Our Brothers (and Sisters) Ain’t Heavy

Lesson 5

Christ’s yoke is light when we help each other to carry it.

Question 5

Are we our brothers’ keepers?

Thomas answers that . . .

“It is written (Matt 22:39): ‘The second commandment is like this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ . . . This precept is fittingly expressed, for it indicates both the reason for loving and the mode of love. . . . Nor does it matter whether we say ‘neighbor’ or ‘brother’ according to 1 John 4:21, or ‘friend’ according to Leviticus 19:18, because all the words express the same affinity.”

— Summa Theologica II-II, 44, 7

Homini Homo Lupus Est?

Question 5 paraphrases Cain, who answered God’s question about his slain brother Abel’s whereabouts, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). The question in this section’s heading — meaning “Is man wolf to man?” — is a Latin proverb going back at least to an ancient Roman play by Plautus from the fifth century B.C. The full line reads that a man is like a wolf to a stranger, to a man he has not met. Of course, Abel was no stranger to Cain, but his very brother. Consider, too, that Abel was a shepherd who protected sheep from wolves, while Cain slaughtered Abel as a wolf does a sheep.

The significance of this Latin proverb has been debated throughout the centuries. The seventeenth-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes would write, for example, that men are like men to other men within their own cities or societies but are like wolves to outsiders. The highly influential twentieth-century Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud would declare that human beings are not gentle beings seeking love but are aggressive beings who see others as possible helpers or sexual partners, as well as objects for their aggression in the form of robbery, humiliation, sexual and other forms of abuse, torture, and even murder. Indeed, he concludes his ponderings on the subject in his Civilization and Its Discontents with that Latin proverb — Homini homo lupus!

Unfortunately, though psychiatry and clinical psychology have, in our time, moved far from Freud in many respects, Freud’s theories on human nature have remained far more well known and influential than those of St. Thomas Aquinas. Freud declared that deep within man lies a cauldron of seething passions. Our ids would rein over us with rampant passions for lust and violence, if not feebly restrained by our fragile egos and the culture-bound restraining niceties of our superegos. Deep down, the id is us. Why should I, says Freud, be my brother’s keeper? He would just as soon do me harm. Yes, there we go again: homini homo lupus!

Six hundred years before Sigmund, Thomas wrote extensively about our passions and animal appetites as well, including the concupiscible appetite through which we desire the things that we love and bring us pleasure (food and sex most prominently at the physical level), and through the irascible appetite, in which our ire (anger) can motivate us to battle against things that we hate, things that serve as obstacles to our obtaining what we love. We see these appetites clearly in the behaviors of predatory animals, such as wolves. They spend much of their lives seeking out food, mates, and territories (which provide access to food and mates), and most of their aggression against each other involves conflicts over those very things. On these basic facts I think Freudians and Thomists would agree, but Thomas proffers different principles that make all the difference.

For one thing, the human tendency to have difficulty in controlling our more animalistic appetites lies in the fact that we are fallen creatures, due to the lingering effects of Original Sin, courtesy of Cain and Abel’s parents, the parents of us all. Further, while Freud wrote of the ego and the superego as relatively weak and ineffective components of our psychology in comparison with the animalistic id, Thomas, echoing Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, including the Stoics, highlighted the fact that humans are the uniquely rational animal, and our unique God-given powers of reason can be developed by our own efforts, and perfected with God’s grace, to give us significant mastery over our animal impulses.

Further, through our reason and God’s revelation, we can discern moral laws and objective standards of moral behavior that transcend the fragile Freudian superego, supposedly composed merely of contemporary moral rules and prohibitions inculcated in us by our parents and society at large when we are young children. Indeed, this capacity to use our reason to find objective truths and moral principles, and to help rein in our animal passions, is the very stuff of the virtues. Virtues perfect our rational powers to obtain truth, to regulate our sexual and aggressive behaviors, and to treat others not with lust or aggression, not as potential victims or burdens, but as fellow beings made in the image and likeness of God, worthy of brotherly love. Indeed, to modern psychology’s credit, in recent decades a growing appreciation of “cognitive therapies” that focus on the power of reason to regulate emotion, and even therapies that focus on the development of virtues themselves, have indeed moved us away from the Viennese doctor and toward the Angelic Doctor!

