Category Archives: Work

Redeeming Work

November 6, 2021Virtue, WorkJohn Paul II, Laborem Exercens, Personalism, The Falltwowingstogod@gmail.com

Nearly every large company presents itself to potential employees as deeply concerned with helping the new employee achieve “Work/Life Balance.” The particulars might be different for each company, but the promise is the same—we will teach you the calculus by which the scales of life can be balanced. But in truth they offer little more than guilt management techniques enabling the employee to decide how much of his life he is willing to trade in order to be professionally successful. This balancing act always feels like a compromise because balance really isn’t the problem. The problem is work itself. Or, at least the way we experience it living as we do in our post-Edenic world.

Man the Worker

By examining the nature of work itself, we can also see how it can be integrated into a rich and full life. Work is, as John Paul II said, “a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth” (Laborem Exercens, 4). It is fundamental because it is part of his nature to work and be perfected by it. The Book of Genesis reveals this through God’s commandment to “fulfill the earth and subdue it” (Gn 1:28). Man is a worker because he is made in the image of God the Creator. He Who made all things, made those things so that man could bring them to their completion. In perfecting things, man himself would be perfected.

But we know that is not the end of the story. In choosing to “become like God” (Gn 3:5) on his own terms, man damaged his true God-likeness. Work was infected by the curse of the Fall and work became labor. Work itself became disintegrated. Plagued by thorns and thistles, man becomes overly focused about the perfecting of things and forgets that work is primarily meant to perfect him. As Pius XI put it, “for dead matter comes forth from the factory ennobled, while men there are corrupted and degraded” (Quadragesimo Anno, 135).

Even this is not the end of the story however. The Son of God made Himself a worker so that work would get caught up in the Redemption. Rather than succumbing to the heavy burden of work, we can submit to the yoke of Christ. Work is still labor, but by laboring in the Spirit of Christ, it is no longer an obstacle but a means of sanctification. Christ was, as John Paul II called Him, “a man of work…Who preached the ‘gospel of work’” (LE 26). Now by accepting the labor associated with work as punishment for our sins and offering it as reparation, work becomes redemptive.

The Two Dimensions

Work then has two dimensions—objective and subjective—and both must be good in order for the “gospel of work” to penetrate our work. In the objective sense, work is the practical manner in which man “subdues the earth.” This means that the work itself must in a very real way facilitate the Common Good. The good produced must be good for society and the work done on the “intellectual toolbench” must be ordered to the truth. For many of us, our professional work will be the place where we fulfill our obligation to the Common Good. It must in some way help others to truly thrive. That is the only way to ensure a proper return for the talents that the master gave to the servants.

John Paul II had great concern for the changes to the nature of work that were coming about because of technology. He was not a troglodyte who feared technology but thought that efficiency was a dangerous measure. He saw technological development as a great good if it facilitated man’s work and enabled him to grow in virtue. But, “technology can cease to be man’s ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work “supplants” him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave” (LE, 5).

The subjective meaning of work is the pre-eminent dimension. Works gains its value from the fact that it is a person who is doing it and not primarily by the work done. Some work is objectively better than other, but good work is that work which makes the worker morally good. The best work for any individual is the work that will make him grow in virtue. This is why the work itself, as long as it is good, does not matter so much as its character building effect on the person. If more emphasis is placed on the subjective dimension of work, then we will cease to value work merely for its pay.

Realizing that the most important thing we make in work is ourselves, we can see why “Work/Life Balance” goes about the problem of disintegration in the wrong way. It is a subtle attempt at redeeming work on our own, rather than allowing God’s original vision for work to permeate our actions.

The Social Cost of Greed

May 5, 2021Catholic Social Teaching, Culture of Life, Economics, Freedom, Human Dignity, Marxism, Politics, WorkGreed, Gregory the Great, Oligarchy, Original Sin, Seven Deadly Sins, St. Paul, St. Thomastwowingstogod@gmail.com

It is axiomatic that those who can’t control themselves will always be controlled by someone else. This axiom is on display in our own day as we continue to see democracy be overthrown by oligarchy. A virtuous populace can thrive under a democratic system. Any system of self-government requires a people who are capable of governing their own desires. Once that power is lost individually and vice takes over, mobs are sure to follow. The problem with mobs however is that they really can never organize and so an oligarch must step in to incite and organize the mob. Thus, democracy moves from mob rule to oligarchy very quickly. Our own day bears witness to these principles in action as democracy dies and oligarchy takes over. If we are to arrest this development, then we must examine its causes. Every social ill has as its root cause personal vice and there is one vice that seems to be baked into our society—avarice. We should not be surprised at this fact given that St. Paul matter-of-factly proclaims that “love of money is the root of all evil” (c.f. 1 Timothy 6:10) and the Christian Tradition since Gregory the Great has considered it as one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Despite tradition’s testimony to the contrary, our own culture insists there is no sin in avarice. That is because it is baked into the American Experiment. Founded on a class-less basis, class became something that was earned and prosperity was the first form of virtue signaling. As Tocqueville said public fortune became synonymous with greed. To condemn greed is to suffer the label of Socialist. For those who are willing to wear that label proudly, they always do so while hiding their 10,000 square-foot houses behind hedges and gates. These modern-day hypocrites make the Pharisees seem tame.

