Logos encompassing timeless God the father and active Holy Spirit is able to see in present tense all that was, is, and will be. Possibly in death we will experience something like this. But God can see the swallows and sparrows in Psalm 82 3000 years ago as well as those birds flying today. He sees them simultaneously. Therefore they exist simultaneously. Death is relevant only to present experience.
“The Psalms purport to be written largely by David, the Hebrew king who lived three thousand years ago. David was warrior, poet, lover, judge, sinner, man of feeling, student of God’s creation. He knew much about himself because of his search to know God. His Psalms are reflective pieces that consider the distance between the Creator and the Creation, between the all-wise and good God and the limited sinful human. God is a shepherd to His people, David wrote, a Father to His children who are repeatedly errant and wayward. These poems are wonderful psychological portraits of the human search for peace and love in a world of conflict and hate.”
“The Psalmist was a historian, recounting God’s plan for Israel, and His providential role in bringing about His ways among the people of Israel. We should all be historians in this regard, seeing God’s providential role in all things, the great and small, in the existence of all things, in our own singular existence as well.”
“Happiness comes from acting according to God’s will. This simple truth is so obvious and necessary, it should so drive all human actions and thoughts, that the alternative should appear nonsensical. And yet the alternative is what drives humans forward in time, confronting the everyday with their own actions, their own will, contrary to God’s will, God’s law.
Other living creatures are not like this. Other creatures live according to God’s will and law. Their choices are restricted to nature’s mandates. They eat, sleep, hunt, live, and die, according to what God has willed. They don’t contrive self-devised opposites, of living in an unnatural way, staving off death as long as possible, eating more than what nature mandates, seeking to break from nature by creating as artificial an existence as possible.
Humans are cursed with the ability to choose. They are cursed with apparent free will. They have convinced themselves that they can order their lives, control their destinies, make choices without (or ignoring the) consequences, tempt fate in so many ways, and live almost as gods. When it all comes crashing down, they are shocked, surprised, horrified, feel ill-used, curse God, fate, or the heavens, all the while taking no responsibility for what they themselves have contrived.
In His law will he meditate day and night . . .
God’s law, God’s word, comes in so many forms, it is impossible, as Paul said in his Epistle to the Romans, to be unaware, or pretend unawareness, of God’s Creation, God’s actions throughout time in human and natural experience. Nature is filled with the writing of God. Human history is a narrative of God’s will. Each life, human as well as others, are contrived by, designed by, God, and it takes very little thought, from humans who are otherwise so reflective and ruminating, to see the hand of God in each day of our existence.
God’s law is natural law, it is the law of the heart and soul, and we scarcely need to be told what is obvious in our deepest intuitions. As Richard Hooker, the Anglican theologian, wrote: “nature teaches men to judge good from evil, as well in laws as in other things” by “the force of their own discretion.” It follows then that “whatsoever we do, if our own secret judgment consent not unto it as fit and good to be done, the doing of it to us is sin, although the thing itself be allowable.”
Hooker said further respecting the laws of God and humans, that God is a law unto Himself, in that He is both the Author of Law and the Doer of Law, both equally in perfection. Human natural and civil laws are learned from nature, learned from God, not original to humans, who perceive disorder and chaos because we are ignorant of God’s true purposes and His eternal laws: all things work according to His will, which is good and perfect.
It follows that all things yearn for what is more perfect, all things therefore yearn for Goodness, and by this yearning, all things are Good. All things therefore yearn for God.
For the Lord knows the way of the righteous; but the way of the ungodly shall perish . . .
As Hooker wrote, “the general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, Nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of Nature, her voice is but his instrument. By her from Him we receive whatsoever in such sort we learn.”
By listening to the voice of reason and the authority of teaching over time we know the Good and are able to withstand the temptations inherent in the passing moments of fads and whims.”
Psalm 9: I will recount all Thy wonderful works . . .
“My deeds are your deeds, just as my being is enwrapped in your Being. The deeds of all humans are expressions of the Deeds of God, for God’s will is supreme; God’s will embraces all human will, all human action. To tell of God’s deeds is to tell the story of human existence. The Greek historia, inquiries into all things, human, natural, and supernatural, is what the human bard, historian, teacher, must tell, by spoken and written words, by thoughts and actions.”
Psalm 18: The Lord will recompense me according to my righteousness, . . . His statutes I did not reject . . .
“Following God’s law, living a life accordingly, in righteousness, is its own reward. Punishment for neglecting God’s will is the consequences of such folly. Impiety never leads to happiness. Contentment does not follow upon sin. Wanton pleasure is its own instantaneous reward; it does not last beyond the moment.”
Psalm 33: The eyes of the Lord are upon those who Fear Him . . .
“To fear God is to trust. To fear God is reliance upon God. To fear God is to love God. To fear God is to accept. No fear is a popular expression among the thoughtless and arrogant, who think they are in control, until they find out they are not. Then fear in the moment comes. Fear in the moment is awareness, it is mindfulness, it is knowing that God’s will is not our wills, that our thoughts are not God’s thoughts. Fear is waiting upon the Lord, patience, silence, peacefulness, watching and waiting upon the Creation.”
Psalm 44: For He it is that knows the secrets of the heart . . .
