Peter Matheson discusses why in this time of crisis we need to rethink how we regard work.

We need to rethink how we as a society regard work. Take the stigma the unemployed have to thole (a fine, old Scottish word for “put up with”), or the unrecognised work of women and other carers, or the insidious creep of workaholic patterns into our whole value system. We expect our politicians, for example, to work ridiculous, inhuman hours. Recently I was at a hui following up the Royal Commission report on the mosque massacre. The Minister responsible, Andrew Little, was at his 16th hui on the issue, and immediately after our afternoon meeting in Dunedin travelled to Invercargill by car for an evening meeting! He was patient and a good listener, but clearly exhausted. On the other hand we take for granted colossal salary packages for CEOs, assuming only astronomical monetary rewards will lure them into a leading role. There is no sense that it’s a privilege, after all, to serve the community.

So we need to rethink all this. We spend much of our active lives at work, yet as Churches we offer virtually no contribution to reflection about its nature and significance. Perhaps our emptying churches are testimony to this neglect of such a crucial issue.

Work is Sharing in God’s Creating

The Hebrew Scriptures have no hesitation about seeing God at work, in creation, in the whole life of the world. When we work we share in that. The fierce rejection of slavery in Exodus, and the prophetic denunciation of those who grind down the faces of the day labourer and the widow, reflect the profound conviction that in our work we are co-creators with God. God’s covenant with Israel embraces the dignity of all — those who till the soil and those who bake the bread, and those who bear the burden of leadership.

Balancing Work with Other Commitments

The Gospels, too, are full of references to work, though Jesus’s calling of the disciples away from their fishing reminds us that work commitments cannot be absolutised. So how do we reinterpret Jesus’s insights in a way that makes sense in our complex post-industrial environment? David Fleming’s Surviving the Future, with its critique of capitalism and celebration of carnival, may be part of the answer. Work need not exclude delight and enchantment.

Work Hierarchy Developed in Church

It’s impossible, certainly, to miss the unresolved tension in early and medieval Christian attitudes to work. We recall the wonderful Benedictine balance of work and prayer, and Thomas a Kempis’s celebration of domesticity. But the ascetic, celibate ideal, on the other hand, so often devalued the daily round, the secular concerns of the laity. This otherworldly mentality, which identifies spiritual life as an aloof detachment from material things and from the networks of trade and business, still haunts us.

Challenge to Work Hierarchy

All the more reason, therefore, to treasure the down-to-earth ethos of the Brethren of Common Life, so influential for the Christian humanism of Erasmus, and the way in which the medieval guilds wove together a natural piety with a respect for the skills of the “tradies” of the time (from the candlemakers up!). Here was a spirituality which celebrated work’s contribution to communal life. The “common good” made civic life itself sacred. How do we recover that insight today?

Work Valued but Not Workers

These days Catholics and Protestants alike welcome the insights of Martin Luther into “worldly holiness”. The freedom of the Christian was to be one for others, hammered out in the apparent ordinariness of their lives as peasants, miners, artisans, teachers, academics. (Luther was never so sure about lawyers!) Clerics were to be in the literal sense of that word — ministers, servants of their people, working hard at the task of exegeting Scripture and pastoring.

Yet Luther never broke free from his hierarchical assumptions about society. Women were there to bear children. Peasants were there to obey their masters. It was to take centuries for the most unwelcome challenge of radicals such as the Anabaptists to break though the hierarchical assumptions of the Shakespearean world, the ugly arrogance of rulers like Henry VIII, and indeed of the whole ancien régime. For centuries the Churches went to bed with this exaltation of privilege, though of course there were always heroic exceptions, not least from the Jesuits and the Calvinists.

Working Class Not Supported

Few historians still subscribe to the idea of the Protestant work ethic as the engine of capitalism, yet it harbours a grain of truth. Much of Protestantism was captured by the secondary values of middle class morality, while 19th-century popes thundered against socialism and other manifestations of secularising modernism.

Here in New Zealand, as elsewhere, trade unions often got short shrift from the Churches. Rhineland Catholicism was different. It got close to the working class and its concerns, as did Rutherford Waddell in little Dunedin. But dig an

inch below the surface and the old contempt for trade unions is still with us, justifying the appalling short-term contracts so many have to endure.

WWI and WWII put chaplains in touch with working class men as never before. What they found shocked many of them to the core. Today we talk of racism. But in the early 20th-century, suburban churches, especially Protestant ones, were shot through with classism and its related snobbery. If people were unemployed it was because they drank, gambled or lounged around soccer grounds. What an appalling caricature!

Efforts to Break Hierarchy and Classism

George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community in Scotland, was a brilliant preacher and a highly decorated officer in WWI. He was the darling of the middle classes in Edinburgh. Horrified, though, by the Great Depression and the yawning gulf between the unemployed and the Churches, he left his prosperous congregation and began an experimental community where young clergy were to be trained alongside stonemasons in the rebuilding of Iona Abbey.

For years I was a member of this radical community, committed to prayer and to politics, to peace and to reuniting the Christian Churches. We sweated together and dreamt of a more just world. One Way Left (meaning of course socialism) was the title of MacLeod’s most famous book. Pilgrims from around the world, many of them young people, were and are drawn to Iona. Its music is now sung in every church in Christendom.

We can name many other communities — Catholic Workers, Taizé, Corrymeela — but the insights are much the same. When we work together, eat together and live together, worship takes on another dimension.

Opportunity to Rethink Work

Work is a core dimension of being human. “Workers of the world unite”, urged the Communist Manifesto. George MacLeod loved to tell the story of a boy who chucked a stone through the stained glass window of his kirk. With the “e” from “highest” obliterated by the stone, the window now proudly proclaimed: “Glory to God in the High st”!

We are to seek God at work in the world, in the High Street. Work and worship are soul-sisters. In a post-COVID world it may be imperative, as never before, to reflect on the dignity and the sacredness of work.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 259 May 2021: 4-5