Christianizing work

Notice that the layman, who takes over God's creative attitude toward the material universe, is essentially the creative worker. And from what we just said, it would seem to follow that the material universe as lovingly transformed will not pass away, but will on the last day receive its eternal form from the choices of those who lovingly worked on it.

"Now I am making everything new," says the Master in Revelation at the point of the entrance of the eternal New Jerusalem.

And if our analysis this far is correct, this "new" making is the making the Master has done through us, and through our loving creativity on the world. The world, then--the eternal world that exists forever after the last day, our eternal environment--will not be something given to us, but something we have made for ourselves, just as the self we will be will be the self we chose ourselves to be, not something given to us that we didn't actively want beforehand. Of course, with all this is the divine life we will share insofar as we care about God as God; but the person who lives (in this finite way) God's life will be the person we chose in this life to be, no more and no less; and the environment we live in will be the environment we chose to make as ours, neither more nor less.

It seems that this rather mystical analysis of work has led us to a fairly remarkable conclusion. God's "plan" for the eternal, unchanging material world we will inhabit is in fact our plan for the world we choose to live in; it is no less than this, but no more either. Thus, if we don't want more than a world that is barely tolerable, we won't have more than this eternally; if we try to make our world as beautiful and comfortable and enjoyable a place as we can, then this will be the environment that will surround us forever. God is not mocked. Just as he will not give the "righteous" person who never sins but never tries to develop himself anything more than this minimally significant human life he has chosen, so if we don't want any more for our world than that it be bearable, it will not be transformed into a palace.

The medieval notion of Christianity assumed that we will simply be given (because of God's generosity) a heaven that we didn't bother to do anything to achieve, when we could have been working to transform this world into a beautiful place. The medievals affected to despise "this world" and "material pleasures" and all the rest of it, as something if not evil, then dangerous, and at the very least, "low" and "beneath the notice of a true Christian."

But in so doing, they missed the point of the fact that, as Paul said, "we know that every creature has been in pain and anguish along with every other one up to now; and not only that, but we too, even though we have the firstfruits of the Spirit, are having pain until we are adopted as son and our whole body is set free. We have been rescued--but in hope."

Along with ourselves, the world, the material world, is waiting to be redeemed. And it is we who will do it, by re-creating it with the love of the Master: the Master's infinite creative love for the whole material universe. He loves the "low" objects in the material world, and loves them infinitely, and creates them and works on them and transforms them and lifts them beyond themselves--not for any "purpose" that he wants to use them for for his own "increase," but simply so that they can be fully what they can be. If my Master loves these objects infinitely, should I despise them? If he has been "working up to now," as John says, shouldn't I say with Jesus, "Then I am working too"?

This is our sublime vocation as laymen: to make a difference in the world; to make the world (some corner of it) different; and by loving it, to make an eternal difference in it.

Note that this is precisely what is ignored by those people who think that to be a "real Christian" you have to get involved in helping out in the parish. Let me say again that there is nothing wrong with helping out in the parish, distributing Communion, singing in the choir, and so on; but it is not the layman's "true Christian activity." His activity as a Christian layman is to transform the world and give the material universe an eternal divine-human aspect.

But there is still more. Notice that the choice itself implies the goal; and if this goal is not realized here, it will be realized hereafter. For instance, the person who has set as a goal for himself to be learned, say, in philosophy will (I have discovered) fail in this life, because there is too much to learn for one short lifetime, and too many blind alleys to get lost in. A philosopher can scratch the surface and grope around, no more. But if this goal--which has nothing contradictory about it--of learning the real truth about life and its meaning cannot be fulfilled in this life, it must be fulfilled in the next, or the person is in hell; the meaning of his life is unachieved and now unachievable. Hence, each of us will be all of the (non-self-contradictory) things we choose to be, whether we achieve this here or not.

This also applies to those goals we have in love for the material universe. If, like Martin Luther King, one of the goals of my life is that Black people will not be despised and will have the same opportunities as Whites in our country, then either I will be eternally frustrated or this goal will some day actually be realized--provided it is consistent with the nature of Blacks and Whites, as it certainly seems to be.

