What is work? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
My first form of my paper was looking at what Ecclesiastes had to say about work and play. I have since changed that trajectory, but I have the old paper and what it said about work.
Many readers can resonate with what the Teacher says in his writings on work. They go and they work all day and, in the end, what for? They provide for their families, certainly a good, but why? Does anyone really care about the work that they do? If they quit or their boss fires them, the boss can just find someone else to replace them.
To start at the beginning of work, terms need definitions. Unfortunately, the difficulty here is that many writers do not define work. In a volume edited by Meilaender, work gets first defined as co-creation.[1] He also has in the book a writing from Dorothy Sayers who says that in the Christian view of work that “Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do.”[2] She also calls the secular vocation sacred.[3] Probably the fullest definition of work I came across comes from a more popular work from Lester Dekoster who work as “The form to which we make ourselves useful to others.”[4]
These definitions are unfortunately too broad or too vague. For Sayers, how many people live to do what they consider work? If so, then what happens when a person takes a vacation from it? What happens when the time comes for a person to retire?
Regarding co-creation, if a small child gets out fingerpaints and starts painting on paper, does this get included under co-creation? If he paints all over the wall and Mommy must clean it up, has he still done work? The child can consider it creative still and perhaps rightly so, but the work still gets wiped away and takes away from the clean walls of the residence.
Lastly, while DeKoster has a fuller definition, the problem comes when on the same page he says that this gives meaning to life. Does this imply that a newborn infant who does no work gives no meaning to life? What does this say about someone who retired, or someone severely disabled through whatever means that cannot do work? Does the person who works an exhaustive schedule and works overtime have a life with greater meaning? Do we not hear countless stories of people who worked relentlessly while their children grew up? Do we not hear of people described as “Married to their jobs?” We relate to these questions since some people are workaholics or their work keeps them from really getting to live their lives. DeKoster has a definition that leads to people only being meaningful in work.
One could define work as that which aims towards an end beyond itself. The problem that comes to mind immediately for this one is to consider that of a married couple wanting to have a child and thus engage in sex, but they would not likely count that as work. While they could say that they are going to work in jest, one hardly suspects that they will say that work takes place in the act, even with a hope for something beyond the act. One could argue that the act can differ in that the good of the couple uniting in love counts as a good regardless of if the desired child comes or not. Other activities like having a meal or something light like going for a drive to enjoy autumn leaves could qualify as well, but that does not make them work.
I do not want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, so I intend to use the previous definition for the time being. The benefit of such a definition lies in that it says nothing about meaning. Not being able to work does not mean that one does not have meaning in life or give any meaning in life. The other benefit comes in the fact that work traditionally takes place to reach an end. The man who works every day can work to provide for his family. The women from the church getting together to make a quilt for a new mother are engaging in work even without pay. Another aspect of why I consider this definition beneficial will come when I get to play. I ask the reader to keep that in mind as we move forward.
In our world today, a problem comes when we find our identity in work. When two people meet for the first time at a social gathering, one normally asks the other at one point, “What do you do?” and the other answers by saying “I am a” and then giving their profession. No one asks this with the expected response of “I watch Netflix videos” or “I visit art museums” or “I enjoy Assassin’s Creed games.” The assumption is that what someone does comes in relation to work instead of their hobbies. Work takes precedence.
Picture a world where someone says that they are a house painter. Then along comes an event like COVID-19 and the government decides to shut down the economy. They cannot find work. Not only that, but their job also gets defined as “non-essential.” What does this say about them? Does this mean that society can function without their job and does not need them?
In The End of Burnout, Jonathan Malesic says that “A waitress who lost her job due to the pandemic had no less dignity than she did before stay-at-home orders forced her restaurant to close.”[5] If work gives dignity to a person, then the waitress having to stay home has no dignity. We can agree with the condemnation of sloth, but not all lack of work comes from laziness. The government forced people to take respites from work in the shutdown, and their dignity and humanity remained intact.
Malesic argues that our society puts too much emphasis on work. He considers work burnout not to lie in a problem with the body, but of something wrong in the soul. If work becomes the path that we take to flourishing and fulfillment, what if it does not deliver? If we do all the work and still find emptiness inside of us, then we have made work an idol and that likely drives us to despair.[6]
From a Christian perspective, one could argue that God Himself made sure man did not think this way by instituting the Law of the Sabbath. Even animals had to take a Sabbath rest. (Exodus 20:10) Not only that, but Sabbath Years occurred as well. (Exodus 23:11) In these years, God forbade the working of the ground. God commands this for the good of the land, the people, and the animals. We also need to consider that this comes in a society populated of people who lived day by day and could not go to a supermarket and get food easily nor had refrigeration to preserve food. This society consisted of day-wager laborers who received a command to stop for one day and that God would provide for them.
