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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 31, 2008
Good works
Much of our labour is in vain, or certainly appears to be in vain.On the eve of another Labour Day, this thought presses in from a number of sources. Several of them are email correspondents I have acquired over the years, so far as I can see, because I am publicly Christian, and they think I am the only “mainstream” journalist likely to understand them. I don’t think I am, but the judgement is theirs, not mine. Each has encountered, in his private life -- or in a couple of cases, public -- nothing but failure in attempting to get e.g. some elementary justice out of various contemporary institutions. I think for instance of a woman whose brother was both falsely and casually accused of serious crimes, by an estranged wife in a child-custody dispute. The brother, also stripped of his income, and in a terrible funk, did little to defend himself. This sister spent huge amounts of her own time and money going to bat for him, against a family court bureaucracy, and up its ladders. Just when she thought she might be getting somewhere, her brother committed suicide. What did she accomplish? This was an American case, incidentally; though from what I know at firsthand, it would be easy to find Canadian equivalents. And, family law is not the only area of jurisprudence today in which, thanks to the intrusion of feminist and other ideologies, a man falsely accused must reasonably expect a miscarriage of justice. But take it as it stands. The woman, who cannot possibly wish to be identified, had also invested much time in counselling her brother against despair. Now she needs someone to counsel her: “You do your best, you work your butt off, and you pray to God for help, and at the end of the ordeal you are left with nothing.” An equally distressing case was reported this week by the media in Italy. Four Franciscan monks, three of them quite elderly, were beaten to a pulp by intruders in the San Colombano Belmonte monastery. They had spent their lives tirelessly in prayer, and in doing charitable works. They laboured and prayed for all souls, quite specifically to spread goodness in the world, to alleviate crime and cruelty. According to the Italian press, “police suspect robbery was the motive,” and yet nothing was reported stolen. The monks were bound and gagged before they were beaten. Their attackers “unleashed an incredible level of violence against them," according to an informant to Corriere della Sera. "It was wild and gratuitous violence because they did not resist the attack at all." Several journalists invoked the old movie, A Clockwork Orange. Last week in this space I was discussing good and evil as concepts in themselves; they could certainly be applied in the instances above. I could say, perhaps a little cheaply, that if police and media cannot recognize an act of gratuitous evil in the attack on the monks, they must be rather thick. But it would be cheap because we are all pretty thick, and any reasonable human mind looks at such an event, and reaches for some explanation more credible than “the pleasure in doing evil of itself.” For evil would not be evil were it not intrinsically incredible. But that was an aside. My point for Labour Day is instead about wasted effort. I take it we labour to some good end, if it is only to earn a paycheque; and at our best, we labour to advance some good, larger than ourselves; or to defeat some evil, perhaps also larger than ourselves. And the truth is that our labour very often comes to nothing, or worse: that for all our work we end short of the point from which we started. Often enough, we may reasonably blame our own stupidity, but sometimes -- as in the cases above -- no genius could have helped us. We tried to negotiate Cape Horn, and the wind blew us backwards. But labour, in a vocation, whatever that be, is the condition not only of human life generally but of life within a society with its divisions of labour. And so long as we are in possession of a human heart, it tells us to get up in the morning -- “for the night cometh when no man can work.” And the intention of accomplishing something is there. Among my Christian readers, I often hear the complaint, “And I have prayed, but God is not listening.” They will not go wrong by reading the Book of Job, or the more recent diaries of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. We must begin by removing our own presumption, and end, like Christ, in embracing our fate. For readers who are not Christian, and have no formation in any other responsible religious tradition, there is nothing to fall back upon but a gritty stoicism. (I watch my mother apply it in the nursing home where she now lives, and she is tough, but sometimes circumstances are tougher.) The "message" of Labour Day is to continue working: for the good, and against evil. There is no alternative. Our task is to hang in, like faithful soldiers, through all the squalour of this world, till death.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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