When I was in high school we read a short German story entitled Immensee. It’s the story of a love that never happened, but that should have, except that the tragic hero of our story was never able to express his love to the woman he loved. So, he ended up alone with an aching heart, full of regrets.
The book ends with him reminiscing about the woman’s last words to him. When they had parted, years back, she’d said to him: “I know you’ll never come back!” He hadn’t realized then how prophetic those words would be. Now, recalling them, he is overcome with regret and his life feels empty. He’s deeply sad. However, after sitting with that melancholy for a while, we are told he went to his desk and, despite nursing that heartache, began again “to work with all the vigor of his youth.”
Thank God for work. Sometimes that’s the only thing between us and unbearable melancholy. Work is a wonderful, God-given thing.
We lack a good spirituality of work. Too often work is seen as something that takes us away from God and prayer, a distraction from the spiritual life, not a good, honest, holy thing, not a gift from God.
In fact, in some spiritualities, work is seen as a punishment for sin, something introduced on the planet after Adam’s sin, not willed or intended by God ideally. In this view, except for sin, there would be no work. It’s hard to formulate a healthy theology of work when work is seen as a consequence of sin, as never intended by God.
There is some truth though in the belief that work can be a distraction and an escape (both from God and family) and that it can be a way to avoid facing the deeper things in our lives.
Further still, there’s the danger that we take our self-worth from our work, so that we feel good about ourselves only when we are achieving something and are anxious that deep down, outside of our work and our achievements, we have little worth. It’s easy to be unconscious of that. And so, we tend to put pressure on ourselves to keep working because our sense of self-worth is tied up with our work. That’s a perennial danger.
But there are dangers in everything. Work can be an excuse to avoid the deeper issues in our lives, but it is also the deep, natural form of contemplation that God gives to us as humans.
We must spend most of our waking lives working. That should tell us something, namely, that work must be the major avenue through which God wants us to journey toward deeper meaning. Given the way we are built and the way life is shaped, God surely does not expect us to consciously think about Him most of our waking moments.
God is not an egotistical tyrant, demanding our conscious attention, even while we must work long hours amidst all the heartaches, headaches, restlessness, anxieties, fears, and preoccupations that impale themselves upon us every waking minute. If God wants our conscious attention every waking minute, then there is some fatal flaw in the way we are built and the way life is set up.
But there is no fatal flaw. God is the ground of our being, the ground too of our work and our relationships. In God “we live and move and have our being.” We know God not just in our conscious awareness and in prayer, but also in a deep inchoate way by participating with Him in building this world – by growing something, building something, carving something, creating something, cleaning something, painting something, writing something, raising children, nursing bodies, teaching others, consoling others, humoring others, struggling with others, and loving others.
Work, like prayer, is a privileged way to get to know God because, when we work, we are toiling in partnership with Him. Jesus knew well both the feel of work and tiredness.
In the spiritual wisdom of monasticism, we find this counsel: Stay in your cell and it will teach you all you need to know. That isn’t to be taken literally. It’s a pregnant metaphor. Your “cell” is your vocation and occupation in life (husband, wife, father, mother, priest, sister, carpenter, teacher, banker, construction worker, nurse, doctor, janitor, artist, bus driver, computer technician, salesperson, athlete, etc.) If you are faithfully doing the work that this vocation and occupation asks of you, that work will be your path to sanctity, leading you into a community of life with God, others, the world.
There is of course the danger that we can use our busyness to rationalize and excuse ourselves from dealing with family, prayer, and community. Hard work can start as a virtue and turn into a vice, but the greater danger lies in not giving ourselves over to hard work.
Work is not a consequence of sin; it’s our path to holiness.