The sacredness of our work

That’s true. Our work, any kind of work as long as it is an honest work, can and should be considered as sacred. And the reason is simple. Given the way we are-that we are creatures of God made in his image and likeness and therefore made to participate in his very life-our work cannot but be also a participation of God’s continuing work, his providence over all his creation.

Since God and everything in him is sacred, we can safely conclude that we and everything else in our life including our work can also be considered as sacred. We should not just stop at affirming that human life is sacred and should be respected. We have to go all the way to affirm also the inevitable corollary that our work is also sacred.

As image and likeness of God, we live and do everything, including our work, with God always. Even without realizing it, the objective truth is that our life, and everything in it, is always a life with God.

Our work therefore is not just ours. It just does not correspond to some purely natural and human needs. It is by definition a work with God. We need to be most aware of this truth, so we can also consciously and freely work in sync as much as possible with God’s will and ways, as is proper to us as God’s image and likeness.

This truth of our faith, of course, does not do away with the distinction between what is sacred and what is mundane. This distinction has to be upheld, but always keeping in mind that the distinction does not erase the basic unity that exists between them, since everything comes from God and also belongs to God.

Sacredness does not belong exclusively to liturgical acts, for example, or to some personal prayer, involving some incense and ritual exercises. It can also be said of our ordinary work involving blood, sweat and tears. But obviously the sacredness of one is distinct from that of the other, only in form but not in essence.

For us to be able to see the sacredness of our work, we need to be driven first of all and always by faith and an abiding piety. Our usual problem in this area is that when we do our work, we often set aside, or at least put in second place, the considerations of faith and piety and just allow ourselves to be ruled wholly or mainly by the worldly principles of what is efficient, effective, profitable, popular, etc.

There is a great need to bring our faith and piety down to the middle of the world all the way to its grime and worst conditions, and not confine them in churches or some sacred place alone. There is a great need to develop and live an authentic Christian spirituality of secularity or what in some sectors is referred to as lay spirituality.

The Vatican II thrust as articulated in Gaudium et spes should be pursued. As concrete consequences of such outlook would be asking ourselves questions like: what does God want me to get involved in now, in the short-run and in the long-run? Is what I am doing now what God really wants me to do? Am I doing things the way God wants me to do them? How can I relate what I am working now to God’s will and providence?

The important thing to do is to put God in the middle and on top of everything that we do. He should be the beginning, pattern and end of our work. This fundamental, indispensable criterion definitely would hamper our work.

If anything at all, it would simply assure us that we are doing what we are supposed to be doing the way it should be done. It certainly will involve some struggle and self-denial, since we have to contend with our usual tendency to do our own thing rather than God’s will and in the way we like it done rather than the way God wants it done.

We need to overcome whatever awkwardness can come to us, especially in the beginning. But if we persist, driven by our faith and love for God and for others, sooner or later working with God will become second nature to us, and we can discern in our work, for all the mundanity involved there, a certain sacred character.

In the end, we can see a greater, deeper and more extensive unity in our life that is based on our union and love for God.