Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "Faith and Work" by Scott Russell Sanders (©1995 by Scott Russell Sanders).

The difference between a machine and a tool—between a bread-maker and a bread pan—is that a tool extends human skills, a machine replaces them. When the freedom and craft have been squeezed out of work it becomes toil, without mystery or meaning, and that is why many people hate their jobs. You can measure the drudgery of a job by the number of layers of supervision required to keep the wheels spinning or the cash registers ringing. Toil drains us; but good work may renew us, by giving expression to our powers.

A generation or two ago it would have seemed less strange to relish hard work. My grandparents might smile at the laziness of Tom Sawyer, who fooled others into doing his chores, but they would remind you that Tom was a child. Grown-ups do their own chores, unless they are idlers, good-for-nothings, ne'er-do-wells. Grown-ups look after their own needs, provide for their families, help their neighbors, do something useful. So my grandparents taught by word and example. Any job worth doing is worth doing right, they used to say. To try sliding by with the least effort, my grandparents believed, was to be guilty of a sin called sloth.

I knew this cluster of values by experience long before I heard it referred to as the work ethic, a phrase that has lost its edge from tumbling over the lips of too many cynical bosses and politicians. Whatever happened to the work ethic? laments the manager who wishes to squeeze more profit from his employees. Whatever happened to the work ethic? groans the official who wants to shrink the welfare rolls. As I understand it, a regard for the necessity and virtue of work has nothing to do with productivity or taxes, and everything to do with fulfilling one's humanity. As I have seen it embodied in the lives not only of grandparents but of parents and neighbors and friends, this ethic arises from a belief that the creation is a sacred gift, and that by working we express our gratitude and celebrate our powers. To honor that gift, we should live simply, honestly, conservingly, saving money and patching clothes and fixing what breaks, sharing what we have.

Those values are under assault every minute of the day in a consumer economy—from advertising, from the glittering goodies in stores, from the luxurious imagery of television, magazines, and films, and from a philosophy that views the universe not as a gift to be honored but as a warehouse to be ransacked. If money is meaning, if winning the lottery or beating the stock market defines success, if the goal of life is easy sensation, then why lift a finger so long as you can force someone or something else to do it for you?

I can think of many reasons to lift a finger, among them the delight in exercising skill, in sharing labor with companions, in planning a task and carrying it through, in bringing some benefit to the world. But the chief reason for relishing work is that it allows us to practice our faith, whatever that faith may be. The Buddha advised his followers to seek right livelihood, to provide for their needs in a modest and responsible manner, with respect for other creatures, in harmony with the way of things. We show our understanding of the way of things by the quality of our work, whether or not we have heard the Buddha's teachings. The old theological debate as to whether salvation is to be gained by works or by faith begins from a false dichotomy. Faith concerns our sense of what is real, what is valuable, what is holy; work is how we act out that faith.

The Shakers condensed their faith into the maxim, "Hands to work, hearts to God." Anyone who has looked at their furniture or buildings can sense the clarity of their vision. "One feels that for the Shaker craftsmen," Thomas Merton observed, "love of God and love of truth in one's own work came to the same thing, and that work itself was a prayer, a communion with the inmost spiritual reality of things and so with God." Mother Ann Lee, who launched the Shaker movement, counseled her followers to "Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow."

If the purpose of life is not to acquire but to inquire, to seek understanding, to discover all we can about ourselves and the universe, to commune with the source of things, then we should care less about what we earn—money, prestige, salvation—and more about what we learn. In light of all we have to learn, the difference between dying tomorrow and a hundred years from tomorrow is not very great.