Beyond Career to Calling Understanding Work as a Vocation within the Catholic Social Tradition

1. Beyond Career to Calling Understanding Work as a Vocation within the Catholic Social Tradition Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology November 7, 2011

2. Divided Life • The split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age. . . . [L]et there be no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one hand, and religious life on the other (Gaudium et spes, 43).

3. Big Questions • What am I Working for? • What am I Resting in? • What am I Living for?

4. WORK LEISURE INTEGRATION

5. Workas Job • Economic Return (extrinsic motivation) • “If work is so great how come they pay us to do it” (Mike Royko).

6. Leisureas Amusement • Entertaining Culture • “They know its been me they have been coming to see to forget about life for awhile” (Billy Joel). • “Instead of being the moment when we rediscover ourselves, thinking about who we ought to be, leisure is “the moment when amusementssucceed to the maximum in making [us] . . . forget” (Jacques Ellul).

7. Weekend Getaway “Your body checks in and your mind checks out.”

8. IntegrationGratifications • Consumerism (leisure): Having over Being • Economism(work):Work is a Means to consumption where one “considers human labor solely according to its economic purpose” (Laboremexercens).

9. WORK LEISURE INTEGRATION

10. Workas Career • Psychological Rewards (intrinsic motivations): self esteem, creative, autonomous and personally satisfying. • Career: the auto-mobile, the self-driven vehicle.

11. LeisureasFunction • Education is justified based on its instrumental value to career. • Rest is justified “to sharpen the saw” in order to be more productive.

12. IntegrationAchievements • Careerism: Doing over Being • Two Cases

14. LBJby Doris Kearns Goodwin And yet the man I saw in his retirement had spent so many years in pursuit of work, power and individual success that he had absolutely no psychic or emotional resources left to commit himself to anything once the presidency was taken from him. Years of concentration solely on work meant that in his retirement he could find no solace in recreation, sports, or hobbies…

15. Subjective Dimension of Work • The aim internal to work such as farming, fishing, architecture, construction, and so forth, “when they are in good order, is never only to catch fish, or to produce beef or milk, or to build houses. It is to do so in a manner consonant with the excellences of the craft, so that not only is there a good product, but the craftsperson is perfected through and in her or his activity. . . . It is from this that the sense of a craft’s dignity derives” (MacIntyre). • “The highest reward [or punishment] for one’s work is not what he gets from it, but what he becomes by it” (Ruskin).

16. WORK LEISURE INTEGRATION

17. Work as Vocation • Vocare: “to call”—a calling to give(transcendent motives) • To be Human—the Universal Call to Love, to be Whole, to Holiness (Being): A person “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et spes, 24). • To a State of Life (Belonging): to give ourselves in the religious, priestly or lay state. • To a Particular Way of Work (Doing): Work “constitutes one of the fundamental dimensions of [our] earthly existence and of [our] vocation” precisely because our work allows us to exercise our gifts in serving others (John Paul II).

18. Work as GivingCatholic Social Principles at Work A Lesson from Native Americans (the law of gift) The “Gospel of Work”: Work Continues Creation: “Collaborators with God” not “individual utility maximizers”; “stewards” not “owners.” Work is Fallen: not just markets, incentives or regulations, but vice (injustice) and sin (greed and pride). Work is Redeemed: sanctified suffering not despair; alleviating suffering not causing it.

19. Leisure as Contemplation An Act of “Receivement”:fostering a “contemplative outlook” to receive the world. Three habits of leisure/resting/receiving: Habit of Solitude: Daily Silence Habit of Celebration: Weekly Sabbath/Worship Habit of Service: Going to the Margins

20. The fruit of SILENCE is Prayer The fruit of PRAYER is Faith The fruit of FAITH is Love The fruit of LOVE is Service The fruit of SERVICE is Peace

21. Integritas: Integer, to be whole, integration (not just balanced). Contemplative Practitioner: “When we first experience our being as created, as being gifted life, this receiving enables us to see our doing and having . . . as ways of giving which they are meant to be” (David Schindler). IntegrationIntegrity

22. WORK LEISURE INTEGRATION

23. Leisure as the Basis of Culture • What carries and animates culture is the cultus, religion, that which we worship and hold to be most worth, that which binds us together (religio). • If worship is sacramental, its implications informs work, where it too becomes sacramental, which then creates moral and spiritual dynamics to renew work’s role toward the common good and spiritual development.

