Work as a Social Duty

In Working Your Way into Heaven, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski has shown us how work is a need of human nature. We've also seen how work perfects man and his acts. Let's now explore work as a social duty.

We start by acknowledging that God created each individual with a unique personality, a part of which is - in varying degrees - social. Our actions consider both our own needs and those of others: family, friends, neighbors, and, most importantly God. In our jobs, we develop a distinct social bond with those for whom and with whom we work: colleagues, bosses, customers, etc. Cardinal Wyszynski describes this using the image of the beehive:

A man at work has people crowding around him, like bees around the queen. Work binds man to man: there is no doubt about this.

He wrote this before so much or our work centered on computers, smart phones, and social media. But when you think about it, despite our tendency to stare at a screen instead of engaging our flesh and blood neighbor or colleague face to face, we know that human beings lurk somewhere behind the glass screen and digital images, right? That's why even those of us thoroughly absorbed in our electronic companions don't really shut ourselves off from our fellow human beings, at least when it comes to our work.

There is no work in the performance of which man can be shut up wholly in himself. In every type of work there is a bond with some other work that has already been done - a connecting link in the work itself: work done before this present work binds together the past and the future. No matter what we take up in the course of our work, we always see in it, enclosed in its completed form, the embodied work of the past. The work that we add to the work already done, will itself be taken up by our successors, who will develop it, improve it perhaps, and bring it one stage further. In the same way, a man at work now is linked with the man who worked before him and with the man who will work after him. There is a special "communion of saints" in and through work. This is the historical bond.

This is easily experienced when you're hired by a company. You're usually replacing someone else. Or perhaps the company is growing and they need you to expand and enhance the existing work flow. Even if you start up your own company, you do so with the idea that you're establishing a connecting with potential customers whose needs you believe you have identified.

Cardinal Wyszynski elegantly and beautifully inserts a Catholic perspective in the image of the "communion of saints." But he goes a step further by claiming that the bond established with others in our work is "the radiance of love"! Even the most menial jobs contain the grain of love. Here's how:

Work is man's tendency to draw near his fellowman; it cannot aim at emptiness. It always links us with people - if not immediately, then at least indirectly. There can be no work that in some mysterious way does not link us with people, even the work that is directed toward God. In fact, that kind of work especially links us with people.

Here we find confirmation of our point about our current work that keeps us focused (often too much) on electronic digital gizmos and virtual networks of people we hardly know. There's real people in them thar hills! And notice how even "work that is directed toward God" especially links us with people. We might think of the example of monks who pray and work not as isolated individuals, not even as a group of individuals separate from the world, but as part of the communion of saints, of which we are all a part.

Nest time we dig deeper into the idea of work as a social duty.