Working Like Crazy
Be still and see that I am God. (Ps. 45:11)
I have never had a job I could take seriously.
Perhaps this admission requires some explanation if I am not to be judged haughty or frivolous. It may be more accurate to say that I have never had a job I thought to be of intrinsic worth or genuine interest. And I have had many jobs.
At the age of 60 and now among the unemployed, or early retired, depending upon how my situation is viewed and my future develops, my present retreat from the ranks of those who sweat for their bread has come after a long and widely varied work history. Until I was almost 40, I never held a job for more than two years; most lasted less than six months. None were jobs that the world held in high esteem. I was a waiter, a bus boy, a short-order cook, a tire installer, a window washer, a cab driver, a desk clerk, a shoe salesman, a night auditor, a tour guide, a security guard, a billing clerk, a grave digger and many other things I either cannot or do not wish to recall. My marriage in late life required that I obtain a steady income and a modicum of respectability, so I became a newspaper reporter and, later, an editor. Such is my curriculum vitae. Admittedly not impressive for one who showed promise of intelligence, was provided with a university education and offered opportunities for what is termed a “solid career” in one of the well-paying professions, such as law.
To the annoyance and puzzlement of those unfortunate enough to have invested in me their pride and hope, I appeared determined to fail, to become impoverished and insignificant. It was not my intention to fail: I simply could not interest myself in success, for the examples of successful people set before me by my elders did not inspire emulation. Money appeared to be the measure and motive of success and money did not excite me. Happiness did, but rich people seemed to me conspicuously unhappy. The only occupations that I ever seriously considered worthwhile were those of priest or soldier. Both appeared noble to me, for both involved sacrifice. Both required that one be willing to lay down his life for his friends. It eventually became clear, however, that I was not called to the religious life, and my poor eyesight removed the possibility of a military career. What was left? The path of least resistance. Whatever came to hand in a rambling existence.
There were large and weighty reasons why I rambled, but they are not the chief subject of this piece. Here, I want to look briefly at the nature of work.
After more than four decades of desultory employment, punctuated by brief periods of idleness, I look back on my working life as a series of battles fought against a relentless enemy who has left me scarred but standing. I may be indulging in what may seem a grandiose conceit, but that is how I see the matter, and I think myself justified in my view. For work when I came of age was generally regarded as more than an economic necessity or the fulfillment of one’s talents. It had become a religion: a faith rooted in the sacrament of sweat. Work for most was no longer a means to end, but an end in itself: an enclosed world of ceaseless effort. And it was against this world of total work that I set my face.
And in this world of total work, the poor may envy the rich, but there is little joy on either side of the divide and everyone labors most all of the time, despite differences in reward and social status. And this dour religion has insinuated itself into most every phase and aspect of human existence. Childhood and schooling tend more and more to be regarded as the prelude and preparation for a life of work. The question always posed to me as a boy was: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” No one seemed to care about who I was, only about my career plans. I was frequently urged to direct my attention away from the present and to cast my thoughts onto some vague prospect of a prosperous life in some respectable occupation. But no occupation attracted me. Those things I loved and prized, my faith and the mystery of words, seemed frivolous concerns in this ominous world of work toward which I was drawing ever nearer and which I instinctively loathed and dreaded.
I satisfied those concerned about my future by saying I intended to go to Law School. It was a notion that pleased my parents and relatives, working class people for whom the practice of law held out vistas of wealth and social status that were the stuff of dreams. They participated vicariously in my imagined future success. For a time, I was the golden boy. And during this time, I was free to major in English during my college years, and to read some philosophy. So I became something of a hypocrite: my pretended interest in Law School falsified my relations with the adults in my life, but it enabled me to be true to my genuine interests. I could never explain to the people invested in my future why Keats was more important to me than economics or accounting; nor what profit I hoped to gain from an evening spent reading Plato’s Symposium. “What good is any of this?” was a muted question in the back of my mind to which I paid little heed. I loved poetry and pondering, and I felt immensely blest to have some respite in which to do both. And the question about the use of these pastimes struck me as meaningless: they had no use, and that is why I gloried in them. They were in some measure Divine, an end in themselves: what St. Augustine termed the good that is to be enjoyed, not used. But in the world of total work, everything that cannot be used, cannot be pressed into service to satisfy appetite and vainglory, is deemed worthless or frivolous.
The time arrived when I was compelled to declare my intentions and act upon them: What was I going to do for a living? I abandoned the pretense of being an aspiring lawyer and managed to gain admittance into a graduate school program in English education. The program was funded by the Ford Foundation and offered potential teachers willing to pursue their profession in the inner cities a generous stipend during their period of study. And thus I set out upon a career, or so it seemed.
