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!