It has been a federal holiday since 1894; it used to be the day after which one should not wear white, except liturgically; in the northern hemisphere it is the unofficial end of summer. In any case we have just passed the first Monday of September, wherein the United States observes Labor Day.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor website, in 1909 the American Federation of Labor called for “Labor Sunday,” dedicating the day before the civil holiday to the spiritual and educational aspects of the labor movement. Although the observance has not taken off, it is still worth wheeling around the tarmac.
I had just undertaken the daily grind of crafts, naps, songs, and ABCs as a kindergarten student when Pope (now St.) John Paul II released “Laborem Exercens” (On Human Work). This encyclical letter was one in a series of papal revisitations of “Rerum Novarum,” Pope Leo XIII’s watershed document on the need for improved working conditions in view of increased global industrialization.
By “work” Pope John Paul meant “any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances.” It both builds up human life and entails “human toil and suffering … harm and injustice” (1).
These realities summon the Church’s perspective because they involve people made in God’s image, made for relationships with each other, self, and the whole created order. Everything we can see affects and indeed expresses our relationship with the God we cannot see (cf. 1 John 4:20).
The Holy Father might not have foreseen all the machines people have made to “subdue the earth,” to increase the quantity and quality of what we make for ourselves, but he did warn of many dangers in the intersection of technology and ethics, especially people’s reduction to their types of work or to their ability to contribute materially to society.
The classic list of “sins that cry to heaven for vengeance” includes murder, sodomy, oppression of the poor, and defrauding just wages. Scripture accounts for each tear: Abel’s spilled blood (cf. Genesis 4:10), the victims in Sodom (cf. Genesis 18:20-21), the Israelites enslaved in Egypt (cf. Exodus 22:21-23), and the poor whom the Lord hears (cf. Psalm 72:12). All four situations violate the dignity of personal and social life. God did not create us to purposefully frustrate the nature He created – body and soul – for His glory and our wholeness.
To return to John Paul’s letter, labor is more important than capital, producers than products. Further, even in “the most ordinary everyday activities,” laborers and their toil can identify with the Creator God (25), Who created us workers to think of each other, to recognize the Source of our abilities, and to consecrate all things in a priestly fashion to that Source.
The curse of original sin included the exhaustive expenditure of energy that “marks the way of human life on earth and constitutes an announcement of death” (27). A Christian spirituality of work will situate this aspect of everything we do and endure within the Lord’s Paschal Mystery, His Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Far from fruitless, the Lord’s Gift-of-Self energizes us to collaborate for the growth of His kingdom here and its full flourishing hereafter.
By Father Christopher Zelonis, Pastor of SS. Peter and Paul, Lehighton. Read more articles by Father Zelonis at www.shipwrackharvest.blogspot.com.
