As we approach this coming Labor Day we will remember in our prayers this Sunday all who labor. We will specifically pray for justice in the workplace, justice being an imperative both in Hebrew Scripture and in the Gospels. Worker justice in our country continues to be a serious issue. The issue was the reason for the forming of labor unions in the first place; but now labor unions lack the influence they once had. Some would argue that that is a good thing, others would disagree, but the presenting problem of justice in the workplace persists still, however we intend to deal with it.
Worker justice has not only to do with a fair wage, but it also has to do with a safe environment, affordable benefits, adequate leisure, reasonable hours and due respect. Labor is a gift when it is performed in a just environment. It is the means of artful sacrifice; an outward and visible sign of human creativity that makes and remakes our world for the better. Labor performed in the context of injustice is quite the opposite. It debases and injures and stifles the creativity of the human spirit. Unjust employment practices abound in our city, our state, our country and our world broadly unseen, and it is our solemn promise as the Baptized that we will “strive for justice, and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” That is job one for us Christian people.
This Labor Day weekend when we take our leisure, thank sincerely someone who labors; thank them for what they do, and for doing it well, for it is our labor that transforms our world, labor a rudiment of the process of Creation, labor that clothes and houses and feeds and waters and heals our world. We are lifeless without our sacred labor, so we give thanks for our own privilege of labor ourselves.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the created order, an outward and visible reflection of the Creator Godself… is process, an ever becoming and evolving reality…the created order and God in it still becoming what might be…the universe blossoming into goodness…Our labor then a high metaphor for this becoming…work and rest, work and rest…and at the last, on the seventh day, the joy of jobs well done.
Dear Father Jim,
Rob Gray invited me to comment on your excellent note about labor. It a period of job and benefit losses and a shrinkage of union membership–with much of our production overseas in factories that fall well below our standards in safety and remuneration–the plight of labor does need to be addressed by the Church.
Your third paragraph does, however,
leave the impression that labor is simply something performed by others for "our" benefit. I would stress that labor is the universal condition ("Adam's curse," "the sweat of your brow") and is the uniquely human activity–changing the world by performing labor upon it. This ability is the basis for the human superiority over other species–proclaimed in Genesis–and it is basic to what Christians call "human nature" and Marxists "species being." All wealth–that is, all "use value"– is produced by labor, as you so well explain in your comment.
But, if all value comes from work, what of those who do not work? You know about Christianity's long suspicion of interest. (I write this as a retiree on a pension myself, thus as T.S. Eliot says a small usurer in the world of big usurers.)Living on the labor of others is, rightly, called exploitation–the extraction of the surplus value that they produce.
In a Christian society, would we not all work for one another, producing not interest or dividends but use value. Would we then have a society based on the motto "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"? Using the defining feature of our human activity in this way, for the common good in free unalienated work, qui laborat orat.
It's a big topic. Rob will now take it to a deeper level.
Best wishes,
Vic Paananen, Revere, MA
Dear Father Jim,
I'm disappointed that Rob didn't chime in as I understood that he would, so I'll go into something that he might have commented on.
The reference to Whitehead's thinking about the world in the process of becoming is rather like the insight of Teilhard de Chardin, isn't it? I know that others have compared the two.
But suppose that it is labor that moves this process forward and that we each are called upon to do what William Blake called the building up of Jerusalem. There is a kind of Christian materialism here in which the human in the process of perfecting himself/herself and the world is the agent of the divine. Can we merge the Christian and Marxist teleologies?
Now I will, finally, shut up and await the return of the missing Rob Gray.
Labor Day greetings,
Vic Paananen, Revere, MA
Vic, You are spot on with your comments. Teilhard De Chardin believed all the world to be a sacrament of process, a process moved by sacrifice, a rudiment of the natural order: birth and death, the food chain, geological evolutions yielding new reality, dying stars for the good of the whole. Teilhard would liken labor (sacrifice) to the inspired active imagination…God's imagination and that of humankind…of same substance, as it were. Rahner would say the same thing a hundred years later. He (Teilhard) well rearticulates from a theological point of view the Romantic movement's aesthetic of the ultimacy of truth and beauty wrought by the labor of the imagination.
As to your reference to the "building of Jerusalem," Peter Hodgson, professor of theology at Vanderbuilt Scool of Divinity, has done a great deal of research on Hegel and Marx regarding the observation you precisely make. He sees great similarity in the Christian vision of "maturity" and the Enlightenment notion of humankind progressing dialectically towards perfection socially, economically and politically. Hodgson rightly points out, as do most biblical scholars worth their salt, that the Gospels themselves at their heart are social, economic and political works of rhetoric. I had a theology professor once say to our class with a wry smile, "that if we never get accused of being communists, we're probably not preaching the Gospel.
Thanks for your interest and gracious insight. JF
Vic and Jim,
I’m not sure how neatly I fit into either of the categories of Marxist or Christian, at least in terms of how they are traditionally constructed, and much of that derives from my inherent suspicion of anything teleological. The end (or fulfillment) of history, if there ever is one, at least in the positive version(s) imagined in both Christian and Marxist teleologies, is something we must make, or create, as you both so beautifully state, through the process of human labor. And the shape of that end will be determined not by some mystical, inevitable historical force, but rather by the shape of our labors.
And Vic, you are absolutely correct to bring Blake into the conversation. We cannot “cease from mental (or physical) fight”
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
I am confident the three of us, as well as Christ and Marx, would all agree that the proper goal of human history is to make a better world through the elimination of oppression, exploitation, and imperialism. However, I would argue that this is something we must continually labor to achieve in the face of historical currents that rage against us, not with us.
And I would contend that teleologies, and particularly those of Christianity, form a large portion of those currents. That is, when our social discourses (or ideologies) tell us that we are to work for the next world rather than this one, we are led to “bear those ills we have” in the chimeric comfort that doing so will free us from such ills after death. And therefore, instead of eliminating oppression, exploitation, and imperialism, we reinforce them.
Rob