On work

Sr Joan Chittister OSB has a wonderful passage in her book Illuminated Life (Orbis), which I thought I'd quote for all you people over the water, who are about to celebrate (?) Labor Day:

One of the most demanding, but often overlooked, dimensions of the creation story is that when creation was finished, it wasn’t really finished at all. Instead, God committed the rest of the process to us. What humans do on this earth either continues creation or obstructs it. It all depends on the way we look at life, the way we see our role in the ongoing creation of the world.

Work is our contribution to creation. It relates us to the rest of the world. It fulfills our responsibility to the future. God left us a world intact, a world with enough for everyone. The contemplative question of the time is, What kind of world are we leaving to those who come after us? The contemplative sets out to shape the world in the image of God. Order, cleanliness, care of the environment bring the Glory of God into the stuff of the moment, the character of the little piece of the planet for which we are responsible.

The ideal state, the contemplative knows, is not to avoid work. The first thing Genesis requires of Adam and Eve is that they "till the garden and keep it." They are, then, commanded to work long before they sin. Work is not, in Judaeo-Christian tradition, punishment for sin. Work is the mark of the conscientiously human. We do not live to outgrow work. We live to work well, to work with purpose, to work with honesty and quality and artistry. The floors the contemplative mops have never been better mopped. The potatoes the contemplative grows do not damage the soil under the pretense of developing it. The machines a contemplative designs and builds are not created to destroy life but to make it more possible for everyone. The people the contemplative serves get all the care that God has

The contemplative is overcome by the notion of "tilling the garden and keeping it." Work does not distract us from God. It brings the reign of God closer than it was before we came. Work doesn’t take us away from God. It continues the work of God through us. Work is the priesthood of the human race. It turns the ordinary into the grandeur of God.

To be a real contemplative and no shaman of the airy-fairy, I must work as if the preservation of the world depends on what I am doing in this small, otherwise insignificant space I call my life.

Sr Joan's remarks remind me of the comments people sometimes used to make when they discovered that I was both a contemplative and a dairy herdsman. "Not much time for sitting and navel-gazing, I'd have thought..." or words to that effect! But there was no conflict - that work, solitary as it usually was, and unarguably useful and necessary as it always was, became part of my contemplative life, or else contemplation became a part of work. I'm not sure I know which. Strangely enough, now that I'm retired (after a farm accident a few years ago), I have to work far harder to find time for contemplation, and it feels far more like an artificial construct. Go figure!