Labor and Labor Day

It is Labor Day Monday, a paid time off holiday for some.  Technically I have today off, but since I am teaching online classes, if I wanted, I could take every Monday off.  I'm also a student, so my Monday class doesn't meet tonight--but I did have a written assignment due, which I've turned in.

I've spent this Labor Day week-end in Williamsburg, Virginia with my parents.  It's been a delightful time.  I will head back this morning in hopes of avoiding the worst of Labor Day traffic.  Once back at my seminary apartment, I'll work on an assignment due in my Foundations of Preaching class tomorrow and do some grading.

Many of us think about Labor Day as the end of summer, and I'm old enough to remember when college classes started the Tuesday after Labor Day.  My mom does too; she said in her generation it was because college students had jobs at country clubs that would close after Labor Day.  In terms of weather, I've always lived in places where summer will stretch on through September and perhaps beyond.

It's interesting to think about Labor Day in this time of "quiet quitting" and people restructuring their working lives.  Will we see this time period as one that changed labor relations forever?  Or will we see the forces of capitalism and empire crack down and break the momentum of workers?

Even though many of us will see today as simply a day off, it's a good day to think about work, both the kind we do for pay and the kind we do out of love. And what about the work we feel compelled to do? I'm thinking of that kind of documenting of family history, of cultural history, of all that might be lost without our efforts.  I'm thinking of our creative work.  There's so many more different kinds of work than just work for pay.

I'm thinking about our attitude towards work too.  I am glad to see that this article, published in 2016, about the theology of work is still online.  Here's my favorite quote from it, with ideas informed by Christian monasticism:  "Taking Benedict’s approach would force us to reconsider how we think about our work. Instead of, 'What work am I called to?' we might ask, 'How does the task before me contribute to or hinder my progress toward holiness?; Not 'How does this work cooperate with material creation?' but 'How does this work contribute to the life of the community and to others’ material and spiritual well-being?' Not 'Am I doing what I love?' but 'What activity is so important that I should, without exception, drop my work in order to do it?'”

And here's a Buddhist thought about work for your Labor Day, found in an interview with Bill Moyers and Jane Hirshfield who explains, "Teahouse practice means that you don't explicitly talk about Zen. It refers to leading your life as if you were an old woman who has a teahouse by the side of the road. Nobody knows why they like to go there, they just feel good drinking her tea. She's not known as a Buddhist teacher, she doesn't say, "This is the Zen teahouse." All she does is simply serve tea--but still, her decades of attentiveness are part of the way she does it. No one knows about her faithful attention to the practice, it's just there, in the serving of the tea, and the way she cleans the counters and washes the cups" (Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft, page 112).