“God’s will, the Psalmist knows, is active through the heart, the mind and emotions of each person, who knows within, feels within, God’s presence, if not a recognized presence of God, at least a recognized presence of what is true and false, right and wrong, no matter how much a person resists, denies, deceives, sins.”
Psalm 46: Be still, and know that I am God . . .
“Be still in the present, be still in the heart, be still in ambition, be still in wanderlust and restlessness, be still in poverty and humility, be still in sickness and approaching death. Be still, know that God is. God has been, is, will be exalted, above all. Not me, not you. God. Be still, and know that God is your God, God’s will is your’s, God’s being is your being, God alone is sufficient, that you must rely on God, accept God, be still, to cancel the fear. Accept.”
Psalm 47: For God is the king of all the earth . . .
“Nations don’t defend themselves. Nor do humans. I cannot keep away from what is willed for me. If a gun shoots, or a flood floods, or a tornado roars, and I am in the path of bullet, water, or wind, there is little I can do to save myself. I cannot shield myself. I must rely on God, who has all of the shields. God has all of the defenses. Armies and weapons, bombs and jets, guards and armor, are illusory. They cannot hold back the inevitable. They might shield, protect, for a minute. But the inevitable is coming. It cannot be stopped. Death is ever-present. Therefore be still, wait upon the Lord, don’t imagine what cannot be done, don’t engage in fruitless folly, accept God’s will. Accept.”
Psalm 51: Against thee only have I sinned . . .
“Sin is, after all, an act in contrast to the will of God. God’s will is manifest, is thorough and overwhelming; we perceive it, know it in our hearts, and in the choice of the moment, when the weight of fear and flesh drag upon our spirits and our sense of rightness, we sometimes make the false choice, go against God’s will of love and peace, and immediately, even while the sin is taking place, regret it, and feel overwhelming guilt.”
Psalm 67: That men may know Thy way on the earth, Thy salvation among all nations . . .
“The earth’s way is God’s way: nature is a reflection of God’s love. God’s salvation is manifest throughout nature. He saves, that is guides, protects, watches over, loves, all of His creation. All nations, all tribes, not just of humans, but the varied forms of life, are products of God’s Love. Only humans struggle against God’s will. The rest of nature abides by, accepts, God’s will, God’s love and the Creation are wonderfully alive, thriving and bountiful.”
Psalm 94: The Lord is a God of vengeance . . .
“Can this be true? Does the Lord exercise vengeance upon His Creation? What can the Psalmist mean? If by vengeance the Psalmist means that the Lord punishes and condemns His creation, then one wonders what kind of Love this is. Jesus’s Father, as presented in the New Testament, is not the God of vengeance and hatred. The Psalmist reveals in so many of his psalms that he understands God to be Love. Vengeance is therefore a response to those who deny God’s love and deny God’s will and try to circumvent His plan and do what they might for their own ends. They certainly deserve vengeance, that is, punishment. And as Jesus said, they have their reward. They have punished themselves. They have avenged their own wrongs by the folly of their actions and the consequent misery that they bring upon themselves.
The Lord knows the thoughts of men, that they are vain . . .”
Psalm 139
Psalm 142: I cried to the Lord with my voice; with my voice I made supplication to the Lord . . .
“Fleeing Saul, David hid in a cave, waiting. Waiting ostensibly for what Saul would do, David was in truth waiting for what God would do. This psalm is David’s prayer for God’s benevolence.”
Psalm 143:
“The enemy has persecuted my soul; he has brought my life down to the ground; he has made me to dwell in a dark place . . .
Hiding, in pursuit, fearing for his life, are themes of these Psalms, 141, 142, 143, 144. David flees from Saul in his youth, and flees from his son Absalom, who had declared himself king, in his old age. But David did not have to flee from God. Rather, he knew God was there, with him, supporting him, protecting him.
My soul thirst for thee, as a dry land . . .
Even so, knowing the nearness of God, fears of the moment distract even so great a soul as David, so that he is parched, thirsty, waiting for God, wondering where He is. He spends a long night, hoping to “hear Thy mercy in the morning.”
I have fled to Thee for refuge . . .
Here David admits that although he is hiding in a cave, his refuge is not a place, rather God. Only God can save him. Not necessarily from fear, from death. But God can save him so that he acts righteously notwithstanding the many arrows raining down upon him.”
Good ending: Psalm 144: My mercy, and my refuge; my help, and my deliverer; my protector, in whom I have trusted . . .
“A short and complete list of what God is to David, to any person, any creature. God concerns himself with humans, with all of his creation: why?
Lord, what is man, that Thou art made known to him? Or the son of man, that Thou takest account of him? . . .
Humans are temporal creatures, living moment by moment, wrapped up in the concerns of the immediate, the falseness, the vanity, the apparent meaningless, of life.
Man is like to vanity: his days pass as a shadow . . .
The shadow waxes and wanes as the sun crosses the horizon. Daily we see our shadow, then nightly it vanishes. A tale of what humans, all creatures, are like: here today, gone tomorrow. God alone remains, the send the rain, to hide the sun, to crash the bolts of lightning, to bring peace to the storm, to clothe the day with night.
