Do Christians Need To Work?
Man needs to work because Man is made in the image and likeness of God, and God worked. Even Original Sin could not take away this gift of work.
We also have the gift of free will, and we use it to determine how we use the other gifts God gave us. God made it possible for us to transform work from the drudgery that is the result of Original Sin to the privilege of using work to make God's love present in the world.
Deacon Michael shows us how to navigate the muddy waters of work in our present culture.
Written by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael
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One of the things that I like to talk about is: through our salvation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, meaning was given to life. Everything in our lives was given meaning, including, as we saw in the first reading, work.
God worked. It wasn't simply a Whoosh, get everything done. God actually worked.
And if you go further into Genesis after the Fall, there is a description of work that is given that is not entirely pleasant. And for the most part, remember Dobie Gillis, Maynard G. Krebs, Wrok! Work isn't always pleasant.
Well, in the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution, work became more unpleasant. It became dehumanizing. The job would be: you put something in there, take it out, put it in there, take it out. And if you got tired, you left your hand in long enough that the machine cut your hand off.
It was very dehumanizing and, because people became cogs in a machine, they weren't worth as much.
So not only were they doing dehumanizing work, they were doing work that was dangerous, and they were being grossly underpaid for what they were doing. It was a denial of their human dignity.
It was during this period of time that people began to realize that there was something significantly wrong. Our socialist movements, our social consciousness movements, come from that period of time because of the indignity of the nature of work that was being imposed upon so many people.
And I'm focusing strictly, really at this point, on Western Europe and the United States. There's significant issues elsewhere that we can talk about.
And the Church, too, recognizing that the second Great Commandment is "loving neighbor", was addressing the issue of what is it about the nature of work that is both important, because it is something that, through Christ, is part of a means to bring us to greater sanctity, but what is there about the nature of work that is dehumanizing and degrading. And, I can't remember the Pope (Pope Leo XIII), but Rerum Novarum was issued which was kind of... if you read it even now you look at it and go, "Whoa! The Church is really off on social issues!"
A lot of people who read Rerum Novarum and the following encyclicals on work, they look at it, especially in the United States, they tend to say, "Well, I'm a good Catholic. I just happen to make lots of money. And what is the Church doing telling us about what we have to take care of in terms of workers?" What do we have to respect? How do we have to treat them? How does it interact with our obligations as Christians and as Catholics?
In 1955, the pope, recognizing, seeing in the Communist world, the Soviet Union especially, the biggest holiday of the year was May 1. So he took the opportunity of creating this day to be the day of St. Joseph the Worker. Because there is no question, it is described in the gospel reading, Joseph was a worker who supported his family. He was a carpenter, which is a brutal job. But he brought to that the dignity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, his son. And they reflects how work is to be treated. And it is something that is a continual problem in our world. The Church is trying to figure out how to exactly deal with, again, the changing nature of work.
The issues related to the brutality of work are quite still with us. There still is that brutality. One of the things that is very striking is workers compensation. We hear about workers compensation.
I worked in an office. Unless a filing cabinet fell on me, I wasn't going to get workers compensation. Yet people do jobs that are hard on their bodies. And statistically, people who do jobs that are heavy labor effectively by the age of 65, that's where the retirement age came from, are either dead or they are disabled.
So we still deal with the issue of the dehumanizing effect of work and the physical abuse of the person. And we have to do that in the context of the great commandment of loving thy neighbor. What we are facing now is an additional issue of one of the things that has happened in our society, and, again, I am focusing on the United States and Western Europe particularly, the dehumanizing aspect of work for many people has changed.
The dehumanizing aspect of it is that it has become something that is all-consuming. That people feel the necessity to work long, long hours at a job, that if they ever looked at it, they would see that it is not giving them any sense of dignity. It may give them money, but it is not giving them any sense of dignity and other than in a very ethereal way, any sense of satisfaction.
Now, I am going to tell a story from my life that I just... it just struck me... I mean it just illustrates that so perfectly well.
My children, two of them especially, love to play soccer. They started at 4 or 5 years old. They played soccer all the way through high school and even into college they played soccer. And my daughter, who is now 46, still plays soccer.
So, the last high school game that my son ever played, obviously I went to it. It was over at St. Marks. And I'm sitting in the stands watching these boys run around. You know, at this age, they're 18 years old, they've being doing this for, if they're 18, they have probably been doing this for 13, 14 years. Pretty good players.
And sitting up behind me was a man with a laptop on his lap and some books beside him. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
I went, "This is crazy." Now, being very bashful, I went up and talked to him. I recognized who he was by his name, and he is a professor at SMU Law School.
I said, "Oh, does your son play soccer?" "Yes." I said, "Mine does too, this is his last game." "This is my son's last game, too." "Hasn't it been a wonderful experience to go and watch them from the age of 4 or 5, where they run around the field and they are just total chaos, and they develop into soccer players like the young men that our children are right now."
He says, "Well, this is the first soccer game I have ever attended that my son played." And then he went back to work on whatever he was working on on his computer. Probably writing a book or something.
He has been dehumanized by work. Work is not something that is designed to take us away from God. It is an integral part, for those who work, of a means by which we can use what occurs in our lives to sanctify us.
It is not a replacement for God. It does not bring us closer to God. But to the contrary. If we are abused in work, it physically and mentally abuses us, and can very much become that mammon, that thing that we worship more than God, so that we find ourselves violating the first and the second Great Commandments.
And the Church, in this holiday, this feast that we have today, for St. Joseph the Worker, is trying to bring us to the attention, our attention, the dignity of work that comes from, only can come from, and does come from, work in the context of of our relationship with our God, and Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Because work itself is not the end. The end is Jesus Christ our Savior. And His pervasiveness, includes the nature of work, the dignity of work, the respect that people who work should be given, the protections that they should be given, and the understanding that work in itself cannot be and is not a substitution for God.
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