This is a random thought that crossed my mind the other day, and just crossed it again: what work, jobs, earning a living, doing business, pursuing a career is for. We live in a world, at least here in the West, where pursuing a career, making money, looking good, succeeding and achieving in a material way is increasingly valued. But that has actually taken the heart, the life, out of our culture, out of our very lives.
Some years ago I read an interesting critique of feminism by a female lawyer (and not from a religious perspective), Domestic Tranquility: a Brief Against Feminism, by F. Carolyn Graglia, in which she points out that prior to the feminist revolution not even men understood work as a way to self-fulfillment, an end in itself. Men understood work not as an end, but as a means: a way to have a family, a home, a neighborhood, a place and a community to come home to and be a part of. Work supported and enabled relationships, and it was in relationships, with family and community, that one found fulfillment. Graglia thinks that feminists got the wrong idea about work and career as a means of self-fulfillment – and that their widespread ideas have been extremely damaging to culture.
More recently, it happens that my hair stylist for some time was a Russian immigrant who grew up under communism. Now, this is not a plug for communism. I’m neither a communist nor a socialist. But asking him about what living under communism was like, he had a thoughtful reply: “It was corrupt, and no one had very much, but no one had to really worry about how to survive, either. We had places to live, free education, free health care and transportation.” And here’s what I found most interesting: “It freed us to focus more interiorly. Life in communist Russia was very interior, focused on relationships, thinking, feeling, not like here in the US.”
Last year, I gave a talk on the dignity of women in the Church, based largely on the document Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, written by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when then-Cardinal Ratzinger was the head, and signed by him (a great document that everyone should read). Based on the document, here’s one thing I said:
Women have an irreplaceable role in all aspects of family and social life. It means first of all that women need to be significantly involved in the family, because it is here above all that new individuals are formed for society. Children need mothering. They need loving mothers as well as loving fathers. Whenever this is lacking, society as a whole suffers violence and generates more violence.
It means that women have much to offer in the world of work and in the organization of society. Women should have access to positions of responsibility which allow us to influence social and political policies for the better.
. . . It means that the relationship between family and work must be better understood. Work, for men and women both, is for the sake of the family, for the care and protection of the family, and for the flowering of the human person within the family, and in relationships within and around the family, not just for the self. . . . This may mean a rebalancing of priorities for both men and women.
For the American lawyer, the Russian former communist, and the future Catholic Pope, the focus is on personal relationships, especially the family, as the source of happiness, stability, fulfillment, and even the welfare of culture itself. And work is for the sake of relationships, not relationships for the sake of work.
I’ll take this a step further: Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body tells us that God exists as a Trinity because of His basic nature as love, love whose nature is to pour itself out selflessly in love, the Father pouring Himself out and eternally giving rise to the Son in love, the Son eternally pouring Himself back to the Father in love, the relationship of love between them eternally being the Holy Spirit. God Himself, at heart, is relationship, relational: personal, loving relationships in love, eternally bonding and forever unbroken.
Human beings, being created in His image and likeness, are a reflection of this eternal relatedness in love: we image God not only in our individuality, but in our relationships, the most fundamental being the family, husband, wife, and child: man and woman joined in love, children arising from their love as the Holy Spirit arises from the Father and the Son in love. So the purpose of life, the way to fulfillment, is in relationships: with God, and with each other, in love. And the family relationship, a healthy, loving family, is the most direct image of the Trinitarian life of God on earth.
But since we are fallen, and God’s image obscured and disfigured in us by sin, the way realize this is to draw close to God and be transformed by Him, allow Him to dwell in us ever more fully, change us ever more completely into His own image, which , if we're really living in and for God, should result in constantly changing and growing in how we love and relate with others. That should be the first priority of life. So work should support and enable not only our relationships with each other, but with God first of all.
In the Middle Ages, this was the understanding of work, of life, of time itself. All of life and time was considered sacred; time itself was liturgical time, an unending cycle of feasts and fasts year-round, in which year by year all of humanity and creation was ascending to God, and humanity and creation were being sanctified. This understanding was lost during the Protestant Reformation, in which there came to be a separation between the “sacred” and the “profane.” The Protestant work ethic was introduced in direct response to the suppression of the many Catholic feasts days in which work was suspended and entire villages turned out for religious processions and celebrations – celebrations which were considered by Protestant landowners to be a waste of time, and suppressed in order to increase worker productivity.
And we’ve been living with the desire to increase worker productivity ever since, with increasing sacrifice of time meant for God, sacrifice of families and relationships, sacrifice of individual well-being. That has been the priority.
As the CDF document says (in a great exercise of understatement), understanding and implementing what life and work are actually for “may mean a rebalancing of priorities for both men and women.” And one area that needs serious rebalancing is in the area of work, business, career. And not only do people who work, including feminists, need to revision why they work, what they are working for, and make choices about what kind of work they will do and how much they will do it, so that they are truly supporting and enabling family and relationships – but business leaders themselves need to realize what business is really for: supporting and enabling life and relationships, not just making profits.
Catholic business leaders above all have a responsibility to learn to rebalance the priorities of their businesses, so that they are not just pursuing the “bottom line” at the expense of their workers, but truly allowing time for God and pursing the welfare of the workers and community through healthy business practices. Our whole corporate mentality and work ethic must change, to be oriented to God and the welfare of others, not simply to “making money” or “pursuing a career.”
I closed my talk with this, speaking of feminism, but it is true of work and business practices also:
Mainstream feminism [or contemporary work and business practices] can promote a kind of selfishness at the expense of others. . . . But we are not here for self-fulfillment. We are here for God-fulfillment, fulfillment in God, by pouring ourselves out to Him so that He fills and transfigures us, and because of Him pouring ourselves out to and living for each other, as gifts from God to one another. Then we find true self-fulfillment: in God, who made us for Himself; and in each other, because He made us for each other.
