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Today's Labor Day Meditation is excerpted from an article "Why we need a new theology of work" by Jonathan Malesic. He contends older images such as work as tilling and caring for the garden of creation and work as vocation may not resonate with today's workers. He looks to Benedict and Pieper and Heschel for new inspiration about work.
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MEDITATION 142: Towards a New Theology of Work, with insights from Benedict, Pieper and Heschel. (Jonathan Malesic)
The common theological terms used to describe work are not much help in navigating questions that workers face today. How do you recognize, for example, if your work is harming you? How much attention should you give it? How hard should you work? Is it “time theft” to take a mental break from work, given that work is itself a source of stress? What if you are not paid a living wage? Should you remain in a job even if you are burned out because you need the salary and benefits? To answer these questions, the church’s theology of work must be portable and subjective rather than objective and tied to a single “state.” It must not overvalue work or drive the overworked even harder.
Ancient Resources
Fortunately, ancient resources can be repurposed to apply to 21st-century work. When it comes to questions of value, as well as what it should feel like to work, the Benedictine tradition, beginning with the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, has much to offer. Men and women religious of the various Benedictine orders are well known for making bread, cheese and beer. Trappist monks at New Melleray Abbey in Iowa make caskets by hand out of wood harvested from their grounds. The monastics’ devotion to craft is admirable—and resonates with the now-commercialized “artisan” ethos—but it alone is not enough to guide an approach to work. Most of us do work that is too abstract to be understood in terms of craft.
The Rule has a larger lesson, though. Its guidelines for living in the monastery teach that work can be a component of spiritual practice and is essential to fulfilling a community’s needs, but it must never become an end in itself and in fact should be limited in order to prevent it from inculcating vicious habits. The discipline that Benedict enjoins upon his monks, and that workers today could emulate, is selective disengagement from labor.
Benedictines have often distilled their way of life down to the motto ora et labora, “pray and work.” Benedict likewise compared the monastery to a “workshop” for holiness. And he taught that if all other means of keeping a monk from sinful indolence should fail, then he should “be given some work in order that he may not be idle,” even on Sunday. So the message of Benedict’s Rule for today is hardly to quit your day job.
We have to ask if the idea of vocation as a stable place in the world applies to the way careers operate at all levels of the American economy.
Still, Benedict places strict limits on the monks’ work, beginning with the times in which monks are permitted to do manual labor. The work schedule of the monastery is bounded by periods of prayer, which takes precedence over everything else. As Benedict writes, “On hearing the signal for an hour of the divine office, the monk will immediately set aside what he has in hand and go with utmost speed, yet with gravity and without giving occasion for frivolity. Indeed, nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God,” Benedict’s term for communal prayer.
Benedict also establishes limits on how long a monk should perform any one job at the monastery. He calls for essential tasks like cooking, cleaning and reading aloud at mealtime to rotate among the monks. No one becomes a permanent reader, no matter how desirable it would be to have a specialist in that role. In fact, Benedict sees a real danger—to the monk and to the community—in unchecked specialization. Skilled artisans can easily end up with the wrong priorities, placing their work ahead of communal or spiritual aims: “If one of them becomes puffed up by his skillfulness in his craft, and feels he is conferring something on the monastery, he is to be removed from practicing his craft and not allowed to resume it unless, after manifesting his humility, he is so ordered by the abbot.”
This doctrine is exactly the opposite of the vocational division of labor that the Reformers advocated, Adam Smith secularized, and upon which Americans have built our wealth. No one could build an entire iPhone alone. An army of workers, though, each performing a single, minuscule task and collaborating across continents, can produce half a million of them in a day. Productivity demands singular attention to one’s job. But if work is to produce not just profits but also healthy workers and societies, then specialization and focus can become hindrances.
Taking Benedict’s approach would force us to reconsider how we think about our work. Instead of, “What work am I called to?” we might ask, “How does the task before me contribute to or hinder my progress toward holiness?” Not “How does this work cooperate with material creation?” but “How does this work contribute to the life of the community and to others’ material and spiritual well-being?” Not “Am I doing what I love?” but “What activity is so important that I should, without exception, drop my work in order to do it?”
Answers to these questions should be informed by recognizing two key theological truths that Josef Pieper makes explicit in his book Leisure, the Basis of Culture. The first pertains to creation as providential, its fruits sufficient for human needs. Pieper sees a lack of humility in the drive toward what he calls “total work.” Someone who believes that everything must be earned “refuses to have anything as a gift” and thereby refuses his or her own status as a creature of God. Abraham Joshua Heschel echoes this idea in arguing for the Sabbath as the heart of human existence. On the Sabbath, the person “must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of” human beings. We are limited, our needs are limited, and God, through creation, has given us enough to meet them. It is beguiling to imagine that in principle there is no limit to the wealth one can “create” by working. But at some point, work and wealth stop doing anyone any good. How many hours do already-wealthy Americans waste in laboring “to support my family”? And how much damage is done to those families by the adults’ anxious obsession with work? Such anxiety denies creation. Better, then, to “Look at the birds in the sky,” who eat without laboring (Mt 6:26).
We must also consider the ultimate destination of all of creation, namely, communion with God. The leisure for which Pieper argues is not simply rest from work. It is, in its highest form, a celebration of existence; and the highest form of celebration is worship. Pieper writes that in sacramental worship, the person “may truly be ‘transported’ out of the weariness of daily labor into an unending holiday,” the heavenly banquet. Once our work is over, we have the beatific vision to look forward to. It is a shame, then, that our dreary labor is typically matched with such dreary Sunday liturgy. The first step in developing a new theology of work could be to develop forms of worship that more closely resemble celebration. Convincing people to postpone work may begin by throwing a good party.
Jonathan Malesic taught theology for 11 years at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He is the author of Secret Faith in the Public Square and can be found on Twitter at @jonmalesic. This essay is adapted from an article that originally appeared in The Journal of Christian Ethics.