Why Work? Part 2

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 3:32 pm by Mark D. Roberts

Why Work? Part 2 2015-03-13T15:32:06-05:00 Mark D. Roberts

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In nothing has the Church so lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion. – Dorothy L. Sayers

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/denverjeffrey/

Yesterday, I began putting up some excerpts from a fascinating and challenging article by Dorothy Sayers called “Why Work?” In these excerpts, Sayers laid out the first proposition of her argument:

The first [proposition], stated quite briefly, is that work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

Today, I want to add the second proposition and some explication.

My second proposition directly concerns Christian as such, and it is this. It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people, and particularly perhaps the Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work.

Yet, according to Sayers, the church has not done this, not at all well:

But is it astonishing? How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly – but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie. [emphasis added; What a great line!]

And here are a couple more gems:

The only Christian work is good work well done. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is church embroidery, or sewage farming. . . . .

[W]hen you find a man who is a Christian praising God by the excellence of his work – do not distract him and take him away from his proper vocation to address religious meetings and open church bazaars. Let him serve God in the way to which God has called him.

“But wait,” the church leader in me wants to cry out, “if we let everybody think their work can be their vocation, that they can serve God in the workplace, then how will we get people to attend religious meetings, not to mention usher, teach Sunday School, lead mission trips, and staff the church bazaars?”

More from Dorothy Sayers in my next post on “Why Work?”

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July 19, 2012

Why Work?

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July 20, 2012 The Dark Knight Rises: You've Seen the Movie, Now Read the Book!

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