The Blessing of Work: Reflection for September

The following reflection was published in the September, 2014, Give Us This Day, a monthly publication of The Liturgical Press and is reprinted with the publisher's permission.

O Lord, look with favor upon your servants, and upon the works of our hands.

“And may the gracious care of the Lord our God be upon us. Direct the work of our hands for us.

O direct the work of our hands” (Ps 90:17).

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever.

Amen.

—Daily Prayer for the Blessing of Work

Prayed every workday by the Nuns of the Abbey of St. Walburga

Why ask God’s blessing on something as mundane as work? When we watch a mushroom cloud rising above the un- bearable ruin of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the smoke billowing from the crematoria of Auschwitz, we might look toward heaven and ask, “Where were you?” But I wonder, if we listened, whether we would hear God reply: “Where were you?” Hard to deny that the mushroom cloud and the chimney smoke were the work of human hands.

Work was woven into the human fabric from the start. We first see God busy about what Genesis calls the work of creation (Gen 1–2:1). The climax of God’s creative work was human beings, created in the image of that very same God. Entrusted with the care of everything just made (Gen 1:28- 29) or set in a garden rich in fruit trees (Gen 2:8), the first human beings were also intended to be creative workers, cultivating the future God had built into all living things.

The first explicit human assignment was to pick fruit for food (Gen 2:15-16), presumably to strengthen earth’s new cultivators for their task. But before the story got too far, the work went badly astray, thanks to that chat with the serpent (Gen 3). Instead of expressing human being’s true identity and purpose in relation to Creator and creation, labor was twisted into the human pursuit of an illusory self in isolation from God and the world. At that moment, mushroom clouds and smoking chimneys became possible.

Fortunately, few of us spend our workdays inventing weapons of mass destruction or new tools for genocide. Our work’s content does matter, of course, but what matters more is what truth it tells about us, what relationships it serves, what fruit it bears. Does it reveal the image of God or a self writ large? Does it weave bonds or tear them asunder? Does it bear the fragrance of fruit trees or the odor of smoke? 

Sister Genevieve Glen, OSB

Copyright 2014, Abbey of St. Walburga