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on craftspeople:

“Young or old, men or women, what they share is the presence, the empathy and the commitment of those who have chosen a manual trade. A contagious aplomb that comes from joy and patience, from the mastery of painstaking techniques and the drive to create, from pride, and from putting their heart into their work.”

—Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Artistic Director of Hermès.

“I was surprised that I found myself beginning to pray daily. I could not get down on my knees, but I could pray while I was walking. If I got down on my knees I thought, ‘Do I really believe? Whom am I praying to?’ A terrible doubt came over me, a sense of shame, and I wondered if I was praying because I was lonely, because I was unhappy. 

But when I walked into the village for the mail, I found myself praying again, holding in my pocket the rosary that Mary Gordon gave me in New Orleans some years before. Maybe I did not say it correctly, but I kept on saying it because it made me happy.

Then I thought suddenly, scornfully, ‘Here you are in a stupor of content. You are biological. Like a cow. Prayer with you is like the opiate of the people.’ And over and over again in my mind that phrase was repeated jeeringly, ‘Religion is the opiate of the people.’

‘But,’ I reasoned with myself, ‘I am praying because I am happy, not because I am unhappy. I did not turn to God in unhappiness, in grief, in despair—to get consolation, to get something from Him.’

And encouraged that I was praying because I wanted to thank Him, I went on praying. The words I had been saying insinuated themselves into my heart before I had finished, so that on the trip back I neither prayed nor thought, but was simply filled with exultation.”

-Dorothy Day, from The Long Loneliness

Dorothy Day is the most kindred of spirits. If all the truth in the universe is dumped out on me one day, and it is revealed that God is simply an imagined presence—one whose sole function is to prompt me to meditate upon what is good and worth being grateful for in my own life—then I will be beyond satisfied with my religious practice.