It was a fraudulent enterprise from the start, and from every angle. The mornings were spent in lecture halls where professors of education filled us in on the psychology and habits of the inner-city child, whom they appeared to regard as an alien species in whom they had taken a benevolent interest. As an inner-city child myself, I had a robust contempt for their condescending “compassion.” They obviously knew nothing about growing up poor in a street lined with row homes–the place where I had been raised–and their assumption of possessing an anthropological expertise about the denizens of these working class warrens was laughable. They presented the classic example of how charity degenerates into philanthropy when it no longer finds its source in God. Again and again, they urged us to adopt patience and understanding in dealing with disadvantaged children.
In the afternoons, we were actually allowed to see some disadvantaged children, much like a trip to the zoo. We were taken to a public school in the neighborhood where I was raised and still lived. The idea was that we would assist teachers in a summer program for high school seniors who had failed English and needed to make up the course to receive their diplomas. To fail English in a public high school in Philadelphia is no mean accomplishment. It not only requires total illiteracy, but behavior sufficiently hideous to move the teacher to vengeance. I “assisted” in two classes: both were 90 minutes long with about 40 “students” in each session.
Mine was the only white face in these classrooms: teachers and students were black, some in complexion, others in heart. Looking out upon the students was like surveying a sea of hatred. The sea appeared calm, but deceptively so. Somewhere, a tsunami was building. I quickly discovered that not only could the students not read or write, they could not speak intelligibly, at least not in any patois that I recognized. They also had not the faintest interest in learning, for they knew they would be handed a diploma simply for showing up. And the diploma had no worth in itself, but would be a means for getting a job. And the job would have no worth in itself, but would be a means for getting some money. And money would be a means for buying stuff. And all of it–diplomas, jobs, money, stuff–meant what? No one seemed to know, or care.
Most of the time, the students slumped in their desks and dozed; occasionally, there were outbursts of conversation, loud and rude and often obscene, that would drown out the words of the teacher, who ignored everything and droned on in a void about the parts of speech. There was no attempt at discipline; no questions were asked or answered. My role was limited to taking attendance and passing out work sheets, which were immediately crumpled. If I was forgetful enough to turn my back, a work sheet would hit me between the shoulder blades.
This was my first experience of a public school, for I had spent my 16 years of previous education in Catholic schools. The contrast was enormous and it taught me that poverty can be experienced in radically different ways, for what separated Catholic school students from public school students in my neighborhood was not income, but religious education. Whatever learning might actually occur in public schools occurred in a void. Learning only has meaning in relation to an ultimate end. Deprived of that end, learning has no discernible purpose, other than as a preparation for entering the world of total work with a skill that can be used in some way to make money. And if money can be made more easily through welfare payments, food stamps, drug dealing, prostitution, theft, burglary and other occupations that require minimal effort, then what fool wants a job? Several of my “students” already had impressive police records but had suffered few consequences from their arrests. They had learned that, contrary to the popular adage, crime does pay.
I quickly surmised that to pursue a role in the public school system would be like enlisting as a crew member on the Titanic. This immensely expensive and rudderless ship was going down and nothing could save it. I woke up one morning and was overwhelmed by the absurdity of what I was doing. Whatever tepid interest I had had in teaching had cooled and congealed, and I could no longer support the pretense that anything sensible or sane was going on in the graduate program, so I called my faculty advisor and quit. I would not have another “respectable” job for almost 20 years. In fact, I came to regard respectability as a form of spiritual leprosy to be shunned.
I became something of a nomad, moving about on the fringes of society, scavenging the necessities of life and jealously guarding my independence. In retrospect, it strikes me that I was fighting a battle on two fronts but against the same enemy, and I instinctively knew that defeat on either front would mean defeat on the other. Victory had to be total. So what was I fighting?
On the one hand, I was fighting nihilism and despair; I was fighting for the faith, which I had temporarily lost and was trying to rediscover. I have written about this in other places and will not go into much detail now. The combat on this front required that I always keep before me the questions: Who am I and why am I here? And this I could not do unless I remained free of the world of total work. So I had to resist the pull of all those forces that would draw me into unthinking routine and sensual stupefaction. To accomplish this, I had to limit myself to short-term jobs that made no claim on the higher faculties of my soul; jobs that I could walk away from in an instant with no regret or second thoughts.
One of my favorite jobs was a four-month stint loading tractor trailers at a dairy plant. Stacked cases of milk would be spit out of the factory doors on a conveyor belt that ran along a steel platform lined with trucks. Using a grappling hook and my left hand, I would swing cases off the belt and into the designated trailers. There was considerable down time and, even while working, my mind was completely free: all that was required was some muscular exertion and a modicum of attention. I could ponder Socrates’ conversation with Diotima or St. Augustine’s thoughts about the nature of time while I hooked and dragged cases into the maws of the trucks. The job approached what I considered the ideal. But the factory closed and I had to move on to other employment that made minimum demands on my intellect.
Now, one might ask: Is it not possible to hold a respectable job while keeping oneself alive spiritually? I suppose it might be, though such a balancing act seemed to me a perilous undertaking. After I rediscovered my faith and married, I did make some concessions on this front: I managed to find a job in the newspaper business, which is semi-respectable. Being a reporter and, later, an editor did require me to use my mind in ways that I found very distasteful and I could not avoid feeling that my dignity was daily compromised. I was forced to rent out my powers of literacy at an hourly rate. I had to pretend that I cared about a great many things that meant nothing to me. Supporting my family seemed to require that I become an intellectual prostitute.