So, although we may well still harbor tendencies and temptations to act wolfishly at times, we can never legitimately treat others badly and claim that our ids, let alone the devil, made us do it!36 Further, the Angelic Doctor can help us build the kinds of virtues that can help us slam shut the lids on our ids and shoo away our wolfish ways, as we will see in detail a few sections down the road.

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

This phrase is the title of an incredibly poignant song from the 1960s, and it has had even more significance to me because of a visit to Omaha, Nebraska, in 2016. It was then and there that I learned a story that occurred about a hundred years before. In 1918, a boy named Harold Loomis had been left by his mother at an orphanage. His young body was ravaged with polio, and he wore heavy leg braces, which made walking difficult and going up and down stairs particularly burdensome. It wasn’t long before several other orphan boys started taking turns carrying Harold up and down the stairs on their backs. One day, the director of the orphanage asked one Reuben Granger if carrying Harold was hard. Reuben replied, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”

Many years later, in 1943, the director saw a photo in a magazine of a boy carrying another boy on his back with the caption, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” He wrote the magazine, requesting permission to use the photo and the caption, which went on to achieve worldwide renown as the image and motto of that orphanage. The director was Father Edward J. Flanagan (1886–1948) and that orphanage was, and is known to this day, as Boys Town — though now they provide their residential care to young girls as well.

What a wonderful life lesson is captured in that phrase! Christ told us to take up our crosses and follow Him (Matt. 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23; 14:27). At times, we must suffer like Christ — even little children, such as those in Boys Town who could not be raised by their parents. And yet Christ also told us that He would give us rest, for His yoke is easy and His burden is light (Matt. 11:28–30). St. Aelred of Rievaulx (a medieval Cistercian) expanded on this passage as follows:

Yes, his yoke is easy and his burden light: therefore you will find rest for your souls. This yoke does not oppress, but unites; this burden has wings, not weight. This yoke is charity. This burden is brotherly love.37

When the boys of Boys Town put on their “yokes” and took the burden of Harold on their backs, they reported in their own words that he was not heavy at all, in their most touching and graphic display of brotherly love. Harold was uplifted by the love of his spiritual brothers, and certainly each of them was uplifted spiritually as well, by following what Christ said was the second greatest of all the commandments: to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) has also chimed in on this loving theme. God has given us our neighbors as a means to show our love for Him, and this love should be displayed especially to those “close at hand, under your eyes, as to whom, I say, you are all obliged to help one another by word and doctrine, and the example of good works, and in every other respect in which your neighbor may be seen to be in need.”38 So important is this love of neighbor that the Father spelled it for her in a mystical experience in these thought- and love-provoking words:

I could easily have created men possessed of all that they should need both for body and soul, but I wished that one should have need of the other, and that they should be My ministers to administer the graces and the gifts that they have received from Me.39

So then, we are indeed intended to be our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers. We are not to be like wolves to one another, or even, strictly speaking, merely like men or women, but we are called to be like God, loving and ministering to one another as He loves and administers grace to each one of us, and loving one another through our love of Him, and as a means of expressing our love for Him, who gave life both to us and to our neighbors. But what kinds of sins can keep us from living this beautiful life lesson? To these we now turn.

The Burden of Inordinate Self-Love

St. Thomas notes that, in a general sense, “it is evident that inordinate self-love is the cause of every sin” (I-II, 77, 4). We sin whenever we choose limited, earthly goods that will bring us pleasure, ease, or some kind of temporal satisfaction even though they are immoral and oppose God’s laws. Such choices show that we love our lower selves more than we love God. St. Catherine reports how God expounded on this lesson to her:

Self-love, which destroys charity and affection and affection towards the neighbor, is the principle and foundation of every evil. All scandals, hatred, cruelty, and every sort of trouble proceed from this perverse root of self-love, which has poisoned the entire world, and weakened the mystical body of the Holy Church, and the universal body of believers in Christian religion; and therefore, I say to you, that charity gives life to all the virtues, because no virtue can be obtained without charity, which is pure love of Me.40

