Why Work?
The meaning of man's work is the satisfaction of the instinct for adventure that God has implanted in his heart.
— Paul Tournier
"There are people," says Paul Tournier, "who go on indefinitely preparing for life instead of living it." In his book The Adventure of Living,1 this eminent Swiss physician and psychiatrist takes a penetrating look at, "the meaning of work." The charm of being an amateur, which Tournier hopes all his life to be, lies in the love that goes into it. It is work done not for gain but for love.
Disenchantment with work is not a new phenomenon. At the turn of the century Arnold Bennett concluded that in the majority of instances a person does not precisely feel a passion for business, and at best he or she does not like
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it. A person begins business functions with some reluctance, as late as possible, and ends them with joy as early as possible. And that employee's engines, while engaged in business, according to Bennett, are seldom at their full "h.p."2
Dr. Tournier finds that most people in our day do not love their work. The resulting serious dissatisfaction with life can lead to many ordinary illnesses. Extraneous pleasures, though numerous, are rarely sufficient to make up for real love of one's work. "To help a worker discover a fresh attraction in his daily work," says the author, "is to help him live a fuller and very often a healthier life."3
But the problem of one's attitude toward work may yield to a more direct approach. Bruce Larson faces the issue squarely: "If you are miserable or bored in your work... or dread going to it... then God is speaking to you. He either wants you to change the job you are in — or — more likely — He wants to change you."4
Behavioral scientists, as will be seen in greater detail later, are making serious inroads on the traditional managerial concepts of organization which will have long-term effects on the jobs people hold. But perhaps Tournier says it better than they, holding that in the organization of work, fruitful reform might well take the idea of the importance of the person as a starting point. "When a worker believes that he is looked upon merely as a tool of production, he feels he is becoming just a thing. When he feels that an interest is taken in him as a person, in his personal life, in the adventure of his life, that what is expected of him is not just a mechanical gesture but a personal understanding of his work, intelligence, initiative and lively imagination, as well as a sense of being one of a team engaged in a common adventure, he takes cognizance of himself as a person, engaged in a personal adventure."5
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The author goes on to describe what might happen if the leaders of industry seriously sought to share with their workers their overall view of the adventure in which they are engaged. Instead the workers are generally left with the most logical alternative — a concept of their work as an economic necessity, a means of earning a living. Individual workers, however well-intentioned they may be as they attempt to do their best at their work, may well lose the feeling that their work has any true significance. Without the overall picture and a sense of direction in a unified effort, their work will lapse into routine. Leaders somehow fail to realize how much normal workers can grasp of the big picture, and how much they need to know for a basic sense of contribution and fulfillment.
Dr. Tournier views the questioning young person today with sympathy. When he asks why it is necessary to work, it is not enough, the author says, to answer, "Because it is your duty." "More human than their parents," says Dr. Tournier, "are those who today are no longer content to live without thinking, to do everything unintelligently like everyone else without knowing why."
Nor is the answer to deify work — to say, as some have concluded, "My work is my life," without understanding its true significance. A person's true value will not be restored by deifying or denigrating work, but by helping that person rediscover work's true human significance.
Dorothy Sayers points to work as a "way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God."6 It is a creative activity that should be undertaken for the love of work itself. "Man, made in God's image," continues Sayers, "should make things as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing." It is evident that this standard applies to the work that Christians
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do, whatever their calling or vocation. "Work," she concludes, "is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do." It is, or should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which the employee finds spiritual, mental, social and bodily satisfaction. It is the medium in which we offer ourselves to God.
The consequences of this conclusion, Sayers readily admits, are somewhat revolutionary:
1. Effort expended must find its true reward not in pay but merely in sufficient return to enable the worker to carry on the work properly, for a person's work is the measure of his or her life. Satisfaction comes in the fulfillment of an employee's own nature and in contemplation of the perfection of work. Witness the loving labor happily put into hobbies, in which the worker no longer bargains with the work, but serves it.