What is Avarice?

What then is greed and why does it cause such social evil? St. Thomas says that, “avarice is taken generally for an inordinate love of having anything whatsoever, and in another way particularly for love of having possessions all of which are comprehended under the name of money because their value is measured by money…avarice signifies a certain defect in regard to the dispensing of wealth and a certain excess in regard to its acquisition and retention because of an excessive love of money” (De Malo, XIII). Mere desire for possessions and money is not evil, but instead an inordinate love of them is. This inordinate love occurs when the desire to possess a thing or thing goes beyond need (this includes the “need” for saving and reasonable luxury). Rather than getting caught up as to where the line between reasonable and inordinate is, we should instead look to the interior of what it is that actually motivates us in our greed.

What makes greed particularly deadly is the fact that it kills our recognition of our creaturely status. All of us crave security. Rightly ordered, we know that this security is limited and so we must trust and hope in God and His promises. This is why the Dollar Bill has the motto In God We Trust on it. But given enough material prosperity, and more importantly, enough money, we begin to think our security is founded upon the ability to monetarily weather any storm. This craving for security leads to an insatiable desire for money because money gives us the appearance of having control. Greed then become all about control and grasping at a God-likeness that is rooted in Original Sin.

Personal greed also spills over to other people because it is opposed to both generosity and justice. It really is more blessed to give than to receive (c.f. Acts 20:35) because it keeps us from falling into the greed trap. The virtue of generosity conditions us to draw pleasure from giving rather than getting. One can hardly imagine God allowing a person to outdo Him in generosity so that they give away too much.

Likewise with justice. The tight-fistedness of greed always keeps us from ensuring that our neighbor receives what is due to him. For the avaricious man, relationships are fundamentally competitive rather than complimentary. Each slice of the pie that you receive is one less that I can have. In this way avarice also becomes deadly for other people. Accustomed to measuring everything in terms of costs, there is an emphasis on having over being. Utilitarianism, rooted in greed is, as Pope St. John Paul II, at the heart of the Culture of Death—”“This culture [the Culture of Death] is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency…only goal . . . the pursuit of one’s own material well-being” (Evangelium Vitae, 12).

Extending Control

It is also deadly to others in a less obvious way. Buoyed by unbridled Capitalism and fed by insatiable greed, the avaricious man, accustomed to thinking he has absolute control over his life, now sets his sights on other people. Having many zeroes in their bank accounts, they now decide they will play the hero for others. But this playing of hero is just that, mere play, even if they label it as philanthropic. This philanthropy however is always motivated by a desire to control other people. It is literally a Messiah-complex thinking that they can save the world on their own terms. America seems to breed these “philanthropists” throughout the ages, be it Carnegie and Rockefeller or Gates and Bezos.

Greed creates the oligarchs and greed is what makes the mob malleable to their manipulation. Convinced that the only way to be free from the grasp of the oligarchs is by having their own resources, they remain under their thumbs. Greed generates “class” warfare and Socialism becomes the weapon to pit the greedy plebs against each other. In truth however the only way to be free is the same way it has always been—become men and women of virtue. The virtuous always remain free because they are immune to such manipulation. Armed with generosity and justice, they are not only counter-cultural, but culture changers.

On Wasting Moral Capital

May 2, 2020Catholic Social Teaching, Church and State, Church Authority, Culture, Culture of Life, Economics, WorkBishop Gomez, Cardinal Sarah, Common Good, Democratic Party, Immigration, Just Wage, Redistribution, Republican Party, USCCBtwowingstogod@gmail.com

In response to the President’s order temporarily halting all immigration into the United States, several US Bishops issued a statement condemning his decision. This is not the first time that the Bishops have come to loggerheads with the President over his immigration policies, and rightfully so at times, but this particular statement leaves Catholics wondering whether the shepherds might be moonlighting as lobbyists for the Democratic Party.

