Labor Day Weekend-Gratitude For Our Life's Work

Thomas Aquinas

Labor Day Weekend is an invitation to take pride in and be grateful for our work.  Whatever your life’s work, do it well! Isn’t that what holiness is all about. Each of us has a mission. Look at the news about people pitching in to help hurricane and flood victims in Texas and Louisiana.

Today I would like to highlight a stellar 13th-century thinker whose work as a spiritual guide remains relevant. Thomas Aquinas can mentor us: about our true purpose, our spiritual life and our relationship with God.

Born in 1226, Thomas joined the Dominicans, the Order of Preachers, completed his studies at the University of Paris, became a renowned professor and preacher, and constructed a “Summa Theologiae,” a comprehensive study of the Christian faith. Faith is a gift from God; it's also a risk but a reasonable one, Thomas argued. Yes, faith and reason, Thomas contended, are compatible.

Thomas’s monumental summary examines 512 questions, many of which we ourselves might ask. His process (the so-called article) is rigorous: the question (for example, whether there's a God); arguments against and for; the author's own point of view; and a reply to arguments with which the author disagrees. Colleges and universities today would be well served with a process like Thomas’s in debates about important issues.

Sacraments especially, for Thomas, are tangible encounters with the living Christ. By tangible, he means involving our senses. And by encounter, Thomas means a meeting in which the living Christ communicates with us personally: as he did with people centuries before. The sacraments may be grouped as follows:
Initiation (Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist);
Healing (Reconciliation, Anointing of the Sick); and
Commitment (Marriage and Holy Orders).

Thomas died in 1274, but his work endures. A theologian par excellence, his writings demonstrate that there are reasonable arguments for believing in God. Thomas was also a mystic who experienced God in prayer, and a poet whose hymns are still sung today, for example, “O salutaris Hostia and “Tantum ergo Sacramentum.”

Yes, St. Thomas Aquinas invites us to discipline our lives so that we can nurture and appreciate our faith. I offer for your consideration this prayer of his:
“Grant me, O Lord my God,
a mind to know you,
a heart to seek you,
wisdom to find you,
conduct pleasing to you,
faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and
a hope of finally embracing you.”
Amen.