2. Everyone should do the work for which he or she is fitted by nature. Economic pressure leads an unwitting society to ridicule the employee who foregoes a high-paying job for work for which he or she feels better suited. Imagine a purely vocational approach to the business of fitting together the worker and the work. Ed Janis was telling a Dale Carnegie class about one of the most satisfying experiences of his life. He had a well-paying sales job with a nationally known firm. Pressure for increased sales at work began to make a difference at home. Life had somehow become tense. One day Ed decided that it was one thing for him to pay the price of climbing the ladder to success (whatever that was) — but it was another for his family to do so. He found a job that paid less and also put him under less pressure. His
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prospective boss said, "You'll not make as much money with us, Ed, but I believe you will be happy here. We're easy to live with." Ed now views his decision to take the new job as one of the most important and one of the best of his life.
3. We should no longer think of work as something we hasten to finish in order to enjoy our leisure; leisure rather becomes the period of changed rhythm that refreshes us for the delightful purpose of getting on with our work.. Thus no regulations would be tolerated which prevented us from working as long or as well as our enjoyment of work demanded. Such restrictions would be resented as a monstrous interference with our liberty. (Sayers leaves to our conjecture the great upheaval of ideas this view could cause in relation to hours of work and rates of pay!) The fight thus would be not for precious hours saved from the job — but rather for precious time to get on with the job!
4. We should fight tooth and nail not for mere employment, but for the quality of the work we have to do. We should clamor to be engaged in work that is worth doing and in which we can take pride.
The first of the foregoing propositions concerns workers as such; the second concerns Christians and leads to the firm conclusion that secular vocations are sacred and that time spent working is time spent serving God. The worker must be able to serve God in his or her work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation. This is an important concept for Christians to bear in mind, not only respecting their own vocations, but those of their friends and associates. This concept could make a great difference in the way a Christian
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executive approached an interview with a prospective employee currently employed in a secular business.
Thus it is clear that in speaking of a Christian view of the management of time, we speak in reality not only of management of ourselves, but we speak also of managing our efforts and endeavors in whatever vocation we find ourselves as Christians.
Lest the reader conclude that this view of work is fine if you happen to be a Christian, but that in industry the position would necessarily be opposed, listen to J. D. Batten, of Batten and Associates, who has written extensively in the field of management and conducted many management seminars in this country and abroad. Under sponsorship of the American Management Association he writes:
Life without productive work directed toward some purpose is meaningless, sterile and messy.... The story has often been told how Wernher von Braun, the great rocket scientist, once flunked a course in mathematics. At that time, he had no particular objective but to finish school, but eventually he began to read about rockets and space, decided this would be his field, and learned how necessary mathematics would be. He then proceeded to take all the mathematics he could in order to reach his target. In the end, he discovered a real zest and pleasure in tackling the roughest problems.
It is imperative that we cease to regard work as a means to an end — a chore to be disposed of so we can enjoy ourselves. Productive, results-oriented work should be viewed in its proper perspective as an integrated, essential and pleasant part of living.
Time after time, men who have reached or are approaching retirement express keen regret at having wasted many productive years in dreams of ease and leisure. They realize belatedly that the opportunity to live richly and fully — to experience the pleasures that can come only with accomplishment — has passed them by.7
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Again, Ruth Anshen, in introducing the Credo Series The Challenge of the Passing Years — My Encounter with Time, declared the hope of the series "to demonstrate the sacramental character of work." No work, she concluded, "can be based on material, technological or physical aspirations alone."
So we return to the question "Why work?" The Christian executive who works and supervises others must have an answer. The answer to this question should be his philosophy of work. To have such philosophy is important to every Christian, whether manager or worker; whether husband or wife. After all, why work? If the average person in a fifty-year work span spends 100,000 hours working, is it asking too much that he or she know why?
Chapter Two || Table of Contents
REFERENCES:
1. Tournier, Paul, The Adventure of Living, Harper and Row, New York, 1965.
2. Bennett, Arnold, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, George H. Doran Company, New York, 1910.
3. Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
4. Larson, Bruce, Dare to Live Now!, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, 1965
5. Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
6. Sayers, Dorothy L., Creed or Chaos?, Methuen and Company, Ltd., London, 1954.
7. Batten J.D., Tough-Minded Management, American Management Association, New York, 1963.
