Digital Edition
Work, play, rest
Oct
Are we made to work?
Work, rest, and play each have a place in our lives.
The nature of work is changing. Between the impact of the pandemic and technology, we find ourselves at a crossroads regarding the nature of work in society. What is work? What is its proper place within our social and economic vision?
In the 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (On the Reconstruction of the Social Order), Pope Pius XI urges that we should strive for a more equitable economic system in which there is “ample sufficiency among the workers.” He notes that workers should not “be remiss in work, for man is born to labor as the bird to fly.”
Reflecting on this passage at the Catholic Theological Society of America, David Cloutier argued against viewing work through consumerism, lest we become like the humans in the Pixar movie WALL-E. Good work is important for the human person and the common good. Our goal, he argued, should be a worker’s paradise “where the primary abundance is not more and more things, but more and more genuinely rewarding work for all.”
The analogy to birds captivated my imagination. While labor and work are not quite the same thing, Catholic social teaching often uses them somewhat interchangeably, in part because Catholic theology embraces a vision of human work that includes unwaged human labor. As I walked down a boardwalk, watching the shorebirds in flight, I found myself coming back to the analogy that labor is to the human person as flight is to birds.
Can birds help us embrace a vision of labor that reclaims the dignity of work and of workers? For migratory shorebirds, flight is a key component of their survival. It is how they labor. Their wings are adapted for migration as well as swimming and hunting on ocean shores. But as I watched, seagulls and terns did not simply fly as work—they played. It is mesmerizing to watch a group of terns windsurfing and playing tag. When a storm rolls in, the birds cannot fly at all without extreme danger. Hurricanes are particularly precarious, as birds can be tricked by the eye of the storm, unaware that the danger has not passed. Flight is always in relationship to the wind.