St. Augustine, who had risen to the pinnacle of his profession as a rhetorician, recounts suddenly being filled with disgust while preparing an ingratiating speech for the emperor’s birthday. He became acutely aware that he was engaged in a complete fraud: composing fine phrases that both he and those who would applaud them knew to be false. He reviled himself as “a vendor of words” and resolved to quit his profession and devote himself to truth. How often did I feel a similar disgust after leaving the newsroom, having done what was considered an “honest day’s work.”
The fact is, there is seldom anything honest about the work most of us do. We usually have to adopt a persona, pretend to be someone other than who we are. Our heart is not in it. We do it of necessity and would gladly be quit of it had we the means or opportunity. There are, of course, some fortunate souls who make a living doing what they love, but they are the exception. The rule is one of enforced drudgery. Do I take too dour a view? I wish that such were the case. But along with its intrinsically repellent character, most work also poses spiritual dangers.
We can come to believe that having a job relieves us of responsibilities in other areas of life. Work can be so great a burden that after we shift it off our shoulders, we feel we have fulfilled all that can reasonably be asked of us and we slump into sensual indulgence. Our “free” time can thus be frittered away. During our non-work hours, we think we ought to be allowed to behave as we choose: be entertained, drink, sleep, waste countless hours on distractions of one sort or another, and often not of the most wholesome kind. “After all,” we reason, “I’ve put in a long day. I deserve a break.” But the long day has not nourished us spiritually so much as it has dulled our sensibilities to higher things. We can lose our taste for any sort of intellectual exercise after we have left the job and more or less collapse into carelessness. We can be serious about our job, but about little else. But the job is not serious in itself; it often has no intrinsic worth and is merely a means to an end: money. And as difficult and distasteful and emotionally draining as money-making can be, it does not excuse us from the care of our souls. Too often, as I know from my own experience, God can become a rather minor figure in that routine that alternates between the rigors of work and the fecklessness of relaxation. We can forget the great Benedictine motto, work and pray, and adopt instead the dictum of the modern world: work and play.
We may think that we have fulfilled the duty of our state in life by supporting our family, but do not the heathens do the same? And as Our Lord tells us, when we have merely done that which is required of us, we should still consider ourselves unprofitable servants. Of course, the demands of the workplace have perhaps never been as all-encompassing as they are now. We are under a tremendous psychological pressure simply to check out while we are not working.
The most significant philosophical essay written in the 20th century bears a telling title: Leisure: The Basis of Culture. The author is the great Catholic thinker, the late Dr. Josef Pieper. The essay was written a few years after World War II and was prompted by Dr. Pieper’s concern that society was organizing itself into what he called “the world of total work.” In such a society, no place is allotted for genuine leisure, which Dr. Pieper identifies not as mere idleness, but as a time consecrated to worship and recollection: a time in which men put aside their workaday concerns and remember and celebrate the fact that they are made in the image and likeness of God. Such leisure has nothing in common with the notion of vacation, which is simply a rest period that prepares us to resume work.
Genuine leisure is a spiritual orientation that carries into and, in a sense, dominates the world of work. Work is then seen as a prelude to the Sabbath rest, as a part of Creation, not as an enclosed world with no reference to anything transcendent. This is not the place to explore the richness of Dr. Pieper’s thought and the crucial importance of his observation that God, not work, must be at the center of our lives if we are to avoid that contraction of the soul that so afflicts modern man, who defines himself economically, not theologically; who sees himself primarily, not in his relation to God, but as a producer and consumer of goods.
The only way to avoid this contraction, Dr. Pieper argues, is by an adherence to the Christian cultus, which he identifies with the Catholic Mass. It is the Mass that guarantees our freedom; that keeps us from being ground under in the world of total work. Perhaps that is a significant reason for the world to hate the Mass, and by the Mass, I mean, of course, the Traditional Latin Mass. The novus ordo rite fits in quite well with the world of total work. It turns us toward that world, which is not so much a God-given Creation as it is “the work of human hands.” This, however, is a larger topic which neither time nor talent will allow me to consider now.
I am not unmindful of how hard it is to retain one’s spiritual vitality while grinding out the weekly paycheck, nor am I recommending that others adopt my admittedly eccentric approach to the world of work. We each must plot our own course in our own circumstances, and such a course is a matter of prudence. I suffered and struggled for many years to keep my soul from being swallowed by the demands of earning my daily bread, and now that I have freed myself for awhile from the toils of Mammon, I can see more clearly than ever the difficulties and dangers that so many of us face. But God has chosen us to live in this seemingly impossible time, and He will stand with us as we rise each day to renew our combat with the world of total work. But there is no denying it: the world of total work is a hell of a thing.
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