O God, I will sing a new song to Thee . . .
Deliver me from vanity, Lord. Let me sing of You, not me, not others. Let wealth, and appearance, and beauty, and the riches of the land, the fatness of the storehouses, the strength of youth, the bubbles of the moment, not distract me from You.
Augustine, a convert to Christianity who had experienced four seconds of providence in 386 AD, who had become Bishop of Hippo in Africa in 397, who had written an account of his life, Confessions, in 392, who heard as all Romans had of the disaster of the Eternal City falling to Alaric the Goth in 410, who watched as Germanic tribes were overrunning the western empire and the Vandals after 409 were sweeping through Spain into North Africa and approaching Augustine’s diocese of Hippo, who grew old and was facing death in the 420s, was at peace. Knowing that the will of God is behind all things brought him peace.
But who has peace today? Our world is in love with disasters. The news, social media, blockbuster movies feed on the fear people have in the twenty-first century that a disaster–an F-5 tornado, category 5 hurricane, tsunami, terrorist attack, random shooting, nuclear war—will lead to destruction, chaos, death. The end of time. Few of us actually experience such disasters. But the people of the Roman Empire during Augustine’s time did. For the Romans, Rome was civilization. What would succeed civilization but barbarism, evil, and death? But why was this happening? Romans asked, why have the gods forsaken us? And some answered: it is the Christians, who have denied Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and the rest, and focused on only one god. The gods—Neptune, Venus, Athena—are punishing us, and Rome is doomed. Augustine knew differently. “God’s providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind,” he wrote in 426 in his masterpiece, The City of God.
God is behind all earthly events. Providence is eternally active in the affairs of humans, animals, the universe, nature, all things. Such is the thesis of The City of God. Rome falls not because of the anger of the gods but because the one true God wills it. Humans die not because of something they have done but because the one true God wills it. All things, all corporeal life, come to an end. The works of humans, notwithstanding the wonders of architecture, the power of modern technology, will be destroyed in time. But we ask, as did the Romans, why? Why must bad things such as suffering and death happen to the good, the innocent?
The City of God is a deep and complex book, but there is a reason why people have for fourteen hundred years, and still do, read it. In its depth is a simple primer of providence. Pope John Paul II during his papacy wrote extensively on suffering and its validity for Christians; in his works he was echoing the theme of The City of God. Augustine wrote succinctly, God “has willed that these temporal goods and temporal evils should befall good and bad alike, so that the good things should not be too eagerly coveted, when it is seen that the wicked also enjoy them, and that the evils should not be discreditably shunned, when it is apparent that the good are often afflicted with them.” Remember, he declared, that humans are conceived in sin; the good and bad are both punished not because they are equal but because both love temporal existence and must be chastened. Who can argue against this when Christ Himself taught the same lessons? Moths might destroy our finest dresses, our designer suits, but they cannot touch our souls. Augustine throughout his book condemns pagans for doing every kind of hedonistic vice there is, and such hedonism is what led to the destruction of Rome. Hence such hedonism, it is implied, necessitated the coming of Christ the redeemer.
In theory this makes sense, but then we see what the powerful can do, see the privileges of wealth, see the fame that money and power bring, while most of us live our anonymous lives in obscurity. Just think if I was an Instagram influencer or had my own Youtube Channel! Providence is the great equalizer. The great, the rich, the famous, begin to lose hair, develop arthritis in their joints, suffer incontinence and develop cataracts, then the slow painful march towards the end occurs demanding such patience, such faith! God “gives earthly dominion both to good men and to evil . . . in accordance with the order of events in history, an order completely hidden from us, but perfectly known to God himself.” This is why Augustine was at peace. He knew that God was in control, that God is good, that evil is but a departure from ultimate good, thus suffering and death are ultimately, Good.
The skeptic then asks, with good reason: “So are we therefore mere puppets on a string?” Philosophers for millennia have debated the issue of fate and will. One of Augustine’s favorite writers, Cicero, believed that the gods cannot have ultimate control over the future because this would limit free will—and no good Roman would want to admit that he or she was not in charge of their own thoughts and behavior. It is the issue of foreknowledge, which Martin Luther wrote extensively about in the sixteenth century. If God know all things, all events, even those in the future, then by knowing God is willing. No, not right, responded Augustine. God knows “all things before they happen and . . . leaves nothing unordered. From him come all powers, but not all wills.” What does this mean? “We are not afraid that what we do by an act of will may not be a voluntary act, because God, with his infallible prescience, knew that we should do it.”
God does not conform to the either/or: Either God is in control or we are in control. God is in control and we are in control of our own actions–but God knows our actions even before we do them. This was David’s message in Psalm 139. God in His great love will not abandon us to our own ways. Augustine, in the Confessions as well as The City of God, examines the intricacies of Providence per the nature of time. Following St. John, God is the creator of time, and as the creator is not bound by time—He is time. God creates beginning and end simultaneously. God sees past, present, future simultaneously. The son, the Logos, is with God in the beginning, appears in His creation, time, at the Incarnation, leaves His creation, time, at the ascension, and interacts with time as the Holy Spirit until the end. God sees all simultaneously, hence knows all simultaneously. But such is His great love for His creation, His creatures, that He allows them to live in time making their own decisions, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, sometimes living, sometimes dying. But they live and die in the presence of Love, as John so eloquently expressed. God showers Love upon His creatures, and bids them to respond to Him in love. To respond to God in Love is to meet and fulfill what He has providentially determined. To deny God’s love, to distance oneself from God, is to deny His will, His providence, and doom oneself to the consequences of not fulfilling God’s will. God knows the choices we make, has foreseen them, but does not change them, does not pull us back from walking in front of the bus. Rather, walking in front of the bus might be exactly what He wills, in His love, and has foreseen.