To be clear, the problem is not that they are aligning themselves with the Democratic Party’s position regarding immigration, but that they so closely aligning themselves with a political party at all. Trapped in what has been called the “left-right fallacy”, American political parties have succumbed to either/or thinking. The Church on the other hand, is animated by both/and type thinking, especially with respect to her social doctrine. When a group of prelates comes out with a statement that sounds like it was drawn up by a Party member, you can almost always be sure that they are failing to embrace and teach the full Catholic understanding of the issue.

The Church on Immigration

With respect to immigration, the Church’s teaching is quite clear that there is a right to emigrate “when there are just reasons in favor of it” (Pacem in Terris, 25). The right is not absolute, conditioned not only to just reasons on the part of the emigrant, but also depending upon the Common Good of the nation they seek to enter. A State must accept immigrants “so far as the good of their own community, rightly understood, permits” (ibid, 106). As custodian of the “good of the community” or the Common Good, the State must exercise its office by enacting policies that first and foremost look to the Common Good and only then to the good of the individual immigrants.

This precedence of the Common Good over the right of the individual is not merely evidence of, as the Bishops insist, “the indifference of a throw-away mentality” but instead flows from the right to emigrate. The immigrant has an obligation to contribute to the Common Good if he is to become a member of the society in which he seeks to emigrate. From this responsibility flows the right to emigrate. If he does harm to the Common Good, then the right disappears.

There is a flip side to this as well, one that is not often discussed, but his highlighted by Cardinal Robert Sarah in his book The Night is Far Spent. The Cardinal says that “without a precise plan for their integration, it is criminal to offer hospitality to migrants.” The Cardinal speaks of the necessity of a welcoming State to have a “precise plan for giving them all the guarantees of dignified life.” This “dignified life” means not just that they have food and housing, but that they have the means for securing these things themselves. To come to another country and live off of the host is not dignified at all, but instead actually does great harm to both the individual person and the Common Good.

Democratic Party Talking Points?

It seems that the US Bishops have ignored the convergence of these very important principles and instead decided to regurgitate Democratic Party talking points. With 30 million Americans currently unemployed, it would be contrary to the Common Good to allow more people into the country and create additional competition for work. The Bishops obviously have fallen into the “immigrants do jobs Americans won’t do” fallacy. Immigrants don’t do jobs Americans won’t do, they do jobs at far lower wages than Americans will do them. They drive down wages for lower-skilled jobs by flooding the market with more workers. In a 2016 article in Politico, George J. Borjas, Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, reported that,

[W]hen the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.
Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.

Contrary to the Bishops’ insistence that “There is little evidence that immigrants take away jobs from citizens,” it is clear Americans do lose jobs as a result of the influx of immigrants. This Democratic Party taking point, on the lips of Catholic Bishops ought to concern all of us, especially because there are two especially relevant Catholic principles upon which they are silent.

If you search “just wage” “immigration” on the USCCB website, you will find a single mention of just wage in the context of immigration (and that is a 2003 document quoting John Paul II). Why are the Bishops not defending this clear abuse of immigrant workers? The Church has long insisted that the dignity of the human person demands that he receive a just wage that is “sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children” (Rerum Novarum, 46). Of course, neither the Democrats or the Republicans ever speak of just wage either (and no “minimum wage” is not the same thing as a just wage).

The reason that politicians never speak of it is because immigration is a hidden way in which a redistribution of wealth occurs. Thus, the Bishops make the unsubstantiated claim that “Immigrants and citizens together are partners in reviving the nation’s economy.” A closer examination however reveals the exact opposite to be the case. Returning to Professor Borjas’ article, he pointed out that

somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer…I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year.

Thus we can see how indiscriminately allowing immigrants into the country, even to fill jobs supposedly “Americans won’t do” can do great harm to the Common Good.

There is nothing in the President’s order that is contrary to the Church’s teaching on immigration and thus they have nothing to add to the conversation as Catholic prelates. Their personal opinions, even when stamped with an imprimatur, only serve to damage their credibility as teachers of the truth. Given the great moral crisis we are facing, especially in the United States, it would be great if Catholic Bishops would not waste their moral capital taking what are clearly political positions.

A Boring Holiday?

September 3, 2018Leisure, Virtue, WorkFederal Holidays, French Revolution, Labor Day, Secular Humanismtwowingstogod@gmail.com

Each year, from sea to shining sea, our nation sets aside the first Monday of September as a day of great festival. People gather together by the tens and celebrate Labor Day, a day that “constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country” (Department of Labor History of Labor Day). Labor Day is remarkable indeed, but not for the reasons for the Central Labor Union first envisioned when they celebrated the first Labor Day back in 1882. Instead, Labor Day is significant because it serves as a sign of a different achievement of modern man—the erasure of what Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper once called the “Festive Principle.”