St. Catherine lived in the fourteenth century, another troubled time for the world and the Church, with a multitude of sorrows from wars, to plagues, to scandals and schisms rending the Church apart. Undaunted, St. Catherine wrote to bishops and popes and played no small part in restoring some measure of unity. In fact, she is known as the “Doctor of Unity.” In many ways, our time is like hers. We need merely look at the daily headlines to find scandal after scandal, within and outside the Church, caused by perverse self-love that seeks to satisfy desires for sexual pleasure and power over others, sometimes through the most heinous of acts. And sadly, as the twentieth century brought forth the splendor of loving charity directed to the orphaned and troubled boys of Boys Town, in the twenty-first century, we have heard numerous stories of boys and young men (and some girls and women too) who have suffered abuse at the hands of those entrusted as God’s shepherds, who have acted instead like Satan’s wolves.

Precisely because the facts of widespread clerical abuse of children and adults are so disturbing, we must strive more than ever to live this chapter’s life lesson to show all the victims Christ’s love. We must always be on the alert to share such love with everyone we meet, simply because Christ bids us to do so, bearing in mind as well that those whom we happen to meet, and perhaps even some we know well, may have suffered some form of abuse in their past of which we have no knowledge. Our call with this lesson is to love our neighbors and to strive to lighten whatever kinds of loads they might carry. We will be far better suited to do this when we work to quash our inordinate self-love, in whatever form it might take.

Removing the Crushing Yoke of the Big Green Monster Inside Us

Years ago, in suggesting a vivid memory image41 for the deadly sin of envy, I suggested the image of a man with a face as green as that of the big green fictional monster and superhero the Incredible Hulk. The suggestion for this striking, hopefully memorable image simply built upon the common phrase of a person being “green with envy.” Envy has been called a “just vice,” not because it promotes the virtue of justice that we just examined, but because the unpleasant emotions associated with envy serve as their own automatic, built-in punishment, making the envier feel rather “green at the gills,” to use an idiom usually associated with nausea. It is not fun to be envious, and it is not the kind of sin many will admit to, and much less brag about because it is a petty thing, and yet envy is alive and very unwell within so many souls in our world today, perhaps indeed within our own.

With Thomas as our guide, we might think of envy not merely as green, but also just as fittingly as “blue,” since envy involves our sadness over another person’s good. Envy does not lift our brothers or sisters, but feels sad when others lift them, or when they lift themselves! Thomas so perceptively notes that as the sin of sloth or acedia most directly opposes the Great Commandment to love God with all that we are, because it is a sadness or apathy regarding the good of God, envy most directly opposes that second Great Commandment, to love our neighbors as ourselves, because it is a sadness regarding the good of our neighbors. We do not feel green or blue, envious or sad, when some good thing comes our way, and neither should we when some good comes to our neighbor, especially some spiritual good that uplifts his soul.

We can see if envy is working in our souls when we observe our reaction when we hear of some good thing that has come to someone we know well, perhaps a sought after job, a promotion, acknowledgment for a special achievement, or a spiritual transformation. Do we “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep,” as St. Paul advises (Rom. 12:15)? Or rather, does another’s cause for rejoicing produce in us that gnawing sadness of envy? Envy does not necessarily want what that other person has but is sad that the other person has it! (Does not its pettiness ring out loud and clear?)

Thomas notes that we can see envy in operation when we observe the workings of its daughters, such as tale-bearing and malicious gossip, whereby we try to bring down a notch, in the eyes of others, the person we envy; perhaps in detraction, wherein, face-to-face with the person we envy, we tease or joke with her in a way that belittles the good that has come her way, perhaps by diminishing its importance or comparing it with someone else’s greater accomplishment. If our efforts and tale-bearing or detraction have hit their mark, have we felt joy at the other’s misfortune, another of envy’s petty daughters? If our envious efforts have been to no avail, has our failure to produce harm left us grieving at another’s prosperity, feeling sad that we were unable to spoil our neighbor’s good? If such a process has gone on within us, do we grasp that these thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds fuel a sinful hatred? This final sinful daughter of envy, hatred, is clearly the opposite of the call to and virtue of charity.

