The second criterion for evaluating the authenticity of work is the degree of conscious participation in its process.

To the degree that workers are treated only as objects to be managed, or organised, or exploited as a resource, both their dignity and their work are disfigured.

On the other hand, to the extent that workers are drawn into conscious participation, the work process becomes authentic.

The third criterion for authentic work is that workers regard what they do as spiritual in a deliberate, self-conscious way, until it becomes their natural way of looking and feeling.

Inauthentic work alienates workers, as Marx compellingly showed, from what they produce, from others, and from their real selves. Marx referred to work at the dawn of the industrialised era.

Alienation meant the worker's boredom and the feeling of powerlessness as a cog in a vast machine - a machine built with his own hands, which then confronted him as oppressor.

We need to look at the picture of alienation relevant to the move from factory to office. What form does alienation take in an era of increasing education and professional labour? 

Alienation translates today into a lack of job satisfaction, or the limited amount of control workers exercise over the conditions under which they work; or the division of work today into narrower and narrower specialties.

Workers often repress their critical and creative feelings and surrender their dignity in work. They treat their job as something foreign to their real interests, or tell themselves that they work for reasons extrinsic to work itself.

For example, if I have no creative voice in my work, I can make up for it by purchasing designer clothes or the latest technological gadget. I work then not for reasons intrinsic to work itself, but to get money for the things I can buy, as compensation for my alienation. Yet the very compensation I seek only deepens my alienation.

The rat race

Another important way in which modern culture destroys life is by making people work excessively not only in their jobs but in their consuming. We call this the rat race.

It means that we have little time for any real enjoyment of life. We are always busy and on the move, consumed by our work and our commodities. There's little time to allow marriages to grow, to nurture children, to care for others, and to build up our local communities. Everything is subordinate to work, yet so very little of life around us is renewed.

Excessive work also means that we live without a cycle of work and rest, or creation and recreation. Work becomes just another form for slavery. God gave us the commandment of the Sabbath, because without rest the creative project turns destructive.

The earth itself needs to rest, to lie fallow, otherwise its fruitfulness will be lost. The social community needs to rest and play, otherwise we become violent. We need to rest in God in prayer, in order not to lose contact with the mysterious sources of our own selfhood.

Rest is thus essential to the purposes of work, socially, ecologically, and spiritually. It keeps nature fruitful, prevents humans from becoming robots, and it allows us to tap into the wells of creativity.

The unemployed

Again, while some work too much, others are not allowed to work at all. We refer to them as the unemployed. They are human beings whose creativity is denied. They live routinely with boredom. It's the other side of the rat race.

It is because of the meaning and significance of work that unemployment represents a fundamental assault on human dignity. It dies the image of God the creator in some people. It provides them with no place to exercise their co-creativity with nature, with other human beings, and with God.

The modern ideology of work also militates against human communion. We see the effects every day in the weakening and decline of family life, or neighbourhoods, and communal life.

The ecological degradation around us has become clearer in recent years. The priority of nature became the subjugation of nature. We have watched the poisoning of rivers and streams from industrial and agricultural pollutants.

We worry about additives and preservatives in the food we eat. We seem to be running the risk of ecological suicide through the slow contamination of the subsystems of air, earth, and water. This fear of destruction comes not from nature itself but form what modern work does to nature.

Ecologically destructive work is profoundly anti-spiritual. It denies the religious meaning of the earth, treating it instead as a dead object open to plunder.

The attack on ecological dignity is ultimately an attack on the Creator, the source of that dignity. The ecological degradation of work implicitly tries to eliminate the image of God in creation.

Work needs to be reclaimed in all its dimensions, as fulfillment for the worker, as the workbench, to use the Pope John Paul's expression, of human ingenuity and creativity, and as facilitative of human community.

Work especially needs to be regarded as a fundamental dimension of our dignity as creatures. Through and in our work we co-create with God, that is, we contribute to the ongoing challenge of turning creation itself into a fitting environment for human habitation.