We know that it's good for us to hold down a job. When we're useful, when we accomplish something, when we know our work helps others, it boosts our self-esteem, gives us a clearer sense of our God-given dignity. Jesus, our great Example of a life well-lived, worked hard by his father's side for many years before he changed jobs and became an itinerant preacher - which was a different kind of work.
In "Laudato Si," Pope Francis reminds us of Jesus' early work with Joseph when he says that "Jesus worked with his hands, in daily contact with the matter created by God, to which he gave form by his craftsmanship....In this way he sanctified human labor and endowed it with a special significance for our development." By working hard to create things, Jesus showed us that when we work creatively, we are living as people created in the Image of God, Creator of the Universe. And it's true: many people, enlivened by God's Holy Spirit, are able to be creative at work: create new products or programs, create networking relationships, create logos and marketing approaches, create new walls and roofs, create better plumbing systems, create solutions to problems. If we are attentive to God working within us, our work can inspire us with great humility and thankfulness to God.
However at this point you may well be thinking "That's not MY job you're talking about!" Unfortunately, many jobs today are very unsatisfying, for a variety of reasons.
So many places of work today offer jobs that don't build people up. Instead, they are dehumanizing. In an article for "America" magazine, "Labor in Today's Vineyard," (Sept, 12, 2016 issue) Jonathan Malesic reports this horrifying reality:
"Last year the New York Times published a much-discussed expose of the work culture at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle, where 80-hour weeks, ego-crushing performance reviews and the sight of workers crying at their desks are reportedly common. Some of Amazon's former employees told the Times that their commitment to the retailer's mission was questioned after they suffered a miscarriage or received a cancer diagnosis. Workers who embrace the culture call themselves 'Amabots' to signify their unflagging work ethic and commitment to the company's rigorist principles.
"Amazon seems like a tough place to work, whether you are in the marketing department in Seattle or in a warehouse in Allentown, Pa., where workers have been reported to collapse from exhaustion trying to fulfill their daily quota of shipments. But Amazon is only one especially visible example of the sorry state of work in the digital economy. American workers put in more time on the job than most of their global economic peers, and increasingly the boundary between work and not-work is a fuzzy one. As a result, the labor force increasingly experiences work as precarious, discontinuous and materially unrewarding."
Because workplaces which dehumanize their workers still exist, it is more important than ever to realize ever more deeply what the God-given purpose of work is: "Work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development, and personal fulfillment." (Pope Francis) If a job does not "do" this for us, we should, if we can, look for a better one.
But if we must stay at a dehumanizing job out of economic necessity, then we can consider whether God is calling the workers to organize and protest their working conditions. There was a reason for the formation of labor unions: their original intention was to protest violations of social ethics, such as terrible working conditions, too-low salaries, and lack of job security. Such conditions still exist in many work environments today; why then do we hear that certain politicians want to eliminate labor unions? The right for workers to organize is a human right, a moral right. And it's the moral duty of consumers to protest dehumanizing working conditions that we are aware of and to back up workers' protests by boycotting products and services.
So many jobs today don't give workers a sense of satisfaction or accomplishment because there's no sense of completion. Fr. James Martin, S.J. ( in his book "The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything,") comments on his job on an assembly line when he was young:
"By 7:00 a.m. I was expected to be 'on the line,' standing in front of a deafening, room-sized machine that shoved pills into boxes and disgorged the filled boxes onto a rapidly moving conveyor belt.
"My job was to take the smaller boxes that came shooting off the line and put them into bigger boxes, and then cover them with plastic shrink wrap. Farther down the line, another person packed them into bigger boxes. Finally someone loaded them onto a wooden pallet....
"I hated it. Everyone hated it. Every ten minutes I checked the clock on the wall to see how much closer lunch-time was. After lunch, I watched the clock and prayed for (or at least anticipated) the end of the shift at 4:00 pm."
How can we find God at work if we work, for example, on a boring, miserable assembly line, or at some job that we truly hate, that we feel dehumanizes us, but need to keep because it pays decently? Fr. Martin tells us where he found God on the assembly line:
"Surprisingly, three women on the line laughed almost the entire day. Having worked in the plant for several years, they knew one another and spent the day chatting about their children, their husbands, their homes, and their plans for the weekend....Gradually they drew me into their circle....By Summer's end they were ribbing me about all sorts of things....They hated their jobs but loved one another....Celebrating birthdays,...socializing outside of work, consoling one another on losses - these are ways of connecting on an often intimate level. This important facet in the workplace often goes overlooked in discussions of the spirituality of work: finding God in others even in the midst of a crummy job."
Another way that we can find God at work is by understanding that our job is directed toward a larger goal. Mothers, for example, understand that the hard, dirty, often thankless task of caring for their young children has a great goal: they're working to develop a mature, loving, productive human being - whose life will be eternal. That makes changing dirty diapers and cleaning up vomit bearable - you look beyond it to a glorious future. Fr. Martin once asked a man who worked in an accounting department - and hated it! - how he made it, what got him through the day. "He pulled out his wallet and flipped it open. 'This,' he said quietly, and showed me a picture of his family." God can fill us with strength and purpose to stay at a job we need to keep, and sacrifice immediate happiness for the deep-down peace and joy of providing for our loved ones.
If our job is dehumanizing, we must never let ourselves feel small or worthless. Here the image of Jesus the Worker can inspire us. If work "at work" doesn't inspire us, how about the work we do at home? How often have we seen a man or woman who was made to feel worthless at work nevertheless develop a spirituality of work apart from the job, by working at home? The place where we build a deck, remodel a kitchen, plant a large backyard garden, can pears from a backyard tree, or repair one's own car instead of having to pay someone else is a holy place, energizing, empowering, a place to meet and greet our creative God! What a great satisfaction we can receive, what a sense of accomplishment and completeness, when we see God working with us and through us as we work at home!
Another way to overcome the dehumanizing aspect of our job is to work to not allow work to take over our lives. So many people do not sense a break between work and home because there virtually is none. They are expected to continue their work at home on their computers and their bosses have their phone numbers and email addresses at their fingertips. Workers are expected to make work an end in itself instead of its being a part - an important part but only a part - of balanced lives. If our lives are devoted to an anxious obsession about work and all our energies are primed to make it up another step on the corporate ladder, we are forgetting that our families need us more than they need more "things" and that God needs us to come away and be quiet with Him on a daily basis.
This is why honoring the Sabbath is so important. Yes, if both spouses work, there may be household jobs that need to be done on Sunday. But the majority of Sunday time should be devoted to rest and relaxation, family time and God time. After all, Jesus said "Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest." And, to counteract the erroneous and unhealthful Total Work ethic, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel argues that the Sabbath is the heart of human existence: "On the Sabbath, the person must say farewell to manual labor and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of human beings." When cell phones and computers are silenced, the voices of our family, the Voice of God, ring loud, clear, and inescapably near.
Regardless of whether everyone at work sees our God-given worth, we can always find God at our workplace. We are made in God's Image and so our work always has dignity. We have co-workers in whose faces and voices, laughter and tears, we can find God. Every time we are creative, we live in the Image of a Creator God Who is continually working creatively to bring good out of evil and make crooked ways straight. When our workplace is one of injustice and dehumanization, God may ask us to serve justice by organizing with other workers and protesting. And we must never forget that our work at home is also a hallowed place to find God.
Work has a valued and necessary place in our lives and spirituality. May our prayers ask God for wisdom and strength to keep our lives healthily balanced between work, prayer, and family, so that every aspect of our lives reveals God to us.