Why We Work: The Deepest Desire of Every Human Heart Is to Be Known and Loved

Contractor or full-time? The Christian purpose of working for a living

Detroit invented “the good job,” workers earning good money spending decades at one steady job. Critics labeled them “wage slaves.”

In December 1913, Henry Ford invented the Detroit-style assembly line. Instead of spending 12 hours producing one car, “the line” allowed workers to make a Model T in 93 minutes. Turnover soared.

So, Ford doubling wages to an unprecedented $5 per day. Applicants came to Michigan from all over — staying for decades. Simultaneously, corporations and governments around the globe grew, creating a giant middle class.

A growing number of theologians, economists, and academics say materialism, communism, and socialism each turned workers into “cogs” in giant economic engines, forgetting the theological and psychological purpose of work.

“The deepest desire of every human heart is to be known and to be loved,” Father Joe Campbell said in a Feast of St. Joseph the Worker homily Saturday. “This desire reaches its fullness in the desire to be known by God Himself.”

Campbell, the parochial vicar at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Brighton, Michigan, says earthly material desires, as well as ideologies and false idols, distract us from our deeper spiritual needs for love, truth, and purpose.

That’s a great change from craftsmen like St. Joseph the carpenter, who believed they used their God-given talents to create new gifts, to build things and services helping others.

The 2020 pandemic that shut down the global economy may have accelerated the return of greater numbers of independent contractors “going to market” competing with each other selling products and services.

The idea of a “job relationship” lasting for decades now seems rare in the ever-changing business sector. Our work culture is now filled with anxious questions, including:

• An uncertain economy. Governments shutting down economies to ease the global pandemic shifted millions from work to ever-changing government benefits.
• Uncertain government support. In Michigan over the past year, unemployed workers collected state benefits of $362 per week. New federal benefits shifted from as low as zero to $600 and multiple points in between. The latest round lasts through summer 2021.
• Uncertain employment prospects. Lockdowns simultaneously created labor and material shortages in some areas and cutbacks in others.
• Uncertainty about the value of money. Economists and business analysts say massive government expenditures and shortages have sent prices of everything from food to used cars to lumber soaring to invite inflationary higher prices, reducing the value of currency and investments.

The trouble with ideology? False idols fail to satisfy spiritual needs

For the past three decades, the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society has taught students Christian social doctrine on work and labor developed by every pope from Leo XIII to Pope Francis.

Committing your work to the Lord establishes plans for us, we learn in Proverbs 16:3. The New Testament adds, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians, 3–23, ESV).

Christian Larson argued: “We are here to become great men and women, and with that purpose in view, we must eliminate everything in our religion and philosophy that tends to make the human mind a dependent weakling. If you would serve God and be truly religious, do not kneel before God, but learn to walk with God, and do something tangible every day.’’

Heaven on earth? Pope Francis warns about “the cult of unlimited human power, the rise of a relativism which sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s own immediate interests.”

The seminar grew out of Centesimus Annus, St. John Paul the Great’s landmark encyclical on economics. The problem with all ideologies, including socialism, capitalism, and socialism, John Paul argued, is they fail to address the cultural need for meaning.

Making workers mere cogs in a giant economic machine or molecules of society, he said, obscures moral decisions, “the very subject whose decisions build the social order.”

Deleting references to God, morality, love, and truth, John Paul said, creates “an autonomous existence and value to morality, law, culture, and religion, it agrees with Marxism, in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs.”

Ignoring God and the notion that humanity has “a transcendent destiny” reduces opportunities to the level of the “subjectivity of society.” Materialism reduces the focus on trying to understand the purpose of life, he added.

John Paul warned that “a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”

His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, also warned about the dangers of a society dominated by merely government and business: “The exclusively binary model of market-plus-State is corrosive of society, while economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society.”

Just a year after the term “workaholic” originated, Josef Pieper released his 1948 classic, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. He argued the purpose of work was to do something with our lives, allowing leisure time where we could grow closer to God.

Pieper argued we work to enjoy our times of leisure, that a greater spiritual focus on God made working the “basis of culture.’’ Both capitalism and communism told people to focus on work (to make money, pay bills), but they forgot to tell us why we need to work.

“Workaholics can lose their sense of culture, their roots, and their purpose,” Pieper warned.

And yet, one excellent shared meal offers: “a spiritual or even a religious character… the heart of leisure consists in ‘festival’… celebration and festival are the heart of leisure… If someone needs the ‘unusual’ to be moved to astonishment, that person has lost the ability to respond rightly to the wondrous, the mirandum, of being.’’