I’m on vacation this week so this will be short…
I like to read non-psychology related things when I have some time off. I came across this section in an essay by one of my favorite writers, Wendell Berry, about work that has really hit me hard this week:
“Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.”
As I take some time apart, I’ve been reflecting on how I see my work. I have too often divorced it from love and pleasure, instead seeing it as duty. I listen to my friends and co-workers long for vacation, looking forward to the weekend…not necessarily bad things to want right?
But when I see work as an obstacle to overcome, I lose the value of what happens in the process. I lose what Berry talks about above as the holiness of communing with God’s work. Whether that be each other, the created world or the systems we belong to – I want my vision to change in how I see work. I know it will still be by the seat of my brow that it comes, but I want my view of it to be much more sacred than it is now.
What would it mean for you to see work differently? In what ways have you divorced yourself from the holiness God has called you to in your work?
