St. Michael's Lent 2026 - Reading #20 - Worship
Reading
All men desire to be happy — but who are happy, and how? Augustine will not waste the season rehearsing every school.
He writes, "It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men desire to be happy. But who are happy, or how they become so, these are questions about which the weakness of human understanding stirs endless and angry controversies, in which philosophers have wasted their strength and expended their leisure. To adduce and discuss their various opinions would be tedious, and is unnecessary."
The live question is simpler: many gods, or the one true God?
He presses on, "The reader may remember what we said in the eighth book, while making a selection of the philosophers with whom we might discuss the question regarding the future life of happiness, whether we can reach it by paying divine honours to the one true God, the Creator of all gods, or by worshipping many gods, and he will not expect us to repeat here the same argument, especially as, even if he has forgotten it, he may refresh his memory by reperusal. For we made selection of the Platonists, justly esteemed the noblest of the philosophers, because they had the wit to perceive that the human soul, immortal and rational, or intellectual, as it is, cannot be happy except by partaking of the light of that God by whom both itself and the world were made; and also that the happy life which all men desire cannot be reached by any who does not cleave with a pure and holy love to that one supreme good, the unchangeable God."
Worship is that cleaving.
Reflection
The midpoint of St. Michael's Lent. Three weeks of clearing ground — the watch set, the grip loosened, the false gods named — and now the season turns from tearing down false worship to building up the true. Cleave is a marriage word, and that is not an accident. Worship is not one activity among your others, an hour filed between errands. It is the cleaving of a life to its supreme good, and every man does it. The only question is the object.
Whatever you cleave to under pressure, whatever you reorganize the week around, whatever you would call happiness if it arrived — that is the thing you worship, whatever your Sunday schedule says.
So the second half of the season begins with an inventory a father must run on himself before he can lead anyone else's prayer: what does my household see me cleave to? Children learn worship the way they learn language — by immersion in whatever the house actually reveres. Before the week asks how to worship rightly, it asks the harder thing: admit what you worship now.