But wait! What then is the efficacy of prayer? Augustine wrote: “Prayers are effectual in obtaining all that God foreknew that he would grant in answer to them.” So we are praying for something that God already knows what the conclusion is? “The fact that God foreknew that a man would sin does not make a man sin; on the contrary, it cannot be doubted that it is the man himself who sins just because he whose prescience cannot be mistaken has foreseen that the man himself would sin. A man does not sin unless he wills to sin; and if he had willed not to sin, then God would have foreseen that refusal.”
So yes, humans have free will. Our father knows what we have done, are doing, and will do, and in His Love He has directed us, through His councils, through His scripture, through His church, as to how we should choose to act. If we act according to the ways of God then we are more apt to conform to God’s will, what God wishes us to do through His love. The basic rule, Augustine taught, is simple: Do what Love tells us to do. Do unto others what we would have them do unto us. As Jesus taught, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done”—if we hallow God’s name and act in Love toward God His will will indeed be done.
Providence, the will and presence of God in each moment, is never felt by some people, is felt in moments of joy or consternation by others, is sensed in the minutiae of nature by some, is a product of intense contemplation, a sudden epiphany, in others, is experienced in a dream by some, is sensed by intuitive awareness by others, is seen by some, and is heard by others. Aurelius Augustine, who became Bishop of Hippo, and after death a Saint and a Doctor of the Church, heard the voice of Providence during one intense moment in his life; what he heard during four seconds changed his life.
Aurelius Augustine (354-430 AD) used the story of life to discover what was universally true. Following upon John the Apostle, Augustine conceived of knowledge as a universal transcendent phenomenon understood at particular times and places by the individual knower. Augustine knew this relationship between himself the knower and Knowledge, God, because of “a voice” “within me” that “cries out” to “truth itself.” This personal, temporal realization of Knowledge is what John meant by the word (Logos). Augustine’s more complete portrait of the individual’s experience of the word, that is, Providence, is his Confessions.
Augustine was raised in North Africa near Carthage by a pagan father and Christian mother named Monica. Her son was an intelligent, precocious boy, a genius at rhetoric, but a sensualist as well. He often got into trouble growing up, at one point engaging in the wanton theft and destruction of an apple orchard. Monica meant him to be a Christian, but her son was not attracted to the stories of the Bible, which he found boring and ludicrous; instead, the great humanistic works of the Greeks and Romans interested him.
Augustine lived at a time during which Christianity was a little over three centuries old; it had not been that many years since Christians were mercilessly hunted and tortured by the Emperor Diocletian. Since Constantine’s conversion in 312, the Church had become more secure. Nevertheless paganism, the beliefs in the old Roman and Greeks gods, preoccupied the population more than the new religion, which was however making inroads. Near Eastern religions such as Mithraism and Manicheism were strong competitors with Christianity for the beliefs and loyalties of Romans. Greco-Roman philosophies, too, attracted the attention of the educated, such as the Agnostic Aurelius Augustine.
Augustine was as he grew up the typical Roman of his time. He was a sensualist, drinking and whoring, at the same time as he read deeply in the works of Latin writers such as Cicero, Virgil, and Horace. Cicero in particular attracted Augustine because of his eloquence, mastery of written and spoken Latin, Stoic philosophy, Republican politics, and sophisticated tastes. The extreme diversity of Roman culture, however, confused Augustine, as it did many others, and he engaged in a search by the time he was beginning to teach rhetoric at age twenty-one—the search to know what is true. There were so many different philosophies, mystery religions, and expressions of Christianity in the far-flung empire that encompassed western and southern Europe, north Africa, and the Near East, that Augustine was not alone in feeling confused, and confusion resulted in anxiety. For example, Augustine over the course of a decade or so studied Stoicism, the philosophy of Cicero and Seneca, Manicheism, an eastern philosophy developed by the mystic Mani, and Neoplatonism, a derivative of Plato’s thought developed by the philosopher Plotinus. Stoicism focused on the path to contentment by thought and controlling emotions; Manicheism focused on the path to spiritual enlightenment by controlling the bodily senses and dietary restrictions; and Neoplatonism focused on the path to uncovering the ultimate reality, the One, by a strict focus on the mind. As Augustine studied and taught rhetoric first in North Africa then in Milan, Italy, as he grew famous as a teacher and wealthy so that he could afford to indulge his senses in a variety of ways, he grew increasingly unhappy—and he did not know why he was so unhappy. Why did not success, fame, wealth, a great mind, a great career, lead to happiness? What was the source of happiness?