Despite that, God still sees work as a good. In the beginning, God plants a garden and calls man to work. Witherington writes that somewhere along the line, work got seen as a negative and considered a result of the fall.[7] The account in Genesis 1:28 telling man to “be fruitful, increase, fill and subdue the Earth, and rule over other living creatures.” These verbs show commands that God gave man to do prior to the Fall. Genesis 2:15 says that man was put in the Garden to work and take care of it. Also, one could argue that in the first part of this command, God gave man the labor of having to have sex with his wife and produce children. Many men if asked to do a job that involved working a garden and eating from any tree except one and having sex with his wife would sign up immediately.
What changed in the fall was not the existence of work, but the nature of work. From that point on, work would be a toil.[8] Genesis contains several alienations. Man gets alienated from himself in that he loses the purpose he originally received in the garden so that now the identity of man at birth comes not in YHWH, but in Adam. Second, alienation from his spouse with these two sometimes having opposing desires. (Gen. 3:16) Most importantly the third, in alienation from God due to sin. I save work for last not because of importance but relevance. Work no longer comes naturally to the man and consists of a joy, but now the ground itself works against man, and man must toil for what he has.
The problem for us comes then in knowing that we should value and celebrate work as a good. We should encourage people to work and we should discourage sloth. We should also have a way of providing for those in need, but that goes beyond the reach of this paper.[9] At the same time, we should not have it so that people who cannot work get treated like lesser citizens and that people do not find their whole identity in work.
An interesting cause of finding identity in work could come in the materialism that our culture has accepted. Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism at the start of the 20th century. In it, he says that in the time earning money became akin to a religious calling. It no longer needed a religious system to back it and considered religion an interference just as much as state intervention.[10] Could this show that if man lives in a universe where people deny God’s reality that his identity must find a foundation in something earthly? In the past, man could say he had identity in the image of God. If man has no sure identity, a logical place to build an identity then comes in work.
If correct, then perhaps work has become an idol for some people. Could this mean that the stigmatization of play that we see comes not from the notion of play itself, but from the view of work? If work has a quasi-religious status and play detracts from work, then ipso facto, play becomes a problem and could even take on the identity of a sin in such a culture. At best, one could treat play as something fine for children, but the adults know better.
Malesic also sees from Maslach, the originator of the original burnout measurement index, that work becomes a way to find value in the world. Maslach recognizes the importance of having psychological needs met at work, writing, “The person who lacks close relationships with friends or family will be far more dependent on clients and colleagues for signs of appreciation.”[11] Malesic then says that when a person does not feel appreciated on the job or lacks community with coworkers, their ability to do the job deteriorates as a result.[12] Apathy sets in for workers which leads to a vicious cycle of less appreciation.
Malesic writes about working with a community of monks in New Mexico at a monastery called Christ in the Desert. These monks set specific work times and when the bell rings, work for the day stops. He writes about this saying “I asked Fr. Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defense attorney, what you do when the 12:40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone.
‘You get over it,’ he replied.”[13]
These monks do not doubt the importance of their work, but they have no franticness saying that everything must get completed entirely. If one thinks everything has to be done completely, it can lead to exhaustion. The workers who know that they have a reprieve can then get more productive when it comes to their other monk duties, like prayer, and then do more when they return to work the next day. They are also able to practice leniency on themselves and not demand of themselves more than they can do.
Next time, we will cover something hopefully more fun, play.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
[1] Gilbert C. Meilander ed., Working: Its Meaning and Limits (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 2.
[2] Ibid., 43.
[3] Ibid., 45.
[4] Lester Dekoster, Work: The Meaning of Your Life (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Christian’s Library Press, 1982), 1.
[5] Malesic, Jonathan. The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. University of California Press. Kindle Edition, 14.
[6] Ibid., 14
[7] Ben Witherington, Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2011), 2.
[8] Ibid., 3.
[9] For those interested in such an approach, I recommend The Conservative Heart by Arthur Brooks and When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. Good books on economic principles to better help include Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt and anything by Thomas Sowell.
[10] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 72.
[11] Malesic, 30.
[12] Ibid., 65.
[13] Malesic, 176.
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