So it is having the goal which guarantees its achievement, not the actions you perform to achieve it; because if these actions fail, the goal is still there, and must be achieved after death.

In fact, the loving creator can almost guarantee that he will fail, in this life. We just don't know enough or have enough time to achieve anything significant in our lives--and there is so much to be done! Even Jesus, failed in his work, which was to make us understand what God's salvation really meant. No one during his life understood what he meant, as can be seen from the Last Supper conversations recorded by John. It was only after he came back to life--actually, only after he left and sent the Spirit, that it began to dawn on his students what he was actually trying to say. The cross of the layman is the fact that his ambitions for the world are not achieved by his feeble actions.

But the cross leads to the resurrection and makes no sense without it. The function of the actions we perform to transform the world is that they confirm that the goals we have are real ones, and are not simply dreams. It is the goals that, in the eternal scheme, do the creative work; it is the work that establishes that the goals are serious and real. That is the way work achieves its goal.

Note the difference here between the Christian worker and the atheist worker. The atheist, who believes that there is no life after death in which the legitimate goals of one's life will necessarily be fulfilled, must take what he actually accomplishes as what makes the real difference in this world; the goal is simply for the sake of the accomplishment; if the accomplishment measures up to it, then the person is lucky; if it does not, then what he had in mind was an impossible dream, and he must content himself with what was actually done. Thus, on the supposition of the atheist, all Martin Luther King, Jr. accomplished was that insignificant start toward Black equality, and it is almost certain that now that his eloquence is missing, the lofty aim will die for lack of nourishment.

That is, the hope of the atheist lies in his assessment of his actual power, and a kind of trust in luck--very often a blind trust that has the facts against it. Any realistic atheist would say that he should set goals that are "realistic" and can reasonably be expected to be achieved. Why beat your head against a wall for (a) something that won't do you any good in the first place, and (b) something that the odds are against in the second place?

And when all is said and done, for the atheist, the goals he achieves are ephemeral. Another will come along and undo with his own goals the goals the noble atheist worked so hard for. The environmentalist will stop pollution until we have a few generations of a pollution-free environment and forget what a benefit this is, and once again decide to seek "progress" at the expense of the world we live in. The anti-nuclear activist may succeed in dismantling nuclear weapons. What is his hope that no one will build any again once they are dismantled?

But the Christian knows that his goal is eternal, and is the operative act, really; the work simply makes the goal real. You have to work, but the feeble accomplishments of the work itself don't do the job; God does the job because we chose that it be done. The Christian is confident that his goals will be achieved if they are not self-contradictory--and if they are self-contradictory, he is content not to have them achieved, because he knows that such goals ought not to be achieved.

The Christian is not wedded to his goals, because the goals are not for his sake; he cares about what he is working on, not simply as a means to his own self-development. If the actual goal he chooses turns out to be contrary to the nature of what he is working on, he always has the implicit goal behind it of "whatever really is good for this object," and is willing to defer to God's greater knowledge.

To take the Black movement again, obviously the equality of Blacks in the sense envisioned by Martin Luther King, Jr. was not something that in the nature of things could happen soon; and it probably isn't happening in the way he envisioned it. What does that matter? It is not right to violate nature to achieve a goal, and if the world can't get to the place desired soon without violating some part of it, then the end doesn't justify the means, and it will have to wait. There is no absolute, objective evil; wrongs do not have to be righted. The world will get there some day, in its own way; and that is what matters.

For the atheist, what happens matters, and matters desperately; for the Christian, what happens matters, but not desperately, because the Christian recognizes the subjectivity of "what matters," and can cope with it; and the Christian has hope that the goal--the real goal--will be achieved, whatever happens.

But this does not imply passivity in the Christian, simply "conforming oneself to the will of God" and letting things be done. That is the fallacy of medieval Christianity once again. The medieval Christian looked on this world the way a renter looks on his apartment. It isn't really his, and he's just living in it temporarily; it belongs to someone else. He tries to take care of it, to be sure, but when something goes wrong, he calls up the landlord and says, "Will you fix this, please?" and sits back and waits for it to be done for him--and complains if it isn't.

