By Michael Pakaluk
Last Sunday, in the small parish of the mountain village where I was on vacation, they sang—surprisingly—the nine stanzas of Isaac Watts’s famous hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” It was sung as the final hymn, testing those parishioners most steadfast in not heading to their cars until the singing was over.
You surely remember the part that speaks of “time like an ever-rolling stream.” But I bet you have never sung these verses:
The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their cares and fears,
Are carried downward by the flood,
And lost in following years.
Gloomy? Yes, and yet also true. Most of us are forgotten soon after we die, certainly as far as our work is concerned. If we are lucky, our children and grandchildren will remember us in their prayers. But even the most devout among us do not pray for our great-great-grandparents.
That hymn is much loved because it invites us to view our earthly endeavors from God’s perspective. We see that everything we now consider important will be reduced to nothing. This should free us from anxiety—“is not life more than food and clothing?”—if we entrust ourselves to God.
That is an important “if.” Bertrand Russell, in his book The Conquest of Happiness, describes an atheistic technique that is analogous to 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 not be such a very terrible disaster. Such reasons always exist, since at the worst nothing that happens to oneself has any cosmic importance.” Elsewhere he advises: think how insignificant your worry will seem in a hundred years.
That technique, however, makes both good and bad disappear. Without God, all the people in our lives and all our goods lack cosmic importance. Life would be “a tale told by an idiot.” Nihilism would be justified. In a hundred years, your spouse will have no importance. Go to two hundred, and your child will not either. Go to a thousand, and neither will your country. Everything of value is carried downward by the stream and “flies forgotten as a dream.”
We know that in Christ we are promised eternal life. But what about immunity from the loss of any good? Suppose someone told you: “Here is a special word, and if you say this word while doing something good, then the value of that good deed will not be swept away by time, but will be preserved forever.” Would you not be eager to learn that word and make sure to use it?
It would be like so many other things in Christianity: almost without effort we can acquire a great good, and all we need to do is not neglect the means offered. Every day in the Christian life we face a situation like Naaman’s, a general of the king of Aram who sought to be cured of his leprosy, and all he had to do was wash in the river seven times. (2 Kings 5)
I mean offering the good things of our life to God. Of this, Saint Dominic Savio or Saint John Vianney—the Curé of Ars—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 will certainly do the work, but He will bless it; you will walk, and He will bless your steps.”
So far, this speaks of blessing. But then it turns to preservation: “Everything will be taken into account, the denial of a glance, of some gratification; everything will be recorded.”
In his Catechism, the saint even uses the possibility of offering something as a test of its goodness. (He was hard on dancing. But that provocative television series that so captivates you—will God be pleased that you watch it, as an offering?).
The saints recognized two key moments in which this “special word” can be pronounced so as to encompass every thought, word, and action throughout the day: namely, in the “morning offering” and at Holy Mass.
Morning offerings can be short and simple, and probably should be for a layperson. I love a couple of ejaculations from Saint Philip Neri: “Lord, today is the day I begin!” and “O Lord, keep your hand this day upon Philip; if you do not, Philip will betray you.” But these are not, strictly speaking, offerings.
The most beautiful one I know is from Saint Mechtilde, the astonishing thirteenth-century Benedictine nun, and probably the lady, Matelda, who is praised for her sublime wisdom by Dante in the Purgatorio. The key lines of her prayer are:
Sole Beloved of my soul, I offer Thee my heart as a rose in bloom, whose beauty may attract Thine eyes throughout the day, and whose fragrance may delight Thy Divine Heart.
I also offer Thee my heart, that Thou mayest use it as a cup, in which Thou mayest drink the sweetness of Thine own Being, together with all that Thou dost deign to work in me during this day.
Moreover, I offer Thee my heart as a pomegranate, of a flavor most sweet and worthy of Thy royal banquet, that in eating it Thou mayest so transform it into Thyself that, henceforth, it may happily dwell within Thee;
and, at the same time, I beseech Thee that every thought, word, deed, and all my will may be directed today according to the good pleasure of Thy most gracious Will.
Mechtilde recounted that after Jesus dictated this prayer to her, He added: “Repeat this word in each of your actions, when you begin them… and have confidence in God, that the work you are then doing can never perish.”
The word of the Lord remains above the ever-rolling stream.
About the author
Michael Pakaluk, a specialist in Aristotle and Ordinary of the Pontifical Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, is professor of Political Economy at the Busch School of Business of The Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their children. His collection of essays, The Shock of Holiness (Ignatius Press), is now available. His book on Christian friendship, The Company We Keep, is now available from Scepter Press. He contributed to Natural Law: Five Views, published by Zondervan last May, and his most recent book on the Gospel came out with Regnery Gateway in March, Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel. You can follow him on Substack at Michael Pakaluk.