This festive principle is written into the nature of mankind. One might even say that it is festival that man is made for. At the end of the first creation account, the seventh day, God invites man to celebrate a festival with Him, a time to not just to reflect and rest but to revel in the fact that all that is, is good. Therefore, each man and woman finds buried in his and her heart a desire to celebrate the eternal festival; a desire that is fanned into flame by the great feasts of this life.

This desire cannot be wholly stamped out, but it most certainly can be squashed. We can and, in fact, have become most un-festive, a truth marked by the “celebration” of Labor Day. An experiment that began with the founders of the French Revolution has failed because, as Pieper says, “while man can make the celebration, he cannot make what is to be celebrated, cannot make the festive occasion and the cause for celebrating. The happiness of being created, the existential goodness of things, the participation in the life of God, the overcoming of death-all these occasions of the great traditional festivals are pure gift. But because no one can confer a gift on himself, something that is entirely a human institution cannot be a real festival” (In Tune with the World, p. 46).

Labor Day, like the other National Holidays including Thanksgiving where no one will name Whom it is we are thanking, are about celebrating gifts we have bestowed upon ourselves. As the Department of Labor reminds us, “It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.” Dramatic pause aside, the fact that there is a most of suspense as we mention not the real Creator of those things, but man, is most telling. Once God is removed from our festal vocabulary our festivals naturally fall flat. Labor Day is a completely flat holiday.

Labor Day in a particular way ends up in the orbit of the absurd because it is a celebration based upon something wholly material. It no longer has the eternal festival in view. It loses its sacramental meaning and therefore is boring. Because of its materiality (along with Thanksgiving and secular Christmas especially) its “celebration” also has an interior spirit of competition. Men and women cannot unite around a common material good. The limited nature of material things leads away from unity and always end in competition.

If we peel back the layers of secularization, then we can see why Labor was chosen as worthy of festivity. Along with procreation, it is the way in which we most image God. In both cases we image God the Creator. So it should not surprise us that the Fall, in bruising the image of God in mankind, turned these two things into labor. The work of Christ the Laborer was to dial back these effects so that work now becomes a source of grace. Now that is something that is worthy of festival. That the One Who simply speaks things into existence should allow mere creatures to use their strength and freedom to co-create with Him. Worker bees have no dignity, man the worker has dignity because and only insofar as he works as the image of God. To flatten Labor Day out also flattens each one of us making us mere cogs in an economic machine. Celebrate Labor Day in a spirit of awe and thanksgiving to God the Creator and each man is elevated to his rightful place in the cosmos.

Nietzsche, who was no friend of transcendent values, once said that “the trick is not to arrange a festival but to find people who can enjoy it.” For all of the reasons above, Christians should enjoy Labor Day and truly celebrate it for everything that it should be. “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice in it.”

The Worker

April 30, 2018Anthropology, Economics, Redemption, The Life of Jesus, Theology, Virtue, WorkCommunism, Liberalism, St. Joseph the Worker, Worktwowingstogod@gmail.com

Was man made to work or was work made for man? The modern answer, enlightened of course by the strange amalgam of Marxism and liberalism is that made was made for work. The Christian, and therefore the true answer, is that work was made for man. In the beginning God made man and placed him in an earthly paradise. Despite declaring creation “good, very good” (Gn 1:31), God left it completely incomplete and commanded man to finish it, to “cultivate and care for it” (Gn 2:15), because man himself was completely incomplete. God commands only what is for our own good so that it is natural for man to work because work is a means of perfecting him. With the Fall, man became incompletely incomplete so that work, while still essential to his fulfillment, lost its sweetness and became labor (c.f. Gn 3:17-19). The effects of this curse are still felt today—especially today—when man is plagued by compartmentalization leaving him alienated from himself. Given the key role that work plays in the integrated life then we must strive to see it in its proper context.

If we are to be honest, absent the Christian message as a whole, the secular response is the best we can come up with. Even the pre-Christian pagans thought that all men were made to work, or, at least some men were made for servile work so that others didn’t have to. That is because all they can see is the bad news—the curse of the Fall. But the Redeemer of Mankind came spending most of His earthly life as a manual laborer redeeming work itself. He came preaching, as St. John Paul II reminded us, “the Gospel of Work.” And just as His mother Mary received the first fruits of His redemptive act, it is His earthly father Joseph, the man who worked beside Him those many years, that first reaped the fruits of the redemptive gift of work. It is for this reason that the Church puts forth St. Joseph as “The Worker.” If we are to see work in its proper context then we should look to St. Joseph as the model.

