Saint Isidore and the Lost Meaning of Work

It is a curious thing, when you come to think of it, that we have managed to build a civilization entirely dependent on farming while simultaneously convincing ourselves that farming is beneath us. We eat three meals a day or six, if we count the snacks we pretend not to notice and yet we regard the men and women who make those meals possible with a sort of benign indifference, the way one might regard the plumbing. We are grateful it exists, in theory, but we would rather not think about it too closely, and we certainly would not want our children to go into the business.

This is a very modern kind of madness, and it would have been incomprehensible to most of human history. But it would have been especially incomprehensible to a twelfth-century Spanish farmhand named Isidore, who spent his entire life doing the one thing our age considers least worthy of attention: working the soil with his hands, day after day, in obscurity so complete that it borders on the magnificent.

The Man Nobody Noticed

Saint Isidore the Farmer or San Isidro Labrador, as he is known in his native Madrid was born around the year 1070, into a poverty so thorough that even the details of his birth have been lost to history. We do not know his parents' names with certainty. We do not know what he looked like. We do not have any of his writings, because he almost certainly could not write. He left behind no theological treatises, founded no religious orders, converted no nations, and debated no heretics. He was, by every metric that the world uses to measure significance, a nobody.

And yet this nobody is now the patron saint of farmers, of laborers, of Madrid itself, and his feast day is celebrated on May 15th with a joy that suggests the Church knows something about greatness that the rest of us have forgotten. For the Church has always had this maddening habit of elevating the people the world overlooks, of finding its heroes not in the palaces and universities but in the stables and workshops and, in Isidore's case, in the freshly turned furrows of a landlord's field.

What do we know of him? We know that he worked as a farmhand for a wealthy landowner named Juan de Vargas, and that he did so for most of his life. We know that he married a woman named Maria Torribia, who is herself venerated as a saint Santa María de la Cabeza which gives us the rare and beautiful spectacle of a married couple who managed to make each other holier rather than merely more irritable, a feat that any married person will recognize as requiring no small amount of grace.

And we know the stories. Oh, the stories.

Angels at the Plow

The most famous tale about Isidore is one that his fellow workers would have found infuriating before they found it astonishing. It seems that Isidore had a habit of arriving late to the fields because he insisted on attending Mass every morning before work. His colleagues, being the sort of practical people who measure devotion by productivity, complained to their employer. A man who spends his mornings in church, they reasoned, is not spending his mornings at the plow, and a man not at the plow is not earning his wages.

Juan de Vargas, understandably concerned, went to investigate. And what he reportedly found was enough to rearrange his entire understanding of labor relations. There was Isidore, kneeling in prayer at the edge of the field. And there, beside his idle plow, were angels actual, luminous, no-nonsense angels driving a pair of white oxen and doing Isidore's plowing for him. The furrows they cut were, by all accounts, impeccable.

Now, one can take this story literally or figuratively, and the Church, in her wisdom, does not insist on either. But the meaning of the story is clear enough in any reading: that the man who puts God first does not thereby neglect his earthly duties but rather finds them mysteriously fulfilled. It is the old promise of the Gospel made visible in a Spanish wheat field "Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you." Isidore sought the kingdom, and the kingdom sent him farmhands with wings.

But there is something else in this story that we ought not to miss. Notice that the angels did not come to take Isidore away from the field. They did not carry him off to a monastery or a cathedral or a hermit's cave. They came to the field and they picked up the plow. Heaven, it seems, does not despise the work of the earth. It joins in.

The Theology of Dirt

This is the point at which Isidore's story becomes genuinely subversive, because it overturns not only the modern prejudice against manual labor but also a perennial temptation within Christianity itself the idea that holiness requires escape from the material world. There has always been a strain of Christian thought that regards the body and its labors as, at best, a necessary inconvenience and, at worst, an obstacle to the spiritual life. The truly holy person, according to this view, is the one who retreats from the world, who fasts until the body is forgotten, who rises above the messy business of flesh and soil and sweat.

