St. Michael's Lent 2026 - Reading #36 - Peace
Reading
Same earthly goods — two aims. Families without faith and families that live by faith use the mortal world differently.
"But the families which do not live by faith seek their peace in the earthly advantages of this life; while the families which live by faith look for those eternal blessings which are promised, and use as pilgrims such advantages of time and of earth as do not fascinate and divert them from God, but rather aid them to endure with greater ease, and to keep down the number of those burdens of the corruptible body which weigh upon the soul. Thus the things necessary for this mortal life are used by both kinds of men and families alike, but each has its own peculiar and widely different aim in using them."
Pilgrim use, or captive fascination.
He names the two peaces: "The earthly city, which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes, in the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and rule, is the combination of men's wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life. The heavenly city, or rather the part of it which sojourns on earth and lives by faith, makes use of this peace only because it must, until this mortal condition which necessitates it shall pass away."
Use earthly peace; do not enthrone it.
Reflection
Here is the mature balance the final week asks of you, because two temptations flank every Christian household. One is assimilation: pursuing exactly what the neighbors pursue — house, comfort, security, status — with a Sunday hour appended; a family of the earthly city with religious trim. The other is a false spiritualism that despises the ordinary goods, as if the mortgage, the soccer schedule, and the retirement account were beneath a serious Christian.
Augustine blesses neither. The pilgrim family holds real goods with real gratitude and zero fascination, uses the world's peace without worshiping it, and remains unmistakably en route.
Your children should be able to tell, from inside your ordinary American life, that this family is going somewhere — that all of it, the house, the table, the work, is provisioning for a journey whose destination is not on any map they will study in school.