First a word about the seeming necessity of compartmentalization. Most of us spend more time at work than anywhere else. It becomes a compartment because it seems to only be related to the material. Man applies his labor and ingenuity on creation in order to produce something that he can use. The emphasis really seems to be on the finished product so that we can stockpile just enough to take a break (even if indefinitely) and do the really meaningful things including the compartment of “religion and God.” While we may hear niceties about “praying while you work,” avoiding compartmentalization seems a practical impossibility.

The Finished Product

But this is where the emphasis on work as made for man is important. The finished product of him work is not just the material thing produced, it is himself. Good work is that which makes us good men. Work ought to be judged first and foremost on what it turns us into. Work that helps us grow in virtue is good work regardless of the actual task. Seeing work in this subjective sense, the person produced, rather than solely in the exterior production can free us from compartmentalization because it is a means of forming the whole person. The interior fruits of our labor are carried throughout the rest of our life.

Still man is confronted with the challenge of integrating work with his relationship to God. There is always a gravity of work that pulls man towards creation, even if it is towards his own virtue, and away from God. And this is why we need St. Joseph as our intercessor and model. He, quite literally, worked for and with God.

Working For and With God

All of the work that St. Joseph did was, even if indirectly, for Jesus. The “righteous man” sought always to serve God especially through his work. What this means for us is that we can redeem our work by setting our intention. At the beginning of any of our work we should make of it an offering to God. Then all that we accomplish becomes a gift to Jesus. We can also willingly accept, like St. Joseph did, the toilsome-ness of work. Because work became labor through mankind’s sin, our acceptance of the burdens is an offering for our sins. It was in this way that St. Joseph shared in Christ’s redemptive act and so can we.

Work also helps us to pay the debt of gratitude to God for the gifts, especially the special skills, He has given us. Gratitude, properly speaking, carries with it not just the obligation to say “thank you” but also the obligation to repay the benefactor. The fruit of our labor then becomes a means by which we repay to God this great debt.

There also needs to be a paradigm shift in order to see our work as working with God. We should see it as a means of not only completely creation, but also as distributing it to all of mankind. Just because you are getting paid to work doesn’t mean it isn’t also an exercise of charity towards our neighbor. All workplaces can be charities when we take upon ourselves the spirit of St. Joseph. This desire not only to give someone what they have paid for but also to go “above and beyond” by making manifest the love of God can sanctify the most secular of work environments.

When Pope Pius XII instituted the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker in 1955 it was in response to the dehumanizing effects of Communism; offering an alternative to their May Day celebrations for workers. In the subsequent sixty-three years we have seen work became a source of further disintegration in the lives of mankind. By seeing work through the eyes of the Church and the illumination offered by St. Joseph the Worker we can restore work to its rightful place in the lives of all of us.

St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us!

On the Idolatry of Money

May 6, 2017Money, Spiritual Life, Virtue, WorkIdolatry of Moneytwowingstogod@gmail.com

The strange thing about idols is that they usually travel in our blind spots. We may very well be aware of their dangers, but fail to see that we have succumbed to them. This is true especially when it comes to the idolatry of money. We may agree, for example, with Pope Francis that “the worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money,” but think that it is the greedy rich people’s problem and not necessarily our own. The plank is firmly implanted in our own eye and unless we submit ourselves to some self-examination we may remain permanently blinded to what has always been viewed as one of the Seven Capital Sins.

The Role of Money in Exchange

A word first on the reason many of us our blind to this particular vice. St. Thomas Aquinas, building on the economic teachings of Aristotle, thought that the marketplace was governed by two different types of exchanges which he called natural and unnatural. A natural exchange was one in which one good was traded for another. This might be a barter system or a money as medium of exchange system. A cobbler needs to feed his family and so he might trade a pair of shoes for a cow or he sells the shoes so that he could buy the cow. In either case the end of the cobbler’s transaction was to obtain a cow. It may be that he chooses to save the money so he can purchase the cow later, perhaps when business is slow, but his purpose is always clear—to obtain something he needs to feed his family.

An unnatural exchange, on the other hand, is one in which money ceases to be a medium of exchange but instead becomes the end. The cobbler sells the shoes with the goal of making money and to get rich. He does not have any particular end in mind, even if it is to save for some future hardship.

What also makes an exchange unnatural is when one or both participants has an irrational end in mind. All exchange should be governed by needs and rational wants. The needs are obvious but a rational want represents something that may not be strictly needed but is a reasonable thing to purchase. A second pair of shoes may be a reasonable want, a tenth pair, not so much.

