Work as our daily path to heaven

ON the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1, we are reminded of the crucial role our ordinary work has in our life. We need to convince ourselves more strongly that our work, whatever it is but as long as it is an honest work, is our ordinary daily way where we can find God, where we show our faith, hope and love for God and others.

Our work is our usual way to pursue our duty to sanctify ourselves and to help in the work of redemption by doing apostolate. It is where we do our part in achieving the ultimate goal of our life, which is to share in the very life and nature of God who created us in his image and likeness.

We know that even if we messed up the original plan of God for us, he also has given us a way to bring us back to him, through Christ who makes himself “the way, the truth and the life” proper for us.

The secret to making our ordinary work a path to heaven, a way, a reason and an occasion to sanctify ourselves and others, is to learn this skill of turning our work, both big and small, into prayer and an abiding conversation with God. If we are to be consistent to our faith that our life is supposed to be a life with God, then we have to know how to make our daily affairs an occasion for keeping a living relationship with God.

There should be a streaming awareness that we are with God even when we are doing the most mundane and technical activities. This is the goal that we should try to reach, overcoming what separates our life from the life of God. While it’s true that there is distinction between the two, there’s supposed to be unity between them.

This affirmation has basis. It’s not gratuitous. It is founded on the truth that God made us his image and likeness, and children of his, meant to participate in his very own life. That’s his will. That’s the reality.

In the first place, God is everywhere. We don’t have to look far to find him, since he is at the very core of our being and is also all around us. If we keep ourselves humble and simple, allowing the faith to work in us, we will realize that even in our inmost thoughts and feelings, we will always find him. We may not totally understand him, but we know he is with us.

The big task we need to do is how to keep ourselves humble and simple, so that faith can work effectively in us. Our problem is that we tend to be proud, to feel self-sufficient, to think that we ultimately are our own being only. We tend to think that our relationships with others and with God, while convenient sometimes, are not necessary.

The task involves the constant effort to be humble and simple, allowing our faith to have full play in us, converting us into contemplatives, seeing God and being with him even while working, and even when we are immersed in the middle of our worldly affairs.

But we need to cooperate, because as St. Augustine once said, while God created us without us, he cannot save us without us. We need to correspond to this will of God in freedom and love, so we can return to him.