Living in Milan, Augustine’s mother Monica came to join him, as she was concerned about his anxiety and unhappiness, and she knew that the answer was Christianity. She encouraged Augustine to go to the cathedral to listen to the sermons of Bishop Ambrose. In doing so, Augustine developed a new appreciation for the Bible, especially the writings of St. Paul. He found in Paul’s Epistles a mind like his own, searching for truth even while experiencing anxiety and doubt. But Paul found the truth, the discovery of which eluded Augustine. He grew more restive as his unhappiness grew, and his attempts to alleviate it by drink, sex, philosophy, and work, failed. At a point of crisis, visiting a friend, while in the garden of the friend’s house, Augustine suffered a breakdown. He began to cry uncontrollably that he did not know what is the correct path, how to achieve contentment. Then he heard a voice. “Take if and read . . . Take it and read.” He stopped, listening. Were there children nearby? No. Whose voice did he hear? Was it the wind, his imagination, his nerves speaking? No, it was real, it was an auditory event. But who spoke to him? Augustine had been reading Paul’s Epistles, and a copy of the book was nearby. He thought that he was being beckoned to take the book and read from it. He did: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
The words were directed toward him and his emotional quandary. He knew. A child’s voice had told him to read the solution that he was searching for so vehemently. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Who could have spoken to him but the Lord? It was a child’s voice, yes, a voice of innocence, but a voice of command. Do this, and ye shall be saved, the voice said to him in so many words. In the space of four seconds on a given afternoon in the year 386, God intervened in time to speak His will to Aurelius Augustine. Four seconds of the experience of Providence had saved a disturbed and sorrowful man.
It was a new birth. Shortly thereafter, he was baptized; he joined the Church and put as much energy into his work as he had before in ruminating, doubting, searching, and hungering. He became a priest and then a bishop, all the while thinking of what happened to him, the four seconds that changed him. Knowing the miracle that occurred to an unrepentant sinner, he decided to put into words what had happened to him. The result was The Confessions, completed in 398. What fascinated him the most was how Providence could act in just a moment of time to affect the whole of time. In that four seconds God spoke to his previous thirty-two years of anguish and searching, bringing to an end the moment by moment despair, after which providential moment the future was secured for him. This must be the nature of God, he thought. God is wisdom, intellect, spoken and written truth, creator of all, including time, hence outside of time yet interacting in time. God sees all simultaneously, knows past, present, future, and intervenes at will. He intervened in Augustine’s life at a point when Augustine was ready, when Augustine would hear and respond, realize God’s love and return love to God and His creation.
A life in search of contentment found it. As he wrote in Confessions, “Surely happiness is what everyone wants, so much so that there can be none who do not want it.” Augustine believed that all people know what happiness is because they at one point or another have experienced it. At each moment one yearns for happiness because one has a memory of its experience. What, then, is this experience of happiness? Augustine argued that this experience of God, however fleeting, is the experience of happiness. “True happiness is to rejoice in the truth, for to rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in you, O God.” But how can humans, ignorant because they live in time, know what is timeless, the truth? One’s mind must “be seized and held steady,” Augustine wrote, “for that short moment” so to “glimpse the splendour of eternity which is for ever still.” Time on the other hand “is never still.” God alone is still.
(Quotes from Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin Books, 1961) and Wippel and Wolter, Medieval Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1969).)
A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange
Dorothy Day was a lay missionary. She was not a member of a religious order (although she did become a Benedictine oblate), rather she was a convert to Catholicism who completely embraced the religion to guide her everyday existence according to the Church calendar, liturgy, prayers, and Mass. She believed wholeheartedly in Jesus’ proclamation, according to Luke, that “Blessed are the poor.” She rejected the dominant social/economic philosophies of her time—Socialism, Communism, Capitalism—embracing a philosophy—Personalism—that, she believed, best matched the human with her Maker.
Born to a lower middle-class family in Brooklyn, her father was a journalist who moved his family around as he found different jobs in Oakland and Chicago. Dorothy was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal church. As a teenager she read the Bible and developed a firm foundation of religious faith. But when she attended the University of Illinois, she began to question her religious foundation. She gravitated toward the radical political philosophies in America during World War I and became an anti-war activist and quasi-atheist. She identified herself as a Socialist, writing for Socialist periodicals, following in her father’s footsteps as a journalist. Arrested for protesting in Washington, D. C. for women’s suffrage, she spent a short time in Occoquan prison, becoming familiar with the guidance and solace of the Psalms. But ultimately her radical philosophy turned her away from Christianity. But she could not turn away from God’s ultimate plan.
Living in New York she slowly became attracted to the Catholic church. Dorothy had a variety of love affairs and several marriages; she even experienced the tragedy of aborting a child. In the mid-1920s she was in a common law marriage with Forster Batterham when she became pregnant; he did not want the child, but she did, naming her Tamar. Having the baby inspired in Dorothy religious feelings, and she wanted the child baptized in the Catholic Church. Dorothy soon followed. The Catholic Church, she realized, was the church of the poor, which drew her to it. Dorothy began to be inspired by the New Testament, St. Augustine, St. Teresa de Avila, and in time, St. Therese of Lisieux. She recounts her journey toward converting to Catholicism in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness.