24. “God created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I never may know it fully in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow, I am necessary to His purposes…I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He had not created me for naught” (John Henry Newman).

25. Leisure Other Entertainment/Amusement Play/Sports/Exercise Music/Art/Theater Education Family/Friends Contemplation Worship

26. Habit of Celebration • What is needed is “not just any kind of interruption of work, but the celebration of the marvels which God has wrought.” • “When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes merely part of a ‘weekend’, it can happen that people stay locked within a horizon so limited that they can no longer see ‘the heavens’. Hence, though ready to celebrate, they are really incapable of doing so.”

27. Habit of Service • The Eucharist is an event and programme of true brotherhood. From the Sunday Mass there flows a tide of charity destined to spread into the whole life of the faithful, beginning by inspiring the very way in which they live the rest of Sunday. If Sunday is a day of joy, Christians should declare by their actual behaviour that we cannot be happy "on our own". They look around to find people who may need their help. It may be that in their neighbourhood or among those they know there are sick people, elderly people, children or immigrants who precisely on Sundays feel more keenly their isolation, needs and suffering. It is true that commitment to these people cannot be restricted to occasional Sunday gestures. But presuming a wider sense of commitment, why not make the Lord's Day a more intense time of sharing, encouraging all the inventiveness of which Christian charity is capable? Inviting to a meal people who are alone, visiting the sick, providing food for needy families, spending a few hours in voluntary work and acts of solidarity: these would certainly be ways of bringing into people's lives the love of Christ received at the Eucharistic table.

28. Our Calling in Weakness • “Consider your own calling, brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God” (1Cor. 1: 26-29).

29. Criss-Crossing the Matrix MacIntyre explains that people “in the West, tend to live betwixt and between, accepting usually unquestioningly the assumptions of the dominant liberal individualist forms of public life, but drawing in different areas of their lives upon a variety of tradition-generated resources of thought and action, transmitted from a variety of familial, religious, educational, and other social and cultural sources. This type of self which has too many half-convictions and too few settled coherent convictions, too many partly formulated alternatives and too few opportunities to evaluate them systematically, brings to its encounters with the claims of rival traditions a fundamental incoherence which is too disturbing to be admitted to self-conscious awareness except on the rarest of occasions” (Whose Justice 397-8).

30. The Splitting of Humanity(Time Magazine August 20, 1945) The greatest and most terrible of wars ended this week, in the echoes of an enormous event—an event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance. . . . With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split—and far from controlled.... [T]he first atomic bomb was a merely pregnant threat, a merely infinitesimal promise. All thoughts and things were split.... The race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race....In an instant, without warning, the present had become the unthinkable future. Was there hope in that future, and if so, where did hope lie?....

31. Time Magazine August 20, 1945 The promise of good and of evil bordered alike on the infinite—with this further, terrible split in the fact: that upon a people already so nearly drowned in materialism even in peacetime, the good uses of this power might easily bring disaster as prodigious as the evil. . . . When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally and above all else responsible for his own soul, and in the terrible words of the Psalmist, that no man may deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him. Man's fate has forever been shaped between the hands of reason and spirit, now in collaboration, again in conflict. Now reason and spirit meet on final ground. If either or anything is to survive, they must find a way to create an indissoluble partnership.

32. Michael Naughton John A. Ryan Institute for Catholic Social ThoughtCenter for Catholic StudiesUniversity of St. Thomas651-962-5712mjnaughton@stthomas.edu