By Michael Pakaluk
But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight – Thursday, July 16 at 8 PM Eastern – to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the ongoing SSPX saga, synodality, and other current issues in the Church and the world. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.
Now for today's column...
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 recor...
