The aim of humans is to worship God and to enjoy him forever, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. But practically, what are we meant to do with our time?

To spend as much of it as possible being entertained? To consume whatever we like at the push of a button? To do whatever we want just that quick? To be completely self-determined? To reduce or eliminate manual labor, so that we can spend hours a day staring at a screen? To spend the better part of our lives earning money at a job that otherwise has little to do with our interests?

Or perhaps we should aim at experiences? To travel the world in comfort, trying to take in all that we can? Is that the good life? Or maybe it’s to contribute to the progress of the world, in science, economics, or social justice, so that as many people as possible can what? Live longer, and so be able to earn more money, have experiences, free up as much time as possible to be entertained, consume and stare at a screen?

This is roughly the range of answers we have on offer in our society. It’s worth noting that, at this practical level, these are roughly the answers we find when we go to church as well. For when we move out of the realm of abstractions, however theologically correct, we are taught most by what people do. On this front Catholics are no different. We unreflexively go through our days — because it’s what everybody else does — trying to maximize leisure, comfort, convenience, screen time and entertainment. It’s what most of our jobs aim at, and what we aim at personally.

But there’s an alternative set of answers. What if people are primarily for our local, flesh-and-blood communities? For using our bodies directly to sustain our bodies, local land, and neighborhoods, as an essential part of what makes us happy? What if we are meant not to minimize but to find our identity in work? What if our greatest pleasure comes not by comfort, but by toil? What if we were made to be planted in a garden? To find our “fit” in nature, rather than escape it? What if we are meant not for mobility but for stability? Not to move but to stay? What if what we spend most of our lives doing makes a big difference in our lives? And what if religion was not an hour on Sunday morning, but the cumulation of a whole life?

This second set of answers is what animated the life and work of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, and it takes us into the heart of the Catholic Worker vision, which we will have to spend several columns elaborating upon. They found this “what for?” deep in the heart of the Catholic tradition, and it is this communal but also agrarian vision whose strangeness to us is a measure of our distance from our own history. It’s the “what for?” that generated their heroic hospitality but also their penetrating critiques of modern forms of life.

But already we’ve run into a serious question. For if we in the Church today do not have an actual, practical, lived “what for?” different than the world’s, what good news do we have to offer? If, practically speaking, we have only the first set of answers, to what are we calling people?

We are great in the Church at focusing on the basics — get to Mass, avoid serious sins, say some prayers. All this is necessary. But I suspect we too infrequently realize that if we do not plant the basics in a more substantial Catholic life — that alternative “what for?” — even they will wither away. We’ve had to aim so low because we’ve had a hard time imagining anything higher.

This is the great gift of the Catholic Worker. Not that it gives us an alternative to the Church, but that it reminds the Church of essentials that we have lost. It reminds us that being Church has always involved — and today especially involves — nothing short of a revolutionary way of being human.

Miller is the director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St Paul.