Happy Twenty-Third Sunday! And a happy Labor Day as well. For those interested in history, the federal holiday we enjoy this time of year was signed into law in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland. At that time, the late 1800s were exploding with the economic and cultural changes of the American Industrial Revolution. Our country was rapidly moving away from an agriculture and commodities export economy toward a manufacturing-based market economy, and families were moving into cities where work could be found.
A new generation of opportunities created a new generation of both blessings and challenges! Among the challenges were the ever-growing moral and legal failures surrounding worker safety, child labor, and gross disparity of wealth between capital and labor. In fact, the pope of that time, Leo XIII, wrote a groundbreaking encyclical in 1891 called “Rerum Novarum,” which applied Catholic moral doctrine to the social conditions of this newly industrializing world.
Leo insisted, among other things, that the demands of work and the economy must serve human dignity and the common good, rather than mere economic output at the cost of human dignity. Another way of stating this: work is made for the good of man, man is not made for the sake of work. The moral argument here wasn’t just a thought experiment among churchmen in Europe, it was on full political display across our country. Grover Cleveland’s passage of this annual Labor Holiday on the first Monday of September codified a growing national reckoning of conscience about the true good of work and the dignity of workers.
As for me, I know my own life can bear the marks of the same struggle of conscience. Setting the work of my temporal life into its eternal context is often humbling and eye-opening. Do I spend my time storing up treasures for this world, or storing up treasures for heaven? Heaven never makes me a slave to my daily work. But money, prestige, power, pleasure, and comfort, these things always drive a hard, merciless, servile bargain for our souls. Even as a priest, work can become an idol. “Ministry” can become a slave-master. We forget that our lives are vocations whenever we reduce our lives to functions.
So, keep it in mind today, my dear brothers and sisters. Labor Day is a worldly example of a much deeper God-given truth. You’re a human person, not a human function. Jesus made the tree in your backyard. Go marvel at it for a while, or hey, maybe climb it. Kiss your children on the forehead. Breathe some air on purpose and think that God created those molecules for your health. Make a delicious grilled cheese with fancy cheese. Open up the Good Book and pray a psalm (try Psalm 145). Spend a day soaking in the vivid things that only people can enjoy and set aside the grayscale of worldly functions. Love your soul as God your heavenly Father loves your soul.
From Fr. Brian