BILL TAMMEUS We are called to sacred work

Labor Day has turned into a time for taking a break from labor, for shutting down summer and for launching political campaigns (that began months ago).
Fine, but I think it's time to spend at least a little of the holiday thinking about the sacredness of work. At its best, work is an expression of our deepest and most meaningful selves, though in our culture work often gets turned into mere drudgery in pursuit of money. Employers too often don't treat workers with dignity or don't allow them to work in a way that builds them up without wearing and tearing them down.
My friend W. Paul Jones spent most of his professional life teaching at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Mo., a United Methodist seminary. Now he's a Catholic priest and Trappist monk, and he has developed a marvelous sense about the value of work.
"I have often been surprised," he wrote me a few months ago, "that I got paid for teaching! I'd do it for free."
Joyful giving
That's the joy and abandonment all of us hope for because when that happens we work not just because of economic necessity but as a way of joyfully giving ourselves away to others.
"When we are creating anything for the sheer joy of it," Paul says, "we are closest to being like God and enjoying the Sabbath with God."
The 19th century Scottish essayist and historian, Thomas Carlyle, showed in his book "Past and Present" that he understood this. There is, he wrote, "a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work."
Though Carlyle's language now can sound breathless and foppish, he set forth the truth that work should be an expression of our gratitude for the gift of life: "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. ... Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God ..."
Perhaps the Benedictines understand the sacred nature of work as well as anyone, and I think a wonderful new book by Tony Hendra, "Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul," captures this clearly.
"... work in the Benedictine tradition," Hendra writes, "enjoyable or not, exalted or humble, is in no conflict with the spiritual. Indeed, it too is prayer, a principle best expressed in the classic Benedictine dictum Laborare est orare -- 'To work is to pray.'
"There is no separation between work in the sense of secular, nonspiritual toil and the spiritual in the sense of uplifting relief from its tedium."
Hendra recounts a conversation he had with Father Joe, an English monk who helped him grasp what's really crucial in life. Father Joe is speaking:
"Work is so important, isn't it, dear? Work works in unknown ways. If work is done well, conscientiously, joyfully, I think it has an effect far beyond what's actually made or grown or sold."
"Laborare est orare."
"Very good. You do remember."
"I thought that only applied to monk work."
"I don't see why. Laborare est orare doesn't mean we actually mumble prayers while we work, does it? You'd drive the other chaps barmy. The work itself is prayer. Work done as well as possible.
Work done for others first and yourself second. Work you are thankful for.
Work you enjoy, that uplifts you. Work that celebrates existence, whether it's growing grain in the fields or using God-given skills. ... All this is prayer that binds us together and therefore to God."
Blessings
I have been blessed through most of my life to have work like that. Oh, it's not that every hour of every day turns out that way. I've worked for people who sometimes failed to respect me personally or my work, just as I myself have no doubt made their lives difficult and tedious by what I have done or failed to do.
But on the whole my work has been a response to what I have understood is my vocation, a word with Latin roots meaning "to call." Sometimes people imagine that God calls people only to formal ministry of some kind. But I believe we can be and are called to other types of work that is just as holy, just as blessed, just as worthwhile.
Labor Day provides an opportunity to commit ourselves to finding such work if we don't have it now or to offering such work to others if, instead of that, we've been exploiting others for meaner reasons.
X Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.