When a commodity is the end of an exchange there is a certain protection against greed. One may desire only so many things. There is only so much room to store them. There are only so many loaves of bread we can eat. There are only so many pairs of shoes we can wear. Our desire may be unreasonable, but there is a natural limit to how much we will desire.

Money is completely different. Our desire for money is infinite. There is no natural limit on how much we can desire. For the rich, their “net worth” becomes merely a game to see how high they can go. This, of course, only happens when money becomes an end instead of a means. When we see it merely as a means to purchase those things we need and rationally want, we will be satisfied with only a certain amount.

Love of Money as a Capital Sin

Scripture tells us that the “love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10) and Tradition labels it as one of the Seven Capital Sins. The latter are not sins in the classical sense, but more like motivations that gives rise to the actual sins in our lives. Objectively speaking one may commit the sin of murder, but the personal motivation is always rooted in one of these seven capital sins. We may murder because of wrath or we may murder to grow rich. The act is the same, but the motivation differs.

Understanding this helps us to root out the actual sins in our lives. When our motives change, our acts change. Love of neighbor will only replace love of money when we see it for what it is. Watch yourself over the next few weeks and see how often money motivates you; not by money as being able to purchase things that you need or rationally want, but just the idea of having more money. Whenever I do this exercise I am always surprised by how easily I have fallen into the trap again.

Covetousness, that is a love of money, remains hidden to most of us because it is woven into the fabric of the culture. Our economy is structured such that money is the end. It is not about producing goods that people need and rationally want, but creating a desire for consumption. Advertisers try to convince us we need something. This is all motivated by a love of money. Most people work, not because it provides for needs and rational wants and fulfills them as persons, but because they want to be rich. When you are swimming in water, it is hard not to get wet. The first step is to recognize that the water is what is making you wet and find ways to stay out of the pool. Examining our motivations and ways that we personally contribute to the culture of consumption will help to purify us from this dangerous idol.

What also makes money a particularly deadly snare as an idol is the fact that it can rob us of our trust in God. Money is usually a sign of security for most of us. After all, money can buy all the things we need, or so the thinking goes. Money contributes to the lie that man lives on bread alone. It is not without accident that when religious fervor was stirred in the hearts of Americans during the Second Great Awakening that the motto In God We Trust first appeared on coins. It is a stark reminder that our security is in God and not in money. Our Lord called the poor in spirit, those who put their trust in God and not in money, as blessed.

Self-Help and the Spiritual Life

January 21, 2017Spiritual Life, Virtue, Workself-helptwowingstogod@gmail.com

Is there anything more demonstrative of the true American spirit than the self-help industry? From How to Win Friends and Influence People to Tools of the Titans, America has always been a ripe market for self-help. It has grown into a $10 billion industry. Part of the appeal is that they appear to fit a primal need—each of us is haunted by an awareness that we are not what we are supposed to be and need some outside help. Always pragmatic, Americans assume that there must be a technique to fix the problem and buy the latest “life-changing” self-help book. Even after reading the best ones, we are still plagued by a nagging sense that all is not quite right inside. Off we go to the next book. But one has to wonder, with over 630,000+ self-help books on Amazon offering different techniques, is the problem really a technical one at all? What if the problem is in our constitution such that no amount of self-help will completely fix it?

Within the Christian tradition we have a name for this fundamental flaw and we call it Original Sin. We used to all know this, but many of us have forgotten it. As Chesterton said, Original Sin is “the only part of Christian theology that can be proved.” In an age where we abhor theory and demand practicality, all men agree on the doctrine of the Fall regardless of whether they profess it or not. What they deny it in theory, they find in practice—each of us “do not do the good they want to do” (Romans 7:19).

Most of us are familiar with the term Original Sin but struggle to articulate exactly what it is. Adam and Eve were created by God with supernatural gifts including the very life of God which we call sanctifying grace. Adam and Eve had perfect integration of their faculties. They could see the Good clearly in their intellect, they were able to will it and carry it out with a bodily intensity in the passions. The passions followed the will which followed the intellect which followed God, the Supreme Good.

Falling from such a height, not only removed the supernatural gifts, but left the human nature they would hand on to their progeny damaged. Their souls were no longer integrated. The intellect was darkened, the will weakened and the passions ran amok, no longer obeying intellect and will. In other words, Adam and Eve’s offspring were not just worse off because they lost sanctifying grace, but also because human nature itself was damaged. Naturally, this leads to the question why God allowed man to Fall from grace, leaving him worse off than if He had never graced him to begin with?