Dorothy met Peter Maurin, a lay member of the De La Salle Brothers and a philosopher on behalf of the European peasantry, in New York in 1932 during the height of the Great Depression. They jointly decided to publish a paper. The Catholic Worker. The first issue appeared in May, 1933. Dorothy and Peter also began to sponsor places for the poor to go for food and shelter, Houses of Hospitality, and soon, farming communes.
During the 1930s Catholicism became second nature to her; she experienced the mystical body of Christ, living her faith wholeheartedly, every day, saying the rosary and daily office. She gravitated toward the liturgy and divine office of the Benedictines, embracing Benedictine hospitality. She was also fascinated by the Franciscans, and imitated them in her view of voluntary poverty, pacificism, and mercy toward others. She also studied Ignatius Loyola and his Spiritual Exercises.
Dorothy became highly critical of capitalism and socialism, choosing instead the philosophy of distributism; the broad gap between the rich and poor disturbed her, and she wanted to see more people able to own their own property. She also embraced the philosophy of personalism, defined as, as she wrote in a 1936 issue of the Catholic Worker:
“We are working for the Communitarian revolution to oppose both the rugged individualism of the capitalist era and the collectivism of the Communist revolution. We are working for the Personalist revolution because we believe in the dignity of man, the temple of the Holy Ghost, so beloved by God that He sent His son to take upon Himself our sins and die an ignominious and disgraceful death for us. We are Personalists because we believe that man, a person, a creature of body and soul, is greater than the State, of which as an individual he is a part. We are Personalists because we oppose the vesting of all authority in the hands of the state instead of in the hands of Christ the King. We are Personalists because we believe in free will, and not in the economic determinism of the Communist philosophy.” (“Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,” Mark and Louise Zwick, p 22, in Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdsmans Publishing Company, 1999).)
In short, Dorothy’s personal philosophy, reflected in her abundant writings, involved human dignity, free will, obedience to God, working for God, subjecting oneself to God’s will, availability of property for all, and adequate wages for each individual to live a life in conformity to God’s will.
She spoke out against society’s exploitation of the poor, governments spending money on arms and war, advertising that tries to fool the poor into seeking what they don’t need—the sin of concupiscence—and employers refusing to pay adequate wages to the poor for his/her work. For Dorothy, one should live one’s life according to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. She also believed in Holy Poverty, giving what one possesses to others, as found in Matthew 25, 31-46: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
Dorothy anticipated Vatican II wishing for the liturgy to be brought to the people, to conform to their needs. She rejoiced in the reforms of Vatican II, wanting Mass to be less artificial, more natural, not conforming to the wealthy, rather conforming to the poor.
She supported worker’s causes, strikes, unions like the United Farm Workers, she opposed child labor, she opposed environmental destruction, she was worried that agribusiness would omit the poor farmers and farm workers. In some sense Dorothy opposed the dangers of economic and social modernization.
She was pacifistic even during World War II, which put her on the FBI watch list. She was opposed to the Vietnam War. Many Catholic Workers burned their draft cards. She believed in taking Christ’s words in the Sermon on Mount, to turn the other cheek, literally. War corrupts youth, she believed, as well as soldiers, helping to cause the horrors of the 1960s, such as the sexual revolution and the widespread experimentation with drug use. War and conscription, she argued, exploits the poor.
Dorothy was a prolific writer, penning not only her many articles and opinion pieces in The Catholic Worker, but a variety of books: On Pilgrimage, a journal of the year 1948 living on a farm in West Virginia with her daughter Tamar and her husband David Hennessey; The Long Loneliness, her autobiography (1952); Loaves and Fishes (1963), about the Catholic Workers Movement; Thérèse, a biography of Thérèse of Lisieux (1960); The Eleventh Virgin, fiction from 1924; Little by Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day (1983).
Dorothy identified the woman’s typical daily life with the life of dedication to Jesus, to a life in conformity of living in the shadow of the Cross.
Dorothy is an example of a Catholic lay missionary, a person who dedicates her life to the Great Commission, spreading the word and love of God to others, strangers, sacrificing themselves to ensure that God’s kingdom triumphs over evil, secularism, and disbelief. She was famous, of course, but there have been many others just like her who have spent their lives in relative anonymity working on behalf of Jesus. Their work often goes unobserved—but not completely. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians, 2:13: “For it is God who works in you to will and to act on behalf of His good purpose.”
A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange
Fanny Allen’s commitment to the Great Commission was not flashy, the stuff of grand tales of perseverance, suffering, and martyrdom—more the everyday, the challenges to faith of family and friends, the renewed commitment time and again, the daily putting on of the Cross to go out among the suffering and the sick to heal them, if not physically, then spiritually.
