Perhaps the most important recent contribution to the spirituality (and theology) of work has been an encyclical of the late John Paul II, entitled Laborem Exercens (On Human Work).

The encyclical in fact single-handedly shifted the traditional Catholic understanding of work from being basically punishment or only something humans have to do, to an understanding in which humans discover their dignity, and collaborate with God as co-creators in the continuing enterprise of creation.

The first sentence of the encyclical introduced a new perception of human life and nature. “Through work man (sic) must earn his daily bread and contribute to continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family.”

You’re as far here as you can get from work as something we are condemned to. It is work that distinguishes human beings from the rest of creation. Animals don’t work. Only humans freely engage themselves in work, following the devices not of their instincts but of their mind. By their daily work, they build up human life, and reveal their very special dignity.

Where does John Paul II get the fundamentals for his vision of work? From the Book of Genesis.  God in Genesis is a worker who fashions the world with his own hands like a potter. He is not ashamed to work with his hands.

He takes the slime of the earth and forms a figure out of it, breathes into it, and it becomes a living soul. He continues by performing all the different “works” of creation. His work, like any human work, is said to be arduous, like the vinedresser who digs the soil, throws away the stones and plants a vine.

The human being, created in God’s image, is put at the center of the earth, to work the earth, transform his habitation, explore the universe, and put it to human use.

The starting point and basic point of continuing reference for any spirituality of work is thus the doctrine of creation.  It is within creation as continuing or ongoing that we must understand the spiritual (and theological) meaning of work.

In its context, Genesis speaks of the agricultural worker, the gardener, and the farmer. These are privileged forms of work (verified in Israel up to this day).

But “work” in the thought of John Paul II also means any human activity, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances, that can be recognised as work.

John Paul spends no time refining a definition of work that meets all objections while taking in all positive factors - an impossible undertaking.

Work is anything that can be recognised as work. It’s agricultural, clerical, scientific, service-oriented, and intellectual. It includes homemaking in the family, service offered to society at all levels, as well as governmental and managerial skills.  

For John Paul, it’s all co-creation. Catholic theology has always considered that creation was not totally corrupted by sin, but retained a foundational goodness.

In the language of principle, this foundational goodness means that grace builds on nature, not, however, like a two-storied building, but in the sense of grace as deeply operative through nature.

Thus, grace does not descend extrinsically upon creation, but comes from the very source of creation, deeper than creation itself, healing its woundedness, and intensifying its co-creativity with the Creator.

Three important implications follow from human participation in God’s creative work. First, it means that creation is development and process. It is not something over and done with. Creation is always a work in process, something fundamentally unfinished.

Secondly, human consciousness is a part of the process. The process, in other words, is not blindly evolutionary. Thirdly, because work shares in God’s creative purpose, it’s all religious, whether we are conscious of the fact or not.

The meaning of work can be obscured by disfiguring structures, and we must therefore also distinguish between work as either authentic or degrading.

Three ethical criteria have been proposed for determining authenticity in human work: the ecological, the human, and the divine.
These criteria are all interrelated.

First, the ecological. Just as contemporary work tends to treat workers as objects to be exploited or managed, so too it treats the earth as an object to be plundered. The end result, as we know, is ecological crisis. Work becomes degrading when it treats the earth as something to be used with no respect for its regenerative cycles or its religious meaning.

Authentic work cooperates with nature as with a partner in the creative process. Authentic work learns from nature, does not abuse nature, and treats nature as a dimension of the sacred.

Nature also follows a rhythm of renewal which is cyclical. Modern work, on the other hand, is structured along a linear model of efficiency. The linear drive means work without rhythm, without rest or play, which makes life seem so much like a rat race.

An important dimension of nature’s rhythm turns is the phenomenon of waste. Work associated with waste tends to be held in low esteem. Yet this is an authentic task where a special dimension of God is revealed, namely the dimension of the circle in which life appears to die, yet provides the seeds of its renewal.

The apparent waste of life is a sacred moment of life itself.  Waste is the natural cross of the universe, leading to a natural resurrection of life.