I was sitting with Andy in Murphy’s Pub on 45th Street in Seattle because it’s a good place to get to know somebody. A mutual friend in California insisted that we should get to know each other, so Andy and I were having a beer and a burger, and going through all the normal who-in-the-world-are-you banter: Where did you grow up? Did you really think “Chicago” deserved Best Picture? Isn’t the weather here great? And, of course, what do you do for a living?
Actually, he already knew I was a Dominican friar and that I teach for the Catherine of Siena Institute. Part of why our friend wanted us to meet was so that Andy could start discerning his charisms. And, in fact, that’s how the question of work came up in the first place. He was describing some of the gifts inventories he’d taken when he was a Protestant, and how he’d never seen the relevance to his life as he actually lived it. He wanted to know how he could really do God’s will. So I asked him how he earned his bread and he told me he was a lawyer for social workers, especially child-care workers, insuring that they could intervene in abusive situations and give the parents the help they needed to become better parents.
I said, “And you think this isn’t doing God’s will?”
He hemmed and hawed, and then started in about his love of movies and how there were so few really good films out anymore, and how it was almost impossible to find a critic who could really say why a film was good or bad. This is a subject dear to me as well, so we had some delightful conversation analyzing the recent Academy Awards. I suggested he could write film reviews, maybe even try his hand at a screenplay. “Yeah, I’d love to,” he said, “but….”
“But…?”
“But it just seems so secular, and I want to do God’s will.”
Sometimes I catch myself thinking or saying something like that: it’s secular, it’s worldly, therefore it can’t be God’s will. It’s a close cousin to another mistaken attitude: “It feels too good, therefore it must be a sin.” And both sorts of thinking make the same mistake: they pit God’s creation against God’s will. And yet, they are so deeply ingrained that, in the moment I am enjoying something most—watching a great movie or swapping jokes with an old friend—I still have to fight off the guilty sense that I’m neglecting God, that the delights of this world impede my intimacy with God.
St. Theresa of Avila, a doctor of the Church, a reformer who enforced strict discipline on herself and her sisters, had no qualms about enjoying the goodness of the world for its own sake. She taught her sisters, “God and chocolate is better than just God.” God could have loved us by making us angels, by giving us a changeless life of seeing his face and receiving his love in a purely spiritual way, but he chose to make us physical, earthly beings and so we receive his love in our bodies as well as our spirits. Chocolate really expresses God’s love for us in a bodily way, a physical way, a secular way.
We cannot separate chocolate (or any other good thing) from the love of God, and if we try we find that even the goodness of the good thing turns bitter in our mouths. We find such bitterness in backhanded compliments, in “strings” attached to gifts, in addictions and compulsions. All these are twisted uses of good things, and any time we twist some good thing to any other goal than love, it turns bitter. This is what theologians call the fruit of sin—the bitterness that results from misusing something good.
But the things of this world are meant to be good and we are meant to use good things to make a better good. This is what God commands the first humans at the beginning of history: to “cultivate the garden and keep it” (Gen 2:15), which means to improve on what God has made. God’s plan from the very beginning was for us to collaborate with him in making the physical world good, to turn a wilderness into a garden, and a garden into a palace.
It is exactly this task which is made so difficult and painful because of the original sin: whatever fruit we bear, we bear with pain, and the earth itself suffers the curse of sin (cf. Gen 3:16-19). But the task is not lifted from us. The world around us is damaged, and so are we, but both we and the world are good things, and our job is to make them as good as we are able.
Nothing we make in this life is perfect, yet, remarkably, some of the things we do are still very good: chocolate is a human invention, as are movies and light rail and bread and wine. And in Christ, who took the fruits of our sins on himself, all the things of this world are brought back to God.
Christ also receives the fruits of our love and gives us his own love, his Holy Spirit, so that our love can be truly powerful, so that we really can make the world a better place. The good things we do and enjoy really are good, and they really are worth enjoying. They are expressions of God’s love, usually expressions of God’s love working through us.
This is what the Second Vatican Council meant when it taught that “The secular character is proper and peculiar to the laity.…By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will” (Lumen Gentium 31). Lay people are still responsible to cultivate and keep the garden, to work and play with the things of this world—the mundane, the earthly, the physical stuff—because this is the way God gives them to participate in his love. We are not angels; our spiritual life is lived in and through our bodies, in this world of changing, imperfect things. God loves us by sending us normal everyday things and people, and God sends us to bring his love to other normal everyday things and people.
When I finished babbling, Andy, of course, hadn’t decided whether to stay in law or move to Hollywood. Admittedly Murphy’s Pub was maybe not the most suitable location for a lecture. On the other hand, Murphy’s Pub is an excellent place for asking tough questions about life, for relaxing and enjoying some music, for tasting a fine micro-brew and a burger with bleu cheese. And although none of these things are heaven itself, they all are little glimpses of it, each in a different way. Because of Christ’s gift to us, everything good, from a hot bath to a well-made law to an Olympic athletic feat, can become an expression of God’s love made incarnate, and made incarnate through our acts of love.