Parochial and Plain Sermon
XI: Doing Gory to God in Pursuits of the World
Excerpted by John Hulsman
Scepter 80-82.
“(I)it should be
recollected that the employments of this world, though not themselves heavenly,
are, after all, the way to heaven—though not the fruit, are the seed of
immortality—and are valuable, though not in themselves, yet for that to which
they lead: but it is difficult to realize this. It is difficult to realize both
truths at once, and to connect both truths together; steadily to contemplate
the life to come, yet to act in this….
Now I
am far from denying that a man's worldly occupation may be his cross. Again, I am far from
denying that under circumstances it may be right even to retire from the world.
But I am speaking of cases when it is a person's duty to remain in his worldly
calling, and when he does remain in it, but when he cherishes dissatisfaction
with it: whereas what he ought to feel is this,—that while in it he is to glorify God, not out of it, but init, and by means of it, according to the Apostle's
direction, "not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the
Lord." The Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour is best served, and with the most
fervent spirit, when men are not slothful in business, but do their duty in
that state of life in which it has pleased God to call them.
Now what leads such a person into this mistake is, that he sees
that most men who engage cheerfully and diligently in worldly business, do so
from a worldly spirit, from a low carnal love of the world; and so he thinks it
ishis duty, on the
contrary, not to take a cheerful part in the world's
business at all. And it cannot be denied that the greater part of the world is absorbed in the world; so much so that I am
almost afraid to speak of the duty of being active in our worldly business,
lest I should seem to give countenance to that miserable devotion to the things
of time and sense, that love of bustle and management, that desire of gain, and
that aiming at influence and importance, which abound on all sides... (T)his most fearfully
earthly and grovelling spirit is likely, alas! to extend itself more and more
among our countrymen,—an intense, sleepless, restless, never-wearied,
never-satisfied, pursuit of Mammon in one shape or other, to the exclusion of
all deep, all holy, all calm, all reverent thoughts. This is the spirit in which, more or less
(according to their different tempers), men do commonly engage in concerns of
this world; and I repeat it, better, far better, were it to retire from the
world altogether than thus to engage in it—better with Elijah to fly to the
desert, than to serve Baal and Ashtoreth in Jerusalem….
But surely it is possible
to "serve the Lord," yet not to be "slothful in business;"
not over devoted to it, but not to retire from it. We may do all things whatever we are about to God's glory;
we may do all things heartily, as to the Lord,
and not to man, being both active yet meditative… Thankfulness to Almighty God,
nay, and the inward life of the Spirit itself, will be additional principles
causing the Christian to labour diligently in his calling. He will see God in
all things. He will recollect our Saviour's life. Christ was brought up to a
humble trade. When he labours in his own, he will think of his Lord and Master
in His. He will recollect that Christ went down to Nazareth and was subject to
His parents, that He walked long journeys, that He bore the sun's heat and the
storm, and had not where to lay His head. Again, he knows that the Apostles had
various employments of this world before their calling; St. Andrew and St.
Peter fishers, St. Matthew a tax-gatherer, and St. Paul, even after his
calling, still a tent-maker. Accordingly, in whatever comes upon him, he will
endeavour to discern and gaze (as it were) on the countenance of his Saviour.
He will feel that the true contemplation of that Saviour lies in his worldly business, that as Christ
is seen in the poor, and in the persecuted, and in children, so is He seen in
the employments which He puts upon His chosen, whatever they be; that in
attending to his own calling he will be meeting Christ; that if he neglect it,
he will not on that account enjoy His presence at all the more, but that while
performing it, he will see Christ revealed to his soul amid the ordinary
actions of the day, as by a sort of sacrament. Thus he will take his worldly
business as a gift from Him, and will love it as such.
It is very easy to speak
and teach this, difficult to do it; very difficult to steer between the two
evils,—to use this world as not abusing it, to be active and diligent in this
world's affairs, yet not for this world's sake, but for God's sake.”
Comments: (blogger)
I think it is possible to deepen Newman’s thought here while
following its main thrust. The question one asks is: How is one out of this
world while being most intensely involved in it? The answer, I believe, is in
understanding the dynamic of Christian anthropology, which is at the same time,
the understanding of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
The main thrust of it is to examine chapter 9 of Hebrews
where St. Paul speaks of Christ entering into Holies not with the blood of
bulls and goats, but with His own Blood. That is to say, “if the blood of goats
and bulls and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer sanctify the unclean unto the
cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the
Holy Spirit offered himself unblemished unto God cleanse your conscience from
dead works to serve the living God?” And again, he writes in chapter 10 that “once
for all at the end of the ages, he has appeared for the destruction of sin by
the sacrifice of himself,” meaning that His priesthood as all mediation is not
simply between “this” and “that” but between Himself and the Father for us. The
priesthood of Christ is the gift of Himself. What He is offering is His very “I.”
Made in the image and likeness of the Son, Christian
existence, anthropology itself and the meaning of work take their meaning from
here. John Paul II says it forthrightly in the “pre-introduction” to “Laborem
Exercens” asserting that “only man is capable of work, and only man works, at
the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a
particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a
community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a
sense it constitutes its very nature.”
In the Theology of the Body, John Paul, examining
phenomenologically the experience of the “original solitude” after Adam’s
tilling the garden and naming of the animals, explains work as the cause of this crossing the threshold of
subjectivity and the consequently loneliness at being the only material subject in material creation.
In #6, John Paul writes “as a person he works,
he performs various actions belonging to the work process; independently of
their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity,
to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very
humanity… And so this ‘dominion’ spoken of in the biblical text being meditated
upon here refers not only to the objective dimension of work but at the same
time introduces us to an understanding of its subjective dimension…. This
dominion… refers to the subjective dimension even more than to the objective
one; this dimension conditions the very
ethical nature of work. In fact, there is no doubt that human work has an
ethical value of its own, which clearly and directly remains linked to the fact
that the one who carries it out is a person, a conscious and free subject, that
is to say, a subject that decides about himself.”
In a word, the human person achieves his destiny to
fulfill himself as image and likeness of the Son of God precisely by mastering
himself (the deepest meaning of human
freedom), getting possession of himself so that be able to make the gift of
himself and enter into the divinized relationality of the divine Persons. Said
differently, one “seeks the kingdom of God by
engaging in temporal affairs,”[1]
This has been the lived experience of St. Josemaria Escriva who grounded the
entire spirit of Opus Dei on the experience of divine filiation that emerges
with the enactment of the sacrament of Baptism in the exercise of ordinary
secular work.
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