The atheist and the Christian I am describing consider that the world is something that we own. For the atheist, there's no landlord to call to fix the leaky faucet; if he doesn't fix it, it won't get fixed. For the Christian, the bank that owns the lien on the house isn't going to fix the faucet either; and if the owner doesn't fix it, it won't get fixed; but the banker is ready with a loan and advice on how to fix it. As long as the attempt is made to fix the faucet, it will be fixed, because the owner is not alone.

In one sense, if this analysis of the Christian dimension of work is true, it is terribly important that we work on the world and have goals for it; because if we don't have goals that translate themselves into work (and only have dreams that are the equivalent of calling the landlord), then things that we "desire" won't get done. In another sense, it isn't important at all that we work on the world--because it isn't objectively important that the world be a beautiful place eternally; the world can be whatever we want it to be, and God is perfectly satisfied. Importance is subjective. For God, nothing is important. I consider, for instance, one phase of my work as a Christian writing this book, because I think that what I have to write is true, and it would be a very useful thing for the world and for Christians in it to be able to have this information and use it for their own Christian development. But there is no absolute sense in which this must be published and in which people must be informed of what I am saying here. Perhaps I am wrong; then wouldn't it be better if these words never see the light? Why have hundreds of Christians rushing off down another blind alley?

And since this view is so very different from everything I hear around me, which is all about "fulfillment" and how "important" we are in God's eyes, and how God "wants" social justice even if revolutions are to be waged to get it, and so on and so on; then there is very little realistic hope that this book will even be read by anyone during my lifetime, let alone be a best-seller and change the way of thinking of generation after generation--which is my ambition.

But I can't just have my ideas and pray that they be spread through the world, without giving the world a chance to find out what they are. My ideas in my head remain in my head; even if they are inspired by God Almighty, they remain in my head unless I choose to express them in such a way that others can hear them and evaluate them according to their own inspirations. If I refuse to do this, and then ask God to do it for me, then I am dreaming and not working; and he will not do it, because I don't really want it done. It is not important from his point of view that it be done; he has not "chosen me as his instrument" in the sense that he "wants" to use me for a work of his, not mine.

On the other hand, seeing where this age is and what it needs--hope and self-forgetfulness, love--I think I have been chosen as God's instrument, and what I say has been, as it were, put into me for the sake of new opportunities to advance from where we are without going back to the middle ages and without simply struggling in the quicksand we are in and only sinking deeper. But my "instrumentality" is secondary, as it were, to my ambitions; it simply is not objectively important that what I am the instrument for should be accomplished. It is to be accomplished if it is my ambition to accomplish it; if I have this as a goal I work for; if not, it is not one of God's "goals."

My cross, if you want to consider it that way, is that I don't see the work's accomplishing anything until after I die, when I believe I will view the eternal fulfillment of the ambition I have for the world, and will rejoice with my Master, who alone, in the last analysis, matters. Not even my rejoicing matters. So I write this, hopeful that it will do some good, but being almost certain that I won't live to see the good. And I think that it's probably better for me not to see my ideas spread during my lifetime, because this would probably mean their trivialization on television talk shows and so on. Can a "celebrity" really accomplish what I would like to accomplish? And could he do it without also accomplishing his own damnation? So I am content. I have no particular desire to be regarded as brilliant, let alone brilliant and eccentric; what I want is for what I say to be regarded as true--if it is true; and I certainly have no desire to be regarded as a saint--now, at least, when I am not one. Later, after I die, and have by God's miraculous activity become one. There is plenty of time for that.

The point, of course, is that it is the goal itself that is what operates, if I am right; and it operates eternally. The work is to confirm the goal as such; and if the goal is very lofty--and why shouldn't it be?--then the life of the worker is the cross, and the resurrection happens after he dies. We have no need to set "realistic" goals, in the sense of what we believe we can in this life realize by our actions. We can stoop to the folly of believing that legitimate goals that are enormous and beyond our poor power here and now can be achieved. The only real folly is to set goals that are in principle impossible, that don't respect the nature of the person acting or the objects acted on.

