Keeping Us Connected Newsletter

April 28, 2023

In the beginning God said….and so it happened. –Genesis 1

Dear Saint Mary Friends,

Monday, May 1 is the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. We all know the 1^st biblical words of God about us: Let us make man in our own image…male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27). We believe God brought us into this world to know him on earth and to prepare us for eternal joy with him in heaven. That revelation comes after seeing God work for the five previous days. He’s the Creator-Worker, and one aspect of our being created in the Image of God is that we would serve him and others through our own work. Some call our work “Sub-Creation.”

Before the Fall of Adam and Eve, the work of caring for the Garden wasn’t a burden, but after the Fall it became a different story. After first addressing the serpent and then Eve, the Lord says to Adam, By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, from which you were taken… (Genesis 3:17). And even though human work is no longer without hardship, fatigue and a mix of success and failure, it is still a way by which we live the image of God.

Now jump forward from Eden to Russia, November 1917 and the Communist Revolution. This was to be the great workers’ revolt, the workers’ utopian paradise. We know how poorly that deception turned out. The overseers of this great workers’ paradise even created their own feast day, May 1^st, dubbed “May Day," and to this day, many countries – especially the most secularized – celebrate it.

In response, the Catholic Church, under two different popes, added two feasts to the church year: In 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted the Solemnity of Christ the King as a powerful reminder that God, not any state, is sovereign over our lives; in 1955 Pope Pius XII instituted the Solemnity of St. Joseph the Worker.

The date for the former varies according to the date of Easter, but Joseph the Worker is May 1. This man of whom the Bible records no word, who appears only in the Gospel’s first verses, this man of action, work and support for family and his town, is lifted up as the true example of working in God’s image.

Here, then, are two opposing ideas: work revealed by God as a means of being in his image, and work as a government’s incomplete understanding of society and individual life.

Much is written about Joseph, us and work. We know this side of heaven, work can be both a fulfillment and a redeeming hardship, but for the short space of this Newsletter, let’s hear from the great encyclical Laborens Exercens by Pope St. John Paul II: ‘the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person’ (# 6).

This applies whether we work with our hands, at a desk, provide fast food, manage hedge funds, or at two of my early jobs as a toll collector and janitor.

The Catechism says, Human work proceeds directly from persons created in the image of God…called to prolong the work of creation…both with and for one another. Work is a duty: Work honors the Creator's gifts and the talents received from him. It can also be redemptive. By enduring the hardship of work in union with Jesus, the carpenter, the one crucified on Calvary, man collaborates in a certain fashion with the Son of God in his redemptive work. He shows himself to be a disciple of Christ by carrying the cross daily in the work he is called to accomplish. Work can be a means of sanctification. (2427)

Above all, Joseph’s faith, holiness and vocation as spouse and father govern his work. He is a craftsman in the image of his foster son, and the Creator of all things. It’s our image, too.

Blessings,