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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 5, 2004
Labour Day
A wonderful old Presbyterian man -- an organist like my Cape Breton aunt and a lay-sermonizer in poetical pamphlets; a gentleman named Hugh McKellar -- once told me something his mother said about Labour Day: "That's the day we work especially hard and efficiently to show how much better we've become at working since the last Labour Day." I'm not a Calvinist myself in fact we have theological "issues" but I love them to bits and the reader should know from the mention of my late aunt that I came from a long line of them on my mother's side. The best kind: Scotch Calvinists. Clan Graham. (And no not "Graham of Montrose".) If there is one thing they have given the world -- and they gave it America and literacy and the better half of modern medicine and engineering the Indian railway malt whisky and lovely droll backboned lines like the one I cited above -- it is the love of work. Work not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. And I don't mean the willingness to work but the true obsession vocation and avocation. They also gave us unions or at least the unions in Canada which paradoxically undermined everything they had achieved. For the original idea of a union was a celebration of work whereas it degenerated into the organized avoidance of it. "Work is what makes a man a man another Presbyterian once told me. And I reflected that this was a challenge to the Greeks, and to the whole ancient world. Work was a curse to them, and no gentleman ever worked with his hands. Craftsmen were near the bottom of the social totem, in Hellas as among the other ancients, and many were enslaved. The life of leisure, the examined life" was what had value to Plato and to them; and the same sentiment -- "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground" -- echoes among the ancient Hebrews and the later Romans. Though the Romans really were more like Scots. "By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread / till you return to the soil / for from there you were taken / for dust you are / and to dust shall you return." (Robert Alter's splendid translation.) It was a Catholic who taught me -- or rather set the example I have yet to learn -- the real nature of working. I watched him cleaning out an especially filthy toilet bowl. Now I'd have been happy to "sign a cheque" to get someone else to do that but this young man a student of law volunteered for the task. Or rather didn't volunteer but just went at it -- upon seeing the filth -- in a joyous fury all scrubbing and hardly any soap and he wouldn't stop till that toilet shined like the day it came out of the factory. He did it for God and for his own enfeebled father and from the pleasure in being alive in being male and potent. To have a craft is to be called to a place within the order of nature. To have a skill and to be able. To work hand and eye mind and muscle. To have a task. This is what raises a man above slavery a woman above mere professional status. It does not matter what you are paid so long as you have enough to get by. You are free when what you do becomes what you are in work and prayer: "Thence comes it that my name receives a brand / And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in like the dyer's hand". Subdued: to a task among men in free service and not to the service of another man. Work is in the heart of our freedom. It is what makes the housewife the truly free woman. Her irreplaceable task the food she brings to table the children she raises in the fear of God. It is what makes the janitor a citizen: not his being paid but the work of his hands in the heat of the day. The pride in his work the shine on the floor he has polished the fine order of his estate all "ship-shape and Bristol-fashion". We live to work and in work is our freedom. That is the meaning of Labour Day. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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