In this sense, the Christian is a fool. He will choose to become an actor, because he wants to say something to the world through drama--though he knows that it is a hundred to one or more against his actually succeeding in getting roles, however good he is. He will choose to be a physicist, because he sees that there is much to be learned about our material universe, and he is not daunted by the fact that only the Newtons and Einsteins have made a real dent in this knowledge. He will choose to be a businessman, confident that if he does this, it will some day be possible for business to get itself out of the economic contradictions it has got itself into, and if he doesn't try to run a business on the principle of providing the best service to the consumer and decent work for the workers and using profit as only a reasonable compensation for this, then who will? He is not afraid of the greed of the others and the greater efficiency it implies. His act is eternal, not just here.

Let me close this section by remarking that all three states of the Christian life work; but the work looks different in each one of them. The fact that all do work should not be surprising; we are all a kind of mixture of the Trinity of the three states of life, because God's Triune attitude is actually one. But still, the focus is different in each case.

Chartres would be an example of the kind of Religious attitude toward work. The goal in this case was to have the material of the cathedral reveal God in the world and lift people's minds to God. And it is seeing the relation of God to the world and the world to God that is essentially the Religious attitude.

Further, the Religious works as a sacrifice. The labor and effort that he does is to show himself that he cares more about God than about his own comfort. In this sense, what the Religious does to the world is not important; if he farms, if he illuminates manuscripts, if he studies seismology, if he teaches, his attitude is that the transformation of the world--the "good" that he does--is secondary to the work as a sign that he loves God and that he loves God in what he is working on. He has given up "care" about the world as a goal of his life; the world reveals God to him, and he takes it into himself to praise God through it. Not that it is a means, exactly; he respects it as God's creation. But he respects it as such, he does not, as Religious, create it as such.

The priest, of course, works to spread the Kingdom; the world is his goal; but it is basically the world of people who do not yet know of the redemption, or who have not taken full advantage of it, and who must be given the opportunity. If he works on the material universe, then as a priest, this is a means toward helping people understand what Jesus' activity was all about and how to take advantage of it. If he engages in social work with people, this is a propaedeutic to lifting them to think about the next world and see the salvation that awaits them (on the grounds, for instance, that you can't think about heaven if you're starving). If he keeps the books of the parish, this is so that the parish can function in its role of providing the opportunity of salvation to the parishoners.

This is not to say that priests don't care about the world for its own sake, any more than to say that Religious are using the world purely and simply as a kind of veil through which to see their Master. Any real person is a mixture of all three states of life, as I have said so often. What I am saying here is that the priest's work as a priest is that of providing the opportunity for salvation to everyone; and everything he does as a priest is a means to that end. And the Religious works on the world as a Religious so that it will reveal itself as the glory of God, and the relation between it and the world will appear. For the Religious, this relation is the goal; the world "in itself" is not. For the priest, the world is the goal, but only the world of those to be redeemed.

But for the layman, the world itself is the goal. It is not that the layman's goal is to have his corner of the world speak about God; it is that it become what it can be made to become: that greater, glorious object which the world as worked on by a man who has God's infinite respect and love for it can help it to be. The Religious plants a garden as partly the penance of labor, and partly so that the growing plants can reveal the wonders of God, who gives life so abundantly. He loves God in the plants. The priest plants a garden so that there will be food for those who can be fed and so be brought to listen to the Word, or so that there can be flowers to help people understand the beauty of the Word. He loves the garden for what it can do for souls. The layman plants a garden so that the plants can grow as well as they can grow. He loves the garden the way the Creator loves it.

They tell the story of the preacher who called on a gardener who had bought a garden a year ago, and who was working hard on it. "I see you and the Lord have beautiful land here," he said. The farmer replied, "Yes? You should have seen it when the Lord had it all to himself."

There is something of the lay attitude in that. God will not create the world into something marvelous "by himself"; it takes humans who love the world to do that--because that is the way he created the world, for us to re-create it "with him." And if we love it as God loves it, then the layman's ambition for the garden creates an eternal garden that is all that it could be because of his ambition for it; and it is part of our eternal environment.

Who is to say that any one of these attitudes to work is any "better" than any other? Each is noble, each is capable of perversion, each is Christian. They are different in kind, not in degree. Those who have the priestly attitude and think everything should be subordinated to the salvation of souls should not look down on those who care about God's world simply because it exists, and who simply want it to be fully what it can be. That is the way God himself cares about it; one of the ways.