Reflecting on Work in the Month and Year of St. Joseph

For the past several years, I spent my summers doing concrete and masonry work. We worked hard; we were exposed to the elements; we created things from our work – foundations, basement walls, garage slabs, and floors.

One striking part of our work was the somewhat scornful way the men on the crew were viewed. When answering what I did for work, the typical answer was “oh…” followed by an attempt to regain conversation. On the job, homeowners spoke to us like we were unintelligent – despite the fact that most of my coworkers had a college degree. My coworkers did construction because skilled block layers or flat workers can earn as much as many office workers.

The root of their impression of us seemed to me that most Americans (at least in the suburban areas we worked) look down on physical labor. Some days, I agreed with them. In hour seven of ten hands digging a trench on a blazing July day, it is hard not to wish you could be sitting at a desk in air-conditioned an office. But consider how much many people look forward to retirement, how many people complain about their jobs – and it seems that despising work does not stop at physical labor.

But in the beginning, it was not so. Before the fall of man, God created Adam to do work. Genesis 2:15 tells us that “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” Examining St. Josemaría Escrivá and Genesis, we will examine three reasons that God created mankind for work.

1. God created mankind in His image and likeness.

In the first words of scripture, we learn that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The first act of God was to work: to create. When God placed Adam in the garden to till and keep it, He invited Adam to participate in creation.

Adam could use his mind and body to form a part of creation, participate in God’s work, and to create something good. Work is not just a good thing that we can do, but it is part of our nature. God created us from the beginning to work.

2. Work benefits mankind by increasing virtue

St. Josemaría Escrivá shows how work can benefit mankind on a natural level by increasing virtue. When he asked his congregation to reflect on workers who are outstanding in his homily “Work in Genesis”, he bade them reflect on the virtue of those workers: their “integrity or their spirit of service or self-sacrifice.”

Virtue is a habit, a way of being. Humans dispose themselves to habits through repetition: by repeating things over and over. In this way, they engrain in themselves a certain manner of acting.

According to Aristotle, if this manner is good, then it is a virtue. Working well necessarily instills virtue as long as the job is not contrary to it. Therefore, “every job that is not opposed to the divine law is good and noble.” Regardless of one’s work, perseverance or fortitude is required to do it well. In physically demanding jobs this is particularly evident.

A blacksmith becomes tired of hammering steel all day. A fisherman or fisherwoman becomes exhausted pulling in his or her nets. In other lines of work, too, difficulties arise through which one must persevere. Likewise, work instills obedience by subjecting the laborer to bosses and superiors. Work impresses humility by stretching employees to their limits. It inspires prudence by teaching them when to
do or not to do various things. In a like manner, work engenders leadership, honesty, hope, temperance, and multitudes of other virtues. Such a life of virtue is an internal reward because by it one is made a most excellent human being.

3. Work unites Man to God

Work itself, however, has immense value in its ability to unite a man to God on a supernatural level. St. Josemaría Escrivá argues that “our professional vocation is an essential and inseparable part of our condition as Christians!” In fact, “every job that is not opposed to the divine law is … capable of being raised to the supernatural plane, that is, inserted into the constant flow of Love which defines the life of a child of God.”

The Christian is called to sanctify the world by bringing God into all that he or she does. In his or her materiality, he or she has “been chosen by the Holy Spirit as His dwelling place.” Just as God chose to dwell in material bodies, He chooses also to sustain human actions in His mind’s eye. As Jesus Christ and St. Joseph labored to create carpentry which has almost certainly not survived two-thousand years, so men and women are called to work faithfully. This unites them to the labor of the Holy Family in the hidden years at Nazareth.

Working faithfully also unites mankind to God the Father by allowing mankind to participate in creating His creation. Most valuably, faithfully working for God unites the Christian to Him spiritually by allowing him or her to extend prayer to all parts of his or her life. Whether one is a lauded speaker or taxidermies deer, his or her work can unite him or her to Christ. For, “All our work, absolutely all of it is done in His presence.”

** All scriptural quotations come from the RSV. Josemaría Escrivá’s quotations
come from “Work in Genesis” and “Passionately Loving the World.”**