I was young when I first heard the murmurings of a fear that I still carry around with me. It’s rooted in a vision of the world that I do not actually think will come to pass, but that I can’t help picturing every spring. “What if,” the fear will hiss in my ear. “What if this is the year that nothing greens or grows. No grass, no flowers, no leaves on the trees. What if the landscape stays as stripped and lifeless as a body on a cross, as a hideous mirror held up to your soul?”
So, yeah, I’m Catholic. I’m also having a hard year, which might be why the fear arrived early. I was at my desk in the Hudson Valley on a sunny winter day, taking in the desiccated world beyond my window, when the fear crawled out and said, “What if. … ” It’s embarrassing to admit that I’m annually waylaid by this irrational, apocalyptic fear. My fear was a sign of how little hope I had in the prospect that the world would renew itself. Anyway, I shuddered.
Maybe you, too, have an unreasonable fear that is leaching the color from your life. Maybe you remedy this through walking, meditation or therapy. I recommend picking a saint to help you. The “saint” doesn’t have to be a literal, official Catholic one — they can be anyone who rejected a life of maximal self-interest in favor of radical service, someone whose commitment to the rigors and contradictions of doing good in this world can show you how to live in it. My saint is Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century soldier turned Carmelite friar. He had a gift for savoring dull chores, like peeling vegetables and washing pots, which he did for most of his time on Earth.
He and I found each other in “The Saints’ Guide to Happiness,” by Robert Ellsberg. Ellsberg makes a heartfelt argument for setting aside the common view of saints as “flawless people from long ago who performed miracles” or courted martyrdom. There are more than 10,000 names on the Catholic Church’s list of saints. A quick look yields not only irreproachable clerics and martyrs but also dentists, barbers and even a pious pharmacist. For Ellsberg, what makes these men and women interesting is that they are all human beings who suffered like the rest of us but did not wallow in misery. What marks a saint is exuberance and compassion, inner balance and commitment to a meaningful vocation.
Growing up Catholic, I was surrounded by saints — in stained glass, stone and story. Choosing a favorite was as natural for me as picking a favorite baseball player. (Tom Seaver, for the record.) As a young man, I was knocked out by St. Teresa of Avila, a 16th-century nun who broke with the spiritual laxness that she saw around her. She traveled across Spain to found her own Carmelite convents, prevailing on her nuns to live in prayer and penance as reparation for the sins of all mankind. There were no small ambitions for Teresa and her followers.
She was both of this world and an exuberant mystic: When struck by the sensation that the power of God’s love was about to lift her off the ground, she would command bystanders to sit on her and hold her down. Her success made her famous and drew the attention of the Spanish Inquisition. In a fiery letter to King Philip II, Teresa says the accusations of scandal leveled against her would be laughable were they not a “stratagem of the devil.” In the end, she prevailed. She was my kind of hero: shrewdly histrionic and ready for a fight, with enough power that even the pope didn’t want to mess with her.
Now I’m older; Brother Lawrence is more my speed. He was a French peasant who joined the army to escape poverty and found himself plunged into the slaughter of the Thirty Years’ War. He was captured and suffered an injury that left him permanently disabled. After that, he found safe harbor at a monastery in Paris. Ellsberg says that “in a community replete with learned souls,” Brother Lawrence, assigned to seemingly menial work like working in the kitchen and repairing sandals, “was not apt to attract attention.” One day, though, a visiting clergyman who fell into a conversation with Brother Lawrence left assured that he had met a spiritual master. Through his labors, Brother Lawrence had learned to be what we might now describe as “present” — or, as he would say, to turn his life of toil into a long, unbroken prayer in honor of God’s world. He is said to have written that even the smallest labor could be an act of praise. “We can do little things for God,” he wrote. It was a simple way of deepening the meaning of his labor.
Pursuing my own fraught labors, I sometimes still feel anxious. But Brother Lawrence is with me. On good days, his practice offers relief from constant worries over deadlines and money. While I don’t exactly share his faith, I let him remind me to breathe. To pay attention as I fetch the mail or pour nuggets of cat food into a bowl that is robin’s-egg blue. That’s often just enough to keep the anxiety from spiraling into fear. Ellsberg writes, “There is no work — as long as it is not harmful or dishonest — that cannot be ‘hallowed,’ that cannot serve as … a path to happiness.” I cling to that idea. It reminds me to bring a bit of reverence to my work.
I also like thinking about how Lawrence, like me, had a youthful vision that stuck. Except his was the inverse of mine: Out walking in winter and stopping before a bare tree, he was flooded with the truth that in a little while it would be putting forth leaves and generating blooms that would bear fruit. That the movement of the seasons is a promise we can count on. A resurrection, if you will.
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