The Love of Hard Work
Second Meditation - Models of Hard Work
I. Solomon advises us to go to school with the ant and learn from this little creature the ways of diligence and hard work (Prov. vi, 6). But we priests have only to look around us: into factories of modern industrialism, into iron foundries and blast furnaces where such heavy and dangerous work is being done night and day; and, in the countryside itself, only by sheer hard work can farmers manage to earn their daily bread honestly for themselves and their families; hard work that spans the long daylight hours of a summer's day from the first glimmerings of dawn until evening dusk; and even then, the day is all too short, and the struggle for existence is unceasing. If I, a priest, need a spur to hard work, I have not far to look for it; perhaps my own hardworking parents set for me the earliest example.
And what about those thousands upon thousands of saintly people who have been the salt of the earth, from whose sweated toil the world has always drunk in abundance? Is it possible to imagine a lazy Saint? These are my masters and models in keeping with my priestly state. But there are certain models of supreme significance and value to me; let us take some of them: St. Paul, the Blessed Mother of Jesus, and finally, Jesus Christ Himself, the God-Man who had a better right than any other child of Adam to say: in laboribus a juventute mea.
II. Saint Paul. - When, as we saw in our last meditation, the Apostle administered such severe warnings to the faithful about hard work, he was well authorised to do so; he was the first to give the lead.
"You do not need to be reminded how, on our visit, we set you an example to be imitated; we were no vagabonds ourselves.Every word of this beautiful chapter should be the subject of meditation. And I should do well to ponder over these moving words which St. Paul addressed to the early Christians of Ephesus on his departure from the city:
"We would not even be indebted to you for our daily bread, we earned it in weariness and toil, working with our hands, night and day, so as not to be a burden to any of you." (2 Thess, iii, 7,8)
"You yourselves can testify how I have lived among you since the first day when I set foot on Asia serving the Lord in all humility, not without tears over the trials which beset me through the plots of the Jews:For three years, uninterruptedly, day and night, in public and in each individual household; all the while ambushed by Jews and Gentiles, and ill-treated by them: that would seem crushing enough. But without rest, without consolation, through cities, by the wayside, by land and sea, in failing health, battered and assaulted; and yet, building up so many Christian communities, covering so many parts of Asia Minor, so many parts of Europe. Surely he has well earned his daily bread! Surely he should receive at least the means of self-support! No. Those labours are free of charge. That is his boast, and he says:
"And how I have never failed you when there was any need of preaching to you, or teaching you, whether publicly or house by house.
"I have proclaimed both to Jew and to Greek repentance before God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ." (Acts xx, 18-21)
"Be on the watch, then; do not forget the three years I spent, instructing every one of you continually, and with tears." (Act xx, 31)
"I would rather die than have this boast taken from me." (1 Cor. ix, 15.)No wonder, when he came to leave those vast territories and populous centers through which he had passed establishing the kingdom of God, he could, with legitimate pride, say to his converts:
"I have never asked for silver or gold or clothing from any man; you will bear me out, that these hands of mine have sufficed for all that I and my companions needed." (Acts xx, 33-34)And no doubt, in saying this, he extended those hands and showed them to the people; hands that had so often stretched out before the multitudes in gestures of irresistible persuasiveness from the preacher of the Gospel and the pacifier of agitated masses, hands that had touched the dead to raise them to life again, and had been laid on the sick to heal them.
He shows them those hands of his grown callous from constant use of the hemp and bodkin with which he sewed the canvas cloths together for the making of tents, the lowly manual labour which earned him his meager pittance. A great man, indeed, is Paul when he perorates in the Areopagus, but his stature is not diminished when he rests from his consuming apostolic labours to sew canvas sheets throughout the night, lest he die of starvation, and to provide for those that help him in the task of evangelisation.
III. The Mother of Jesus. - It is very little the Gospels tell us about her, and even that litde reveals her inner life rather than her outward activities. But what was the need? Was your own mother poor? Or, at least, don't you know some good woman, the mother of a Christian family, with a very small share of this world's goods? Consider her occupations, her life of unremitting toil.
Such was Mary's life, Mary the Mother of the humble home of Nazareth. Call to mind the picture of the Strong Woman, the "vigorous wife," as contained in the Book of Proverbs; those were the household cares of the Strong Woman and Vigorous Wife, Mary of Nazareth. To rise at first light of dawn, tidy the house, sweep, scmb, wash the dishes, sew or mend; and to be the last to go to bed at night.
Those blessed hands, which now emit heavenly rays of beauty, and which dispense to us all the great stream of graces won by Christ, are hands that once were chapped and roughened with the cleansing of pots and pans, the scrubbing of floors, the plying of the needle, the carrying of the pitcher to the well.
