In this year of Jubilee, the month of May is dedicated to workers. The naming of May and its claiming for workers has a long and rousing history.
May Day was a longstanding feast associated with spring and the coming of summer. In European villages many local dances and customs with unbroken links to pre-Christian religions can still be found. In the Catholic calendar the First of May became a Marian feast during the 18th century. Unsurprisingly, Jesuit teachers concerned for the faith of their students in a licentious world were involved in its promotion.
Later, the English Jesuit poet Gerald Manley Hopkins, one of whose most dedicated promotors is Australian Mercy Sister Ursula Gilbert, wrote a poem beginning:
May is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why.
Hopkins wrote in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and the social unrest associated with it. At a time when it was common for poorly paid industrial workers to work for 10 hours a day for six days of the week, workers’ representatives adopted the day to focus their demand for an eight-hour working day.
ALTERNATIVE CATHOLIC CELEBRATION
In an 1866 strike in Chicago several police and workers were killed, and public opinion turned against the workers. The day became associated with conflict. It became increasingly sponsored by and identified with the Communist Party. In response, Pope Pius XII dedicated the day to St Joseph the Worker as the focus of an alternative Catholic celebration.
The story of the day suggests that in the conflict between employers and workers, the vision of work was often narrowly focused on wages and conditions and political change. It was easy to lose sight of the place of work in a good human life, and of what makes work truly human. Those questions are important today when work is often seen only as an outdated activity waiting to be taken over by machines.
The Offertory of the Mass reminds us of these larger questions. The celebrant prays on behalf of the congregation when offering the bread and wine as the ‘fruit of the earth and work of human hands’. The prayer reminds us of the part that we human beings play in giving shape to our world. It also reminds us that our hands are never empty when we come to God. We return to God the things and people that we have shaped by our love and work, and we receive them back as a gift that is transformed.
NEW UNDERSTANDINGS
One fascination of words is the way in which feelings associated with them change. Words once precious become suspect, while other suspect words become welcome. That is the case with ‘the work of human hands’. In much of the Old Testament the phrase was dismissive. It was used to contrast the real God who is not of our making with the statues and other images that pagans considered to be Gods. These idols were ‘the work of human hands’. God, who is beyond our world and our manipulation, could never be confined in such crude things.
The change in the feel of ‘the work of human hands’ from suspicion to welcome and so to inclusion in the Mass points to a constant tension in the way in which we as Christians relate to our world.
On the one hand, we acknowledge and fall in love with the beauty of the world around us and take delight in our ways of echoing it in art and of working it. On the other hand, we recognise that in our love for the world we have not found God, but that God has found us, embraces us, and draws us to delight in the God on whom all depends, a God who is always more than we can understand.
Ideally these two visions of our world feed into one another. Our wonder at our world and its mystery will lead us more deeply into the mystery of the God who lies beyond it but who has entered our world in Christ, and invites us to explore with him its beauty, to share its pain, and to long for its transformation.
These different views of our world are often presented as opposites between which we must choose. Some people believe that we must accept the self-sufficiency of the world of our experience and do away with any reference to God. Others believe that we must focus exclusively on the mystery of God as revealed in Christ. The beauty and urgency of our world are a distraction.
THE WORLD IN OUR HANDS
The reference in the Eucharist to the work of human hands reminds us that God has placed the world in our hands to respect, to develop and to celebrate. We should accept it gratefully as a gift and offer back to God what we have made of it through the work of our hands, our hearts and our minds. In return God offers us association with Christ in a transformed world. In it nothing valuable and respectful in our work will be lost.
If our work is both God’s gift to us and our gift to God, it is something to be treasured as an essential part of our humanity. The relationships involved in our work should also be respectful in seeing workers as human beings and not as inferior machines. They should also encourage our participation and ownership of our world through shared responsibility.