The Self-Help Trap

God left man worse off to protect him from a bigger fall, that is, plunging into the self-help trap. Without this inner brokenness we could actually help ourselves. The only problem is that we would help ourselves to become something less than we were meant to be, namely “partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4), “God’s children now” (1 Jn 3:2). With the stain of Original Sin, we are always aware of a lack that cries out ultimately for God.

The self-help trap denies not only Original Sin, but the height from which we fell. It is meant to help us “improve,” but what does this mean? Progress is only progress if we know where we are going. We must know our purpose or destination before we can say whether something has improved our chances of reaching it. Each self-help program promises “success” but success is highly dependent upon the author’s definition.

One of the other post-Fall pitfalls is that we are prone to self-deception. We begin to look at what is normal (what everyone else is like) and the norm (what we were made for) and think “I am mostly OK, just need to work on few things.” Self-help only feeds this. We will always choose to improve in areas that either require the least amount of work or based on some idol we have set up.

In the minds of many well-meaning Christians, Christianity is the self-help program that actually works. Pope Benedict XVI pointed out this trap Christians can fall into in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est when he said “[B]eing Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (DCE, 1). There are a number of evangelists that present the Gospel as a self-help program that actually works. The danger in doing this however is that it doesn’t work when it is lived as an ethical system. Christianity morality is hard and all but impossible without first having an encounter with the living Christ. To the world, Christian morality makes no sense. It only makes sense once we trust Christ completely. With trust comes the willingness to do whatever He tells us.

Christianity and Self-Help

The opposite of Christianity is not atheism but radical self-help. They both start at the same place—a willingness to change. But it is there that they part ways. Self-help says “you can do this, all you need to do is approach the problem differently,” Christ says “pick up your Cross and follow me.” If I take it from the wounded hands of Christ, it will make me whole. Every virtue I am lacking is found in the crosses God sends me. All I need to do is allow them to do their work on me. It has a proven track record winning friends and influencing people—the Saints always make more Saints.

All that being said, this does not mean that self-help books and techniques do not have value in the spiritual life. Grace perfects and elevates nature so that the books which acknowledge the good of virtue over selfishness can be the raw material for change in our lives. But their proper place is always after the invasion of grace has occurred in our lives. A recent book written by Jeff Goins called The Art of Work is one worth commending to you.

The subtitle of the book reveals just how compatible it is—A Proven Path for Discovering What You Were Meant to Do. Although he does not specifically mention Christianity, it assumes that God’s Providence is an active force in our lives. He offers practical advice on how we are to respond to our call (without reference to Who it is that is calling), how service fulfills us, suffering is a friend dressed like an enemy because all things work for good for those who have a calling and nothing we do is wasted. He also recognizes God’s law of gradualism in which we do not so much leap from one cliff to another but build a bridge gradually across the chasm. Throughout the book he gives tells stories to demonstrate his point (even at one point referring to St. Theresa of Calcutta. All in all it reads like an instruction manual for fulfilling all aspects of your Christian vocation, especially when he talks about living what he calls a “portfolio life.”

A New Labor Day

September 8, 2015Catholic Social Teaching, Economics, Worktwowingstogod@gmail.com

In an attempt to remove the effect of all religious superstition, the leaders of the French Revolution invented a new calendar in 1793 to replace the Gregorian calendar. The calendar consisted of 12 months of 30 days, with five days left over that represented secular holidays (sometimes 6 in a leap year). The new calendar replaced the Christian holidays with festivals commemorating reason, virtue, genius, rewards, the revolution itself and finally labor. The revolutionaries borrowed this habit of creating secular holidays from the Roman Empire. While the observance of this calendar only lasted a short time, the habit of inventing secular holidays did not. In fact, we just celebrated the Labor Day holiday this week—a day that, according to the Department of Labor, is “dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” What this really marks is a “flattening out” of our horizons. Festivals have always been celebrated to mark and recognize that which is a pure gift. Labor Day and our other secular holidays we celebrate are all about us and what we do. Trapped inside our own world, we are greatly in need of a Christian revolution like what happened when Christianity “baptized” the secular holidays of the Roman Empire and attached deeper meaning in them. While it is fresh in our minds, we might start with Labor Day.

On the one hand we should not be surprised that work is one of the areas in which there is a flattening. When man is created on the sixth day of creation, the reader is told that God created mankind in His image (Gn 1:27). To remind mankind of this truth, He gives them two primary tasks, namely, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gn 1:28). These two tasks are the two main ways that mankind can image God—through procreation and through work. It is also these same two tasks that bear the curse of the Fall (Gn 3:16-19). In trying to become like gods (Gn 3:5) in the wrong way, the two primary ways in which man really is like God become distorted. Both childbirth and work become “labor” and the imaging of God is difficult to see.