If we are to seek to lighten our neighbor’s burdens by embracing the light yoke of charity, we must cast off the green hulking yoke of envy in ourselves and in our society. We saw that justice has its interpersonal (commutative) and larger societal (distributive) dimensions. Envy, which opposes justice as well as charity, can also be seen in interpersonal and broader societal forms. Those who would destroy property rights, for example, would rob others of their legitimate, hard-earned material goods. Thomas addresses rights both to personal property and shared common goods in II-II, 66, 1–2. Given today’s growing acceptance of socialist ideas, it is worth recalling a statement of Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: “No one at the same time can be a good Catholic and a true socialist” (120), a statement preceded and echoed to some extent by every pope from Leo XIII through Benedict XVI, and indeed, even outside the Church. Note well the title of prominent German social scientist Helmut Schoeck’s classic work on the dangers of egalitarian and totalitarian governments: Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, (Liberty Fund, 1987). We cannot lift up our neighbors or build a better society merely by taking away the material goods and resources of those we envy.

The Lightness and Warmth of the Virtue of Charity

“Neighbor,” “brother,” “friend”: Thomas tells us the exact term matters little to the God-given virtue of charity, as we saw in this chapter’s opening quotation. Christ told us to “love our neighbors as ourselves.” We should be aware that outside the Christian faith, and in some very prominent religions, believers will also proclaim the call to love their neighbor, but “neighbor” has a very restricted meaning, referring only to those of the same religion, and not to outsiders or “infidels.” According to Christ’s message, though, metaphorically speaking, everyone is our neighbor, brother, and friend, meaning literally that our love should extend to all persons on earth, even if they do not share our religion. Out of love we will share the Good News of Christ with them through discussion and loving actions, but never at the point of a sword.

In his extensive treatise on charity (II-II, 23-46), Thomas spells out the many-splendored ways love is to reach out far, wide, and warmly to others. St. Thomas compares the love of charity to the heat of a powerful furnace (II-II, 27, 7). When our hearts burn with the fires of charity, their far-reaching flames will serve to warm strangers and even our enemies. But as those closest to the furnace receive the most heat, true charity (like justice) should begin at home and be directed in greatest intensity to the Spirit who dwells in our hearts and to those who are near to us — our families, friends, school- or workmates, neighbors, and fellow parishioners.

Of course, furnaces themselves are also very hot, and Thomas makes clear that we are indeed called to love ourselves, and even our own bodies with the love of charity, as we’ll examine in our next life lesson. But for now, how can we fan the flames of the charity God places in our hearts so they will warm our neighbors’ hearts and waft their burdens away up in smoke?

Although charity, as a theological virtue, is infused into our hearts by God and is potentially infinite in quantity, it can increase or decrease in us through our actions. St. Thomas tells us with moving eloquence how each act of charity increases within us the disposition or tendency for more charitable acts, “and this readiness increasing, breaks out into an act of more fervent love, and strives to advance in charity, and then this charity increases actually” (II-II, 24, 6). Once more, Aristotle says that we become builders by building and harpists by playing the harp. So, too, Thomas tells us we become fervent lovers by loving fervently!

One of my favorite Aquinas quotes is this: “The love of our neighbor requires that not only should we be our neighbor’s well-wishers, but also his well-doers” (II-II, 32, 5; cf. 1 John 3:18). Charity is a dynamic virtue that acts and works and gets good things done, all by, with, and in our love for God. So then, let us ask ourselves what loving act will we do to lift up our neighbor when we next set this book aside? Let’s take just a minute to formulate our plan, and then get back to business.

Praying for Our Neighbors, Especially the Heavily Burdened

The Irish have a name for prayers directed only to our own needs — “stingy prayers”! If we are to lift up and to love our neighbors, our prayers to God must keep their needs in mind too. Such prayer is directly opposed both to inordinate self-love and to the vice of envy. When we envy, we are sad for another’s good, a sadness we may come to relish as the next best thing to having what the envied person has. To thank God for the goodness He has bestowed on the person envied and to petition Him to keep that good coming is a pretty direct counterattack on envy and every one of its daughters. Indeed, if you pray for the welfare of the people you envy, you are certainly not envying very well!

We can also ask God to help eradicate any remaining envy within our own hearts, and we can pray for those who might envy us. Further, we can pray for God’s grace and strength for those who feel most burdened and need it the most, asking that we might be given the grace and strength to act toward them as instruments of His love, sharing with Him in some of the heavy lifting.