Isidore's life is a cheerful rebuke to all of this. Here is a man who became a saint not by leaving the world but by digging into it quite literally. His holiness was not achieved in spite of his work but through it. Every furrow was a prayer. Every seed planted was an act of faith that the God who commanded the earth to bring forth vegetation on the third day of creation was still at work in the fields of Madrid.

There is a theology of dirt here that we desperately need to recover. The Incarnation itself God becoming flesh, entering the material world, getting dust on His feet and splinters in His hands is the ultimate affirmation that matters. When God wanted to save the world, He did not send a philosophy or a system of meditation. He sent a baby who needed feeding, who grew into a carpenter who knew the grain of wood, who chose fishermen and tax collectors as His companions. Christianity is, among other things, the most materialist of all religions, insisting that the physical world is not an illusion to be escaped but a gift to be sanctified.

Isidore understood this in his bones, which is perhaps the only place such truths can be fully understood. He did not need to read treatises on the dignity of labor because he lived that dignity every day, in his aching back and calloused hands and the good honest exhaustion of a day's work offered to God.

The Generosity That Makes No Sense

But Isidore was not merely a hard worker. He was also, by all accounts, absurdly generous the kind of generous that makes accountants nervous and sensible people shake their heads. The stories tell us that he regularly shared his food with the poor, even when he barely had enough for himself. On one occasion, he was carrying a sack of grain to the mill when he noticed a flock of birds struggling in the winter cold. Without hesitation, he poured out half his grain for the birds, much to the dismay of his companion. But when they arrived at the mill, the remaining grain reportedly produced twice the expected amount of flour.

This is the arithmetic of the Kingdom, and it has never made sense to anyone operating by the arithmetic of the world. The world says that if you give away half of what you have, you will have half as much. The Kingdom says that if you give away half of what you have, you will have more than you started with. The world says that generosity is a luxury for those who can afford it. The Kingdom says that generosity is a necessity for those who wish to be fully human.

Isidore, who could not afford generosity by any reasonable calculation, practiced it with the reckless abandon of a man who had done his sums by a different method. He had calculated, in that wordless way that saints calculate, that God's economy runs on different principles than our own, and that the surest way to have enough is to give more than you can spare. It is a maddening principle, and it is the foundation of the universe.

The Patron Saint of an Anxious Age

And here, at last, we arrive at why Isidore matters to us, in this particular moment, in this strange and frenetic age. We live in a time that has lost its connection to the earth not merely physically, though that is true enough, but spiritually. We have become a civilization of screens and abstractions, of digital clouds and virtual realities, of work that produces nothing you can hold in your hands. We have, in a very real sense, forgotten where our food comes from, and in forgetting that, we have forgotten something essential about ourselves.

For we are, as Genesis reminds us, creatures of the earth. The very name "Adam" comes from the Hebrew adamah, meaning ground or soil. We were made from dirt, and to dirt we shall return, and everything in between is, in a sense, a conversation with the earth from which we came. To lose touch with that earth is to lose touch with ourselves, to become unmoored from the elemental realities that keep us humble and keep us sane.

Isidore, that humble farmhand who never wrote a word and never traveled more than a few miles from Madrid, has something to teach us that all our technology and sophistication cannot provide. He teaches us that holiness is not about escaping the ordinary but about inhabiting it so fully that it becomes extraordinary. He teaches us that prayer and work are not rivals but partners, that the man on his knees and the man at the plow can be the same man, doing the same thing, if his heart is rightly ordered. He teaches us that generosity is not a calculation but a way of life, and that the birds of the air and the poor at the gate have a claim on us that we ignore at our peril.

Most of all, he teaches us that greatness real greatness, the kind that endures when empires have crumbled and celebrities have been forgotten is not about doing spectacular things but about doing ordinary things with spectacular love. In the end, when the ledgers are opened and the accounts are settled, I suspect that the angels who plowed Isidore's field will still be plowing, and that every furrow ever cut in faith will be found to have been a prayer that reached the very throne of God.

For in God's Kingdom, the dirt is holy, the labor is worship, and the farmer on his knees in a Spanish field is closer to heaven than he knows.

~The Seeker's Quill