CCC Gainesville | Blog
The Meaning of Work, by Todd Best
Saturday night at 7:00 (Aug. 27) we have the opportunity to participate in something called Opus – an event for those who consider Christ Community their church family. Opus is a latin word for work – and we will be having a conversation about our collective work as a body of Christ-followers. Part of the evening will involve sharing dessert and having table conversations about our work together. All of us have work that we do, whether or not we get paid for it. We hope to encourage reflection about a theological understanding of our work and callings as individuals. Then, having considered our own work, we want to consider how we bring our collective work together as a church in a way that honors God is and good for the world.
Admittedly, we tend not to think much about the meaning of our work and how it relates to God’s purposes and ways. Our main thoughts often settle on the practical questions of how much money we are making and how to enjoy life in spite of our work. But we need to bring this area, as all areas, into the light of the Christian story. We need a Christian understanding of our work that will frame it and bring its meaning to light. One resource that I have found extremely helpful toward this end is an essay written during WWII by Dorothy Sayers titled “Why Work?” Sayers was a contemporary and associate of C.S. Lewis who masterfully wrote about how Christian beliefs, coupled with our imagination, open up ways of seeing the world. Work was one of the cultural themes she returned to from time to time. “Why Work?” has provided me with a couple of quick thought-primers as we approach Opus.
First, in “Why Work?”, Sayers repeats a perspective she has addressed in other places:
What I urged then was a thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon — not as the necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.
This brief passage alone could provide hours of conversation if we were to take it piece by piece. But for now I wonder what this revolution might actually look like if we were to begin to embrace her way of thinking about our work — both as individuals and as a church community. Specifically, I wonder how different our work might begin to look if we thought of it as a creative activity…as something done for the love of the work itself…as flowing from our identity as the image-bearers of God.In another passage, in her criticism of the Church separating ‘secular’ work from ‘sacred’ work, she ponders what it might it look like for a Christian table maker to faithfully make tables. Of the table-maker:
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…what use is all that (one’s piety or church activities) 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 workthat is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.
Sayers’s point here may strike us as rather narrow – just make good tables – but to consider this approach to work as a form of worship to God is really what she says will best serve society and God.Finally, as a way to help us think about our work, I’ll end with a quote which needs no commentary, and I trust it will open us up to the revolution she begins with:
…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.
*Note: “Why Work?” can be found in a collection of essays called Letters to a Diminished Church.
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