Interestingly enough, these two topics were areas of primary focus for St. John Paul II. Most are familiar with his “rereading of Humanae Vitae” through a personalistic perspective in his Theology of the Body, but less are aware of his teachings on the Theology of Work that marked much of his pontificate. Perhaps there is no better summary of his teachings than in his encyclical Laborem Exercens.

What makes his teaching in this area so unique is his emphasis on the subjective aspect of work. The emphasis in the past was always on the objective part of work, namely the kind of work being done. This led to the distinction between intellectual and servile work, with the latter being somehow viewed as less than the former. Aristotle made a similar distinction between doing and making to reflect these two types and we also label work either “white collar” or “blue collar.” There is nothing wrong with making these distinctions per se, but there is always the danger that a utilitarian view of work arises. Workers simply become cogs in a machine that is aimed solely at production, whether of material or intellectual goods. What Christianity did was proclaim a “Gospel of work” (LE, 6) where it is not primarily about the kind of work that is being done, but the fact that it is a person that does it. This is especially true because we worship a God who took flesh as a manual worker.

Rather than just being an instrumental good, work is an intrinsic good. Recall the distinction between instrumental goods and intrinsic goods are that instrumental goods are good for something else while intrinsic goods are good in themselves. Work is an intrinsic good because of what it does to us interiorly. In other words, work is good for us because of what it makes us into. In fact this ought to be the sole criterion upon which we judge our work—what is my work turning me into? Otherwise there is always the grave danger of compartmentalization which leads to a disintegration in our personality.

The fruit of our work ought to be a growth in virtue. Two in particular are mentioned by St. Josemaria Escriva when he says that our work ought to develop in us “two human virtues, industriousness and diligence, which merge into one, for they both help us in our efforts to make good use of the talents we have each received from God” (Friends of God, 81). So important is this principle that Jesus Himself warned about becoming like the slothful (and wicked) servant who buried his talents rather than making them as an offering to the Master (Mt 25:26).

Primarily though work ought to serve as a labor of love. Through our work we ought to grow in charity through a love of God and service of our neighbor. St. Josemaria again, “”A complete range of virtues is called into play when we set about our work with the purpose of sanctifying it: fortitude, to persevere in our work despite the difficulties that naturally arise and to ensure that we never let ourselves be overwhelmed by anxiety; temperance, in order to spend ourselves unsparingly and to overcome our love of comfort and our selfishness; justice, so as to fulfil our duties towards God, society, our family and our fellow workers; prudence, to know in each case what course to take, and then to set about it without hesitation…And all this, I emphasize, is for the sake of Love” (Friends of God, 72).

From this emphasis on the subjective over the objective flows the Church’s principles related to economics. If things are meant merely to serve persons then there is a priority of labor over capital. The right to private property flows from the fact that man, because he rationally participates in his work, always ought to know that he is working for himself in some ways and not just a cog in a huge machine from above (CE 15). But it also serves as a limiting factor on private property by subordinating it to the universal destination of goods based upon a solidarity of all mankind.

I mentioned above that the problem with Labor Day now is that “it is all about us” but that this could somehow be redeemed. By reflecting on work, we begin to see work as an unmerited gift that calls for celebration. This is because work is not just a way in which we image God. If that were the case we would merely be like the beavers imaging God’s wisdom when they build a dam. But instead what makes work uniquely human is that man consciously participates in God’s activity as Creator. When God created the earth, it was not yet done. He left it to man to perfect the earth by participating in His creative act. God still creates today through man’s free participation and instrumentality.

As John Paul II said, “man, created in the image of God, shares by his work in the activity of the Creator and that, within the limits of his own human capabilities, man in a sense continues to develop that activity, and perfects it as he advances further and further in the discovery of the resources and values contained in the whole of creation” (LE 25). This awareness brings new meaning to work and ought to permeate even the most ordinary everyday activities.

In many ways a Christian Labor Day would be much like what the Sunday Sabbath rest is intended to be—a time to do the work of reflection and contemplation through participation in God’s work of resting. While the Sabbath is a time of reflection on the goodness of Creation and gratitude for the New Creation in Christ, a Christian Labor Day would be a day of contemplation and gratitude for the goodness of Creation that God has brought about through the labor of mankind.

The point is that work is not simply something we must do to take care of our bodies, but our souls as well. It is not something merely to be tolerated but something that perfects us and makes us ready for heaven. Does this describe our work? If not, perhaps we are all in need of a Christian Labor Day!

St. Joseph, the Worker, pray for us!

Two Wings to God

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth"Pope St. John Paul II