Teachers are always looking for the teachable moment, the object lesson that will help their students learn not just facts, but connect the dots, get the bigger picture and maybe even acquire some wisdom.
The current state of affairs in the economy offers many such moments, but one that stands out for any of us involved in education, be we parents, teachers, pastors or youth ministers, is the opportunity to talk about the nobility and sacredness of work. Perhaps no time in recent history has offered us such a vital chance to expose our kids and to remind each other of the Church’s teachings on work.
Let’s face it: until very recently, many people have looked down on manual labor, including some who now find themselves, not only respecting it more, but actually praying for an opportunity to engage in it. In better times, many of us may have adopted an “us” and “them” mentality, distancing ourselves, however subconsciously, from the worker we passed cleaning the streets or getting us our cup of coffee in the morning. We may hear the echo of our parents’ or grandparents’ voices telling us that they had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that nobody handed them anything, and that their rise to power and status was the result of determination and hard work. Without our realizing it, this may have translated into a prejudice against those who have not made it as far as we have. Somehow, we think, they lack the drive, the work ethic, or the determination to go the distance. We all know people who believe that the majority of the homeless, jobless and those working at the lowest end of the pay scale are just not trying hard enough (translation: not trying as hard as they are).
This has never, necessarily, been the case, but the awareness today of the Fortune 500 executive who was laid off and took a janitorial job to get health care for his sick wife or the single mother of three who is working that many jobs, all of them garnering her a lower weekly pay than she enjoyed before she became a statistic, drives home the point that all work is noble and that we never know who the person is who is serving us our meal or cleaning up after us. Not that it should matter that the new janitor in our building has a master’s degree in electrical engineering; the source of his basic right to respect was never his professional credentials, but the single glorious fact that he is a child of God.
The first chapter of Genesis establishes man’s call to stewardship, to take control of creation in God’s name, to work toward a unified kingdom. Later, in Exodus, man is told to work, but on the seventh day to rest. In the prophetic books, we see Isaiah, Amos and others raging against the corruption that has crept into man’s work, with its emphasis on money, materialism, and personal gain and its resulting neglect of the poor.
The Second Vatican Council encouraged the laity to work for the betterment of mankind, reminding all that “by their competence in secular disciplines and by their activity, interiorly raised up by grace, [they] work earnestly in order that created goods through human labour, technical skill and civil culture may serve the utility of all men according to the plan of the creator and the light of his word.” “Lumen Gentium/Dogmatic Constitution on the Church”
Thanks to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 1986 pastoral letter “Economic Justice for All,” the moral framework our work is to take has been laid out for us in simple, yet powerful terms. Even Catholic high school students know that “the economy exists for man and not man for the economy,” but as long as that knowledge remains only the material for a test answer, it is spiritually useless. Until it informs and transforms how all of us approach our work lives, than we still have much more to learn. Perhaps now, given the state of the nation and the world, we can help our young people and ourselves to understand what it means in real life terms and to order our own work life accordingly.
“Work,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us, “is both duty and gift, redemptive and, thus, life-giving. Human work proceeds directly from persons created in the image of God and called to prolong the work of creation by subduing the earth, both with and for one another. In work,” we are reminded, “ the person exercises and fulfills in part the potential inscribed in his nature. The primordial value of labor stems from man himself, its author and its beneficiary.” (2427-2428)
Today we have been given a great opportunity to teach our kids and to renew our own belief that all work is sacred, that we waste time and heart stratifying work, and that when we pass the greeter in a store or the taste tester in the market, we, like Abraham greeting the three visitors in Genesis 18 have just seen the face of God.
Kathleen Pesta is a religious studies teacher at The Prout School in Wakefield