Fanny Allen, born to revolutionary war hero Ethan Allen and his second wife Francis Montresor Brush Buchanan, was the first native New Englander to become a Roman Catholic nun. She was born and raised in Westminster and Burlington, Vermont; after her father’s death in 1789 she lived with her mother in Westminster before and after her mother’s marriage to Jabez Penniman. Fanny like her father Ethan was uncomfortable with some Protestant doctrines; when she went to Montreal in 1807 to learn French at the Convent School of the Sisters of the Congregation she came under the influence of Catholicism. At the convent she had a conversion experience, as told by her biographer, Bishop Louis De Goësbriand: “On a certain day, one of the Sisters, by a sort of inspiration, asked Fanny Allen to take a vase of flowers which she gave her, and to carry it upon the altar upon which the Holy Sacrament was present, recommending her to adore our Lord Jesus Christ when she would enter the sanctuary. The young lady started smiling, fully intending not to comply with the request; but as she opened the gate of the chancel she felt arrested by an invisible power, and quite unable to move a step. Three times did she endeavor to go up the sanctuary, and three times she failed in her attempt. Surprised and overcome she at last fell on her knees and in the sincerity of her soul adored Jesus Christ, of whose real presence in the Eucharist she then became fully convinced. Immediately after she withdrew to a remote part of the church where she shed abundance of tears and said to herself: ‘After this miraculous occurrence, I must give myself up to my Saviour.’ She, however, did not at once inform her teachers of what had happened, but desired to be instructed, and made up her mind some time after, to go to confession. After she was sufficiently instructed, she made her solemn abjuration [of her previous, Episcopal Church baptism], and was baptized by the parish priest of Montreal, Rev. L. Saulnier. . . . After her baptism she received her first communion, and on this very occasion resolved to embrace the religious life.” (Louis De Goësbriand, Catholic Memoirs of Vermont and New Hampshire (Burlington, VT, 1886, 14.)
Upon returning to Vermont, her mother, stepfather, and friends were shocked to find her conversion to Catholicism; Vermont was, like all of New England, a place in which Protestants had long looked upon Roman Catholics with hatred. “The grief and indignation of her parents knew no bounds. They looked upon it as a most disgraceful infatuation. Peremptorily imposing silence upon her in relation to the subject, they determined to suppress it, if possible, until every means had been used to divert her mind from the fatal delusion.” (Goësbriand, 15) This reminds us of Jesus’ words, according to Luke, “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I have come to divide people against each other. From now on families will be split apart, three in favor of me, and two against—or two in favor and three against.” (Luke, 12, 51-52)
Time passed, during which her mother accepted Fanny’s religious change, and agreed to take her to Montreal where she might find a community of nuns with whom to live. They visited the Church at the Hotel-Dieu of St. Joseph, where Fanny experienced an epiphany: “She hardly cast her eyes upon the painting of the holy family placed behind the great altar and beheld the face of St. Joseph, that she cried out and said to her mother: ‘That is himself. You see, mother, that St. Joseph wishes me to live here, he it was who saved me from the monster. She by these words reminded her mother of an event which had occurred when she was twelve years of age. As she was walking along a river and looking out upon the water which was much agitated, she saw arising out of it an enormous beast of monstrous shape which was coming towards her. In her terror she thought she could not take her eyes from it, nor stir from where she was, when all at once she thought she saw near her a venerable, bald-headed man, wrapped up in a brown cloak, and carrying a stick in his hand, who took hold of her arm, saying : “Little girl, what do you do here? make haste and run away.” At the sound of his voice she recovered her strength and made towards home in a hurry, turning about, however, to see the old man, but he had disappeared. When she reached home, her mother noticing her excited condition and the changed appearance of her features, understood that some extraordinary accident must have happened, and the child told her the best she could and the cause of her terror and the manner of her rescue by the old man.” (Goësbriand, 16.) Fanny immediately resolved to become one of Sisters of St. Joseph of the Hotel Dieu.
Hotel-Dieu of St. Joseph in Montreal had a long and illustrious career when Fanny devoted her life to God. “In Montreal, the mission of St. Joseph on earth was . . . represented by the founding of the Hotel-Dieu, under the charge of the Sisters of St. Joseph. . . . The Sisters of St. Joseph of the Hotel- Dieu are true to the spirit of their first mother, and in their immense and admirable new hospital at the foot of the mountain in Montreal, they nearly always have some patients of Vermont or other New England States. There many are cured, owing, perhaps, more to the prayers and excellent nursing of the sisters than to the skill of their admirable physicians and surgeons. The Sisters of St. Joseph are a cloistered community. In their works of charity they are not encouraged by the hope of being praised by men. The remembrance of St. Joseph ministering to the Son of God, the honor in the sight of God attached to this office, the hope of the greater reward promised to works of mercy, are the chief incentives to their life of devotion.” (Goësbriand, 8-9) Fanny joined the convent in 1808, and there lived for nine years serving the poor and the sick, bringing to them the message of Christ in accord with the Great Commission.
Fanny’s life is illustrative of what often happens when a person goes against comfort and expectation to take on a life-changing task. Fanny’s conversion upset the cohesiveness of family based on traditional ways of worship, challenging her mother’s Protestantism and her birth-father Ethan Allen’s Deism. She followed the will of her heavenly father over the remonstrances of her family and friends, but in so doing she taught her mother, stepfather, and friends that love for God required amazing sacrifices. As Louis Goësbriand related: When “Mr. Penniman and his wife came to Montreal to see her; they visited the monastery in all its details, were surprised to see how happy, contented and perfectly united amongst themselves were the Sisters of this community. They had imagined that Catholic Convents were no better than so many prisons, and they were so pleased with what they saw, that they continually spoke of the happiness of those Sisters, and congratulated the young novice on the choice of life she had made. She also felt so pleased to see her parents free from former prejudices against the religious life, that she seemed to grow more fervent in the service of God, and in the discharge of all the duties of her state. When the time of her profession had come (1810) many of her acquaintances of the United States came to witness this solemn action. They filled the whole chancel, and the church itself was quite full. All the Americans could not but wonder at seeing this young lady of Vermont shut herself up in a convent for the rest of her life.” (Goësbriand, 19) It was truly an eye-opening experience for New Englanders traditionally brought up in an atmosphere of suspicion of Catholicism in general and convents in particular.
