This post is a little long and rambly, but I think I’ll leave it.
A few days ago I posed a question for Christians: “How would you square a belief in the inherent dignity of honest work with the idea that hard work was the curse of God on Adam?”
I got some good responses, which you can see in the comments to that post. Caleb’s response, in particular, sent me back to the recent Plough issue on “Why We Work,” where I found a helpful piece by Alastair Roberts. More on that momentarily.
The background to my question is my recent reading about the Amish and other Anabaptists–a tradition with a long history of weaving together their daily work with their faith. This is attractive to me. It’s essentially been a lifelong goal of mine, stretching from the time I left the Holiness churches through my time as a Lutheran, Episcopalian, and, now, a pagan. I have no interest in an otherworldly faith that cheapens this world. I am interested in how I can live a fully integrated life here and now.
Many years ago I read that deeply problematic C.S. Lewis passage (from God in the Dock_) where he divides religions, like soups, into “thick” and “clear”:
By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly.
Surprising no one, Lewis says Christianity is the best balance of Thick and Clear. When I first read it, however, I was instantly attracted far more to the Thick than either the Clear or some balance of the two. That has remained the case in the decades since. There have been times when I perhaps drifted more toward the Clear, but I always come back to the Thick.
“Good work is our salvation and joy,” says Wendell Berry, and I agree. This is a Thick principle. Earthy and solid, like the Amish. As I was thinking through this, my mind went back to the Garden of Eden, as it does surprisingly often. I find it to be a fruitful(!) myth; I posted one of my theories about it here. How can good work be essential to our well-being if work is the curse of God on Adam?
As a few people pointed out, that is a mistaken way of framing it. There was indeed work before the Fall. Here’s where Alastair comes in. He says humanity’s work was meant to be “continuous with and established by God’s labor” in creation. Eden, in fact, was a training ground. God would teach Adam and Eve how to “extend and elaborate good order within the creation” and from there they would go out to exercise this responsibility throughout the world. Eden would remain as the primal garden sanctuary, where God and humanity could commune. Humanity’s work would be a pattern of there and back again: going out to perform their work, and returning to the garden sanctuary to be with God.
The Fall, however, changed the character of work:
Man’s work was supposed to flow out of and back into fellowship with God: it was ordered out from and into the sanctuary. However, after humanity’s rebellion in the Fall, human labor went awry, adopting a different character. Alienated from God, human labor lost its primary orientation to communion, becoming acquisitive, driven by a desire for material possessions, power, and status. Capacities that were created for beneficent rule were twisted to the ends of domination over others, and labor became entangled with systems of bondage. Mutual recognition, companionship, and belonging through fellow labor curdled into rivalry and division. Work once blessed with fruitfulness was reduced to frustration and futility. Labor degraded into unrelenting toil. The earth no longer readily answered to the efforts of the man, and now, alienated from the Giver of Life, man’s labors were constantly slipping down into the pitiless maw of death. The labor of women in childbirth became hedged about with the risk of death, for mother and baby alike. The book of Ecclesiastes, which meditates upon the condition of man in a world under the power of death, describes how man’s greatest works are washed away and forgotten beneath the advancing tides of time.
Having lost its grounding in relationship, suffering became the new character of work. I appreciate this elucidation of the story–so I’ll adapt it for my own uses.
My personal theory (more in that link above) is that the Eden story is an ancestral memory of our break with the more-than-human world. Viewing this through the lens of work, Eden tells us that once we labored in harmony with the universe. Our work was reciprocal: taking and killing, yes, but also giving, caring, and protecting.
Perhaps the break with the more-than-human world happened because evolution damaged humanity in some way. However it happened, the separation set us at odds. Work is now rarely a partnership between people, much less between humans and non-humans. At this late date, money is all that matters.
I don’t know whether or how this breach will be healed on the grand scale. I will leave that question to the religions that operate at that scale.
In my own life, I intend for my labor to be grounded in the recognition of interrelatedness. Living in the world as it is, my work will often breach those relationships. Wendell Berry once had a pond excavated on a narrow shelf on a wooded hillside. He thought he had done it carefully, in consultation with experts. Nevertheless, after a wet fall and winter, a chunk of the woods above slid into the pond.
In general, I have used my farm carefully. It could be said, I think, that I have improved it more than have damaged it.
My aim has been to go against its history and to repair the damage of other people. But now a part of its damage is my own.
The pond was a modest piece of work, and so the damage is not extensive. In the course of time and nature it will heal.
And yet there is damage—to my place, and to me. I have carried out, before my own eyes and against my intention, a part of the modern tragedy: I have made a lasting flaw in the face of the earth, for no lasting good.
Until that wound in the hillside, my place, is healed, there will be something impaired in my mind. My peace is damaged. I will not be able to forget it.
When our work has breached relationships, it is our responsibility to repair and heal what we can, in memory of Eden.
It is better, of course, to avoid these breaches altogether. This is where our work becomes truly difficult, because it cuts against the grain of everything around us. I don’t know what you will be called to do; I know what Rachel and I have been called to do. Like Adam and Eve, our work is joint, one long venture lasting thirty years so far. We have been called to work together in patience and love: parenting, gardening, making a home, supporting each other. We gave up a job with money and status (that was killing me) so that we could remain near each other, within our community, and fully shift our focus there. I say this only to insist that work grounded in interrelatedness will cost you—but only in ways that do not ultimately matter. Ultimately, you’ll only lose your suffering. For the last word, we turn again to Mr. Berry:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and that vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.