Foolproof against Nothingness
Last Sunday, at the small parish in the mountain village where I was on vacation, they sang – remarkably – all nine stanzas of Isaac Watts’s famous hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” It was sung as the closing hymn, putting to the test those parishioners most stalwart about not leaving for their cars until the singing is over.
You remember the bit about “time like an ever-rolling stream.” But I wager you have never sung these lyrics:
The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
And lost in foll’wing years.
Lugubrious? Yes, and yet also true. Most of us are forgotten soon after we die, certainly so in our work. If we are fortunate, children and grandchildren will remember us in their prayers. But even the most pious among us do not pray for our great-great-grandparents.
That hymn is beloved because it invites us to look at our material strivings from God’s point of view. We see that everything like that, which we take to be important now, will be reduced to nothingness. This should free us from care – “is not life more than food and clothing” – if we throw ourselves upon God.
That’s an important if. Bertrand Russell, in his book The Conquest of Happiness, describes an atheist’s technique, an analogue of the hymn: “When some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen. Having looked this possible misfortune in the face, give yourself sound reasons for thinking that after all it would be no such very terrible disaster. Such reasons always exist, since at the worst nothing that happens to oneself has any cosmic importance.” Elsewhere, he counsels: think of how insignificant your care will appear a hundred years from now.
That technique, however, makes good disappear as well as bad. Without God, all the persons in our lives, and all our goods, have no cosmic importance. Life would be “a tale, told by an idiot.” Nihilism would be justified. A hundred years from now, your spouse will be of no importance. Go out two hundred, and your child is not. Go out a thousand, and your country is not. Everything valuable is carried downward by the flood and “flies forgotten as a dream.”
We know that in Christ we’re promised eternal life. But what about immunity from the loss of any good? Suppose someone said, “Here’s a special word, and if you say this word while doing something good, then the value of that good thing won’t be swept away by time, but will be preserved forever.” Wouldn’t you be keen to know that word and be sure to use it?
It would be like so many other things in Christianity: for just about no effort, we can acquire great good, and all we need to do is not neglect the proffered means. Each day in Christian life we face a situation like that of Naaman, a general of the King of Aram, who was looking to be cured of his leprosy, and all he needed to do was bathe in the river seven times. (2 Kings 5)
I am speaking about offering up the good things in our life to God. Of this, St. John Vianney said, “Oh, what a beautiful thing it is to do all things in union with the good God! Courage, my soul; if you work with God, you shall, indeed, do the work, but He will bless it; you shall walk, and He will bless your steps.”
So far, he speaks of blessing. But then he turns to the preserving: “Everything shall be taken count of, the foregoing of a look, of some gratification – all shall be recorded.”
In his Catechism, the saint even uses the possibility of offering something up as a test of its goodness. (He was tough on dancing. But that edgy TV series you find so captivating to watch – will God be pleased with your watching it, as an offering?)
The saints have recognized two key times when that “special word” can be uttered so as to take within its scope every thought, word, and deed throughout the day – namely, in a “morning offering,” and at the Holy Mass.
Morning offerings can be short and sweet, and probably should be for a layperson. I love a couple of aspirations of St. Philip Neri: “Lord, today is the day I begin!” and “O Lord, keep Thy hand this day over Philip; if Thou do not, Philip will betray Thee.” But these are not, strictly, offerings.
The most beautiful one I know is by St. Mechtilde, the astonishing 13th -century Benedictine nun, and probably the lady, Matelda, who is praised for her exalted wisdom by Dante in Purgatorio. The key lines of her prayer are:
Only Beloved of my soul, I offer Thee my heart as a flowering rose, the pleasantness of which may attract Thine eyes the whole day, and the fragrance of which may delight Thy Divine Heart.
I offer Thee, also, my heart, that Thou mayest use it as a cup, from which Thou mayest drink the sweetness of Thine own Self, together with all that Thou mayest deign to work in me during this day.
Moreover, I offer Thee my heart as a pomegranate, of exceeding sweet savor, and fit for Thy royal banquet, by eating which Thou mayest so transfer it into Thyself, that for the future it may happily feel itself within Thee;
and, at the same time, I pray that every thought, word, work, and all my will may be this day directed according to the good pleasure of Thy most gracious Will.
Mechtilde reported that after Jesus dictated this prayer, he added: “Repeat this word at each of thy actions, when thou beginnest them. . .and have confidence in God, that the work which thou art then doing can never perish.”
The word of the Lord endures above the ever-rolling stream.
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