Of course, the prayer Christ gave us is anything but a “stingy prayer,” as revealed in its first words: “Our Father.” We acknowledge that God is our Father and we are brothers and sisters in Christ, and then after praising God, all of our petitions are asked for one another, giving us, forgiving us, and delivering us.

The Sweet Yoke of the Sacraments

How can the sacraments strengthen our love of neighbor and give us the strength to lift up our brothers and sisters in Christ? Of course, it is the sacrament of Baptism that joins us all together as brothers and sisters in Christ. It bestows on us the sweet yoke of Christ and the graces of the Holy Spirit that make that yoke light. It also allows us to share in the blessings of one another’s merits and virtues. Consider these wise words of Venerable Louis of Granada (1505–1588) on pulverizing envy and practicing charity among those who are baptized:

If you continue in a state of grace, united to your neighbor through charity, you have a share in all his good works, and the more he merits, the richer you become. So far, therefore, from envying his virtue, you should find it a source of consolation. Alas! Because your neighbor is advancing, will you fall back? Ah! If you would love him in the virtues which you do not find in yourself, you would share in them through charity; the profit of his labors would also become yours.42

The sacrament of Baptism should remind us that we’re all in this together, this being that race for the eternal prize of bliss in heaven, and we’re all here to help one another to cross God’s finishing line.

Indeed, in the sacrament of Confirmation, God bestows upon us the extra strength we need to cross that goal. In this sacrament, we become soldiers for Christ, mature and confident members of what has long been called the Church Militant of believers on earth. A classic act of military honor is the soldier’s vow to leave no soldiers behind. When ancient Romans proclaimed, “Nemo resideo!” they echoed in their own tongue the principle of even more ancient Greek warriors. As warriors for Christ, we should also strive to leave no one behind, to exert our strength to lift those who need uplifting and to do our best to rescue the bodies and souls of our neighbors who have been captured by the harmful, sinful secular ideologies proclaimed and endorsed in our time.

Of course, the ultimate act of neighborly love is to give one’s life for a friend (John 15:13), and this Christ did for us. Let us recall how He picked up the burden of the physical Cross, knowing the suffering He would endure upon it, so that we could be uplifted and forgiven of our sins. Let us recall how Simon of Cyrene was compelled to help Christ carry that Cross (Matt. 27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26), and how Christ told us that what we do for the least of our brothers, we do for Him (Matt. 25:40). Will we heed Christ’s example and help our brothers and sisters with their burdens? Will we remember that, like St. Paul, we can do all things in Christ, who strengthens us (Phil. 4:13), and that every time we receive the Eucharist we receive that unlimited source of strength Himself in His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity?

Life Lesson 5 Summa

There is no brother or sister so heavy that God cannot give us the strength to strive to help lift him or her up. We were made to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers and to strive to pulverize all manner of sins, especially the petty sin of envy, which makes us saddened by our neighbor’s good fortune. Rather, we must fan the flames of our loving charity and try to warm our neighbors with additional spiritual and, when needed, material goods. We must pray every day not only for ourselves, but for all our brothers and sisters in Christ, united as children of God through the sacrament of Baptism and made firm and given the strength we need to lift one another up through the sacrament of Confirmation.

36 In chapter 12 we will take a look at the role the devil might play in regard to sin.

37 Aelred of Rievaulx, The Mirror of Charity, trans. Elizabeth Connor (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 133.

38 The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena (Charlotte, NC: St. Benedict Press, 2006), 12.

39 Ibid, 16.

40 Ibid, 14.

41 Thomas told us that, to remember a thing, we “should take some suitable yet unwonted illustration of it, since the unwonted strikes us more, and so makes a greater and stronger impression on the mind. . . . Now the reason for the necessity of finding these illustrations or images, is that simple and spiritual impressions easily slip from the mind, unless they be tied as it were to some corporeal image, because human knowledge has a greater hold on sensible objects” (II-II, 49, 1).

42 Louis of Granada, The Sinner’s Guide (New York, NY: Veritatas Splendor Publications, 2012), 289.

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