If you ask Christ, the Judge of living and dead, the Rewarder of every virtue: "Lord, what are those precious stones in Thy Mother's crown of glory which shine more refulgent than the stars of the heavens?" His answer will be: "No, not ostentatious deeds, not lofty preachments, not the conversion of whole nations, not martyrdoms or consuming flames or agonising crosses; they are the humble household tasks of my Mother, the worries and cares of a very humble home which, in passing through my Mother's hands, or rather, through her Heart ablaze with divine love more burning than that of all the Seraphim, were fashioned into that crown of glory, heaven's most lustrous adornment."
O God, however much the world may despise hard work, I will not despise it; and seeing the transformations it undergoes when suffused by Thy love, I shall love it, too.
IV. Jesus Christ. - "In laboribus a juventute mea" are words that sum up, if we exclude physical ailments, the life of our Lord.
Carpenter, craftsman, the artisan's son, are the terms used by fellow-citizens and countrymen when speaking of Jesus; terms spoken in a tone of derision when refusing to accept the wisdom that flowed from His lips.
How came this man by all these things? What wisdom is this that is given to him, and such mighty works as are wrought by his hands ? (Mark vi, 2)From the age of twelve to thirty, His whole life, which St. Luke compresses into the words "He was subject to them," was a life of obedience to Mary, His hard-working Mother, and to Joseph, the carpenter. With Joseph He cuts, saws, planes, and nails, wood; He makes or repairs window-frames, doors, ploughs; earning His bread with the sweat of His brow and the toil of His hands. Dispossessed, as it were, of His Godhead's crown, which He had seemed to leave behind Him among the bright angelic choirs, on earth He wears two crowns: during the last hours of His laborious existence, the crown of thorns, studded with the rubies and gems of His precious blood; during His whole life, the crown of hard work, studded with the drops of sweat when wielding the tools of His carpenter's trade day after day.
And how often, during the years of His public ministry, while proving to the world His Mastery, He would go back in thought and yearning to those peaceful hours spent at the workshop of Nazareth!
Is there anything more exhausting to a man than to be constantly dealing with vast throngs of people? There He is: the Word of God, surrendering to their demands, hemmed in by them, crushed, carried along by them through the hilly tracks and dusty roads of Judea and Galilee and over the shores of Tiberias.
His lodging-place is besieged by the crowds from dawn to dusk; He has not even time for a meal; He instructs them, listens to them, heals the sick, suffers the thousand-and-one impertinences of friends, the suspicions and captious questionings of shrewd enemies; and over the heads of those same crowds, within reach of their sarcasm, overwhelmed by the cataract of His own torments, He finally utters from the cross the triumphant cry of liberation: Consummatum est. It was liberation from crushing toil, an end to all those years of unspeakable labour in which every muscle, every sense, and every faculty and fibre of His being had been consumed by hard work.
That is one more lesson from the Cross; the lesson to every priest on the meaning of hard work.
O Lord, do I, Thy minister; do I, alter Christus, propose to squat down under the sheltering shadow of the Cross and spend my life in idleness, adducing my very priesthood as a reason for taking things easy?
Resolutions
This will be my work programme:
1. Not to omit a single one of my priestly acts of piety: mental prayer, Mass, Divine Office, spiritual reading, visit to the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary; and to give to each act all the time, space, quiet, and serious attention which my dealings with God require, performing them in places conducive to recollection, and considering them my noblest occupation and exercises of the day.
2. To prepare for preaching: sermons, homilies, catechetical instructions, and whatever entails the announcing of God's word. To devote to this preparation all the time and labour that my audience and my ability demand, because otherwise I should be profaning the word of God taught us so reverently by its first Herald, the Word of God in Person.
3. To discharge my ministerial duties towards my neighbour, not only those due in strict justice, but also those of equity, charity, or simply out of devotion, with that fixed attention and calm repose which everything divine demands, not allowing any human interest to abbreviate or hurry them unduly.
4. Not to despise any form of zeal, however new and unusual it may appear to me, so long as the Church does not disapprove of it and it seems to be effective; and even to make use of these new manifestations of zeal in so far as prudence and timely circumstances call for them: schools, lectures, works of charity, social or quasi-social institutions.
O God, as Thou didst pour the new wine of the Gospel into new wine-skins, notwithstanding the persecution by fire and sword on the part of the keepers of the old wine-skins, I also shall try the new as well as the old, so as to be able to sum up my life in the words of Thy Apostle:
"I have been everything by turns to everybody to bring everybody salvation." (1 Cor. ix, 22)
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.
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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!
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