Fanny lived out her life in love for others, both her family and friends as well as the mentally and physically ill at the Hotel-Dieu. Her life echoed what Pope Francis recently encouraged healing nuns to do, “to cultivate their service and love for the sick, always with joy and hope, never losing the joy in their hearts, and loving the most fragile persons.” https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2024-10/world-day-mental-health-interview-sisters-hospitaller.html
A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange
Ignatius of Loyola was a soldier for Navarre, Spain, who became a soldier for Christ. Recovering from battle wounds at his family’s castle in Loyola in the Basque region of Spain, he experienced conversion in which he renounced his former sinful ways of war, arrogance, and lust and took up the Cross of poverty, humility, and service to the Lord. He quit the military and renounced his former life, gave away all of his possessions, and became a wandering penitent. He journeyed to Rome and to Jerusalem as a pilgrim and formed a society of brethren in 1534 to serve the poor, which eventually became the Jesuit movement in 1540. Loyola’s SpiritualExercises reveal his faith while the Autobiography reveals his actions taken for Christ.
Loyola wrote the Spiritual Exercises for his disciples to help each individual to achieve freedom of the soul in discovering and conforming to God’s will. Loyola devised a plan of meditation that covered four weeks, more or less, depending on the energy and success of the disciple. The emphasis is on understanding that the role of humans on earth is to praise God; the rest of Creation assists each individual in this task. The individual charts sin and resolves through prayer to vanquish the enemy. The penitent contemplates Christ and His call to all humans to fight for the glory of God. The individual must make humility a work of art, humbling the self to God, rejecting all desire for earthly things, imitating Christ in poverty and suffering. The disciple learns to choose wisely: if God wills it, you accept it, and do it; to acquire knowledge, as to why the choice must be made; to make the choice, the decision to act, during a moment of tranquility. In making a choice, combine imagery and reason—but ultimately the decision rests on reason.
The Exercises require daily close personal examination to commune with God, recognize sin, and eradicate it. In each exercise, the individual imagines the sinful body, imagines the suffering Christ and identifies with Christ’s passion. Loyola’s technique is an active approach to meditation, wherein one contemplates an image and wills a response, merging reason, will, and empathy. The Exercises are an extended form of penance, self-denial in the extreme according to the imagery of Christ’s suffering.
The theme of Loyola’s life as described in his Autobiography was the fight against Satan for the souls of Christ. When he was enduring the pain of recuperation from his battle wounds, and a broken leg had to be set and reset, he learned to be grateful for the intense pain and resultant deformity, as it allowed him to grow in humility and to be a “martyr to his own pleasure.” After his recovery, and his decision to begin a new life, he was overwhelmed by his past sins, and was constantly caught between happiness and sadness, thoughts of redemption and sin; it was as if angels and demons waged war over him. He became obsessed with trying to meet God’s demands for his soul. In 1523 he journeyed to Jerusalem, guided by his soul, guided by visions, even one of Christ, which gave him certainty that he was on the right path. When he returned to Spain he decided to expand his learning, which would bring further spiritual insights. He studied Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard in particular. His teaching of spiritual exercises was brought to the attention of the Inquisition. In 1528 Loyola was at the University of Paris, winning converts because of the Spiritual Exercises. Yet he still felt uncertain and insecure. Once when attending to a plague-stricken person, he touched an infected boil and, terrified of acquiring the sickness but disdainful of his fear, plunged his hand into his mouth. In 1538, in Rome, he completed his Autobiography at the same time that he completed the SpiritualExercises, his journey of body and soul now complete.
By this time Loyola had attracted many followers whom he called a Company of men devoted to Christ willing to share poverty, humility, and danger for the sake of spreading the Good News. The Society of Jesus was constituted by Pope Paul III in 1540. Loyola pledged loyalty to the Pope, organizing his men as soldiers of God without weapons save those of education, charity, spirituality, obedience, poverty, and humility. Loyola, believing in action for the sake of Christianity, inspired his followers, the Jesuits, to journey to far-away places to help others and spread the word of God. Francis Xavier, a Jesuit priest and friend, went as a missionary to China. Other Jesuits traveled to North, Central, and South America. Throughout their history the fervent dedication of the Jesuits has brought anger, jealousy, and suppression. But would Catholicism have been spread so effectively, its roots planted so deeply, in North America, without the work of the Jesuits?
Sources: The Autobiography of Ignatius Loyola, ed. John C. Olin, New York, Harper and Row, 1974; The Spiritual Exercises, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1964.
A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange
The American Plutarch 