In an attempt to remove the effect of all religious superstition, the leaders of the French Revolution invented a new calendar in 1793 to replace the Gregorian calendar. The calendar consisted of 12 months of 30 days, with five days left over that represented secular holidays (sometimes 6 in a leap year). The new calendar replaced the Christian holidays with festivals commemorating reason, virtue, genius, rewards, the revolution itself and finally labor. The revolutionaries borrowed this habit of creating secular holidays from the Roman Empire. While the observance of this calendar only lasted a short time, the habit of inventing secular holidays did not. In fact, we just celebrated the Labor Day holiday this week—a day that, according to the Department of Labor, is “dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” What this really marks is a “flattening out” of our horizons. Festivals have always been celebrated to mark and recognize that which is a pure gift. Labor Day and our other secular holidays we celebrate are all about us and what we do. Trapped inside our own world, we are greatly in need of a Christian revolution like what happened when Christianity “baptized” the secular holidays of the Roman Empire and attached deeper meaning in them. While it is fresh in our minds, we might start with Labor Day.
On the one hand we should not be surprised that work is one of the areas in which there is a flattening. When man is created on the sixth day of creation, the reader is told that God created mankind in His image (Gn 1:27). To remind mankind of this truth, He gives them two primary tasks, namely, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gn 1:28). These two tasks are the two main ways that mankind can image God—through procreation and through work. It is also these same two tasks that bear the curse of the Fall (Gn 3:16-19). In trying to become like gods (Gn 3:5) in the wrong way, the two primary ways in which man really is like God become distorted. Both childbirth and work become “labor” and the imaging of God is difficult to see.
Interestingly enough, these two topics were areas of primary focus for St. John Paul II. Most are familiar with his “rereading of Humanae Vitae” through a personalistic perspective in his Theology of the Body, but less are aware of his teachings on the Theology of Work that marked much of his pontificate. Perhaps there is no better summary of his teachings than in his encyclical Laborem Exercens.
What makes his teaching in this area so unique is his emphasis on the subjective aspect of work. The emphasis in the past was always on the objective part of work, namely the kind of work being done. This led to the distinction between intellectual and servile work, with the latter being somehow viewed as less than the former. Aristotle made a similar distinction between doing and making to reflect these two types and we also label work either “white collar” or “blue collar.” There is nothing wrong with making these distinctions per se, but there is always the danger that a utilitarian view of work arises. Workers simply become cogs in a machine that is aimed solely at production, whether of material or intellectual goods. What Christianity did was proclaim a “Gospel of work” (LE, 6) where it is not primarily about the kind of work that is being done, but the fact that it is a person that does it. This is especially true because we worship a God who took flesh as a manual worker.
Rather than just being an instrumental good, work is an intrinsic good. Recall the distinction between instrumental goods and intrinsic goods are that instrumental goods are good for something else while intrinsic goods are good in themselves. Work is an intrinsic good because of what it does to us interiorly. In other words, work is good for us because of what it makes us into. In fact this ought to be the sole criterion upon which we judge our work—what is my work turning me into? Otherwise there is always the grave danger of compartmentalization which leads to a disintegration in our personality.
The fruit of our work ought to be a growth in virtue. Two in particular are mentioned by St. Josemaria Escriva when he says that our work ought to develop in us “two human virtues, industriousness and diligence, which merge into one, for they both help us in our efforts to make good use of the talents we have each received from God” (Friends of God, 81). So important is this principle that Jesus Himself warned about becoming like the slothful (and wicked) servant who buried his talents rather than making them as an offering to the Master (Mt 25:26).
Primarily though work ought to serve as a labor of love. Through our work we ought to grow in charity through a love of God and service of our neighbor. St. Josemaria again, “”A complete range of virtues is called into play when we set about our work with the purpose of sanctifying it: fortitude, to persevere in our work despite the difficulties that naturally arise and to ensure that we never let ourselves be overwhelmed by anxiety; temperance, in order to spend ourselves unsparingly and to overcome our love of comfort and our selfishness; justice, so as to fulfil our duties towards God, society, our family and our fellow workers; prudence, to know in each case what course to take, and then to set about it without hesitation…And all this, I emphasize, is for the sake of Love” (Friends of God, 72).
From this emphasis on the subjective over the objective flows the Church’s principles related to economics. If things are meant merely to serve persons then there is a priority of labor over capital. The right to private property flows from the fact that man, because he rationally participates in his work, always ought to know that he is working for himself in some ways and not just a cog in a huge machine from above (CE 15). But it also serves as a limiting factor on private property by subordinating it to the universal destination of goods based upon a solidarity of all mankind.
I mentioned above that the problem with Labor Day now is that “it is all about us” but that this could somehow be redeemed. By reflecting on work, we begin to see work as an unmerited gift that calls for celebration. This is because work is not just a way in which we image God. If that were the case we would merely be like the beavers imaging God’s wisdom when they build a dam. But instead what makes work uniquely human is that man consciously participates in God’s activity as Creator. When God created the earth, it was not yet done. He left it to man to perfect the earth by participating in His creative act. God still creates today through man’s free participation and instrumentality.
As John Paul II said, “man, created in the image of God, shares by his work in the activity of the Creator and that, within the limits of his own human capabilities, man in a sense continues to develop that activity, and perfects it as he advances further and further in the discovery of the resources and values contained in the whole of creation” (LE 25). This awareness brings new meaning to work and ought to permeate even the most ordinary everyday activities.
In many ways a Christian Labor Day would be much like what the Sunday Sabbath rest is intended to be—a time to do the work of reflection and contemplation through participation in God’s work of resting. While the Sabbath is a time of reflection on the goodness of Creation and gratitude for the New Creation in Christ, a Christian Labor Day would be a day of contemplation and gratitude for the goodness of Creation that God has brought about through the labor of mankind.
The point is that work is not simply something we must do to take care of our bodies, but our souls as well. It is not something merely to be tolerated but something that perfects us and makes us ready for heaven. Does this describe our work? If not, perhaps we are all in need of a Christian Labor Day!
St. Joseph, the Worker, pray for us!