Whatever You Do, Do It Well

I have taken a large excerpt from Dorothy Sayers essay, “Why Work?”  This essay was written after World War II and was addressing a specific worldview that individuals held at the time. I do not believe that all of what she says still holds true today.  For example, when she writes “In nothing has the Church so lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation.”  I do not believe this to still be the case.  However, I love much of what she says here and I didn’t want to tear the essay apart in order to pick and choose what fits and what doesn’t.  The point is that our secular work may also be sacred and we need to see it as such.  We need to recognize that we serve the Lord within our work and whatever we do, whether it is carpentry or homemaking, we need to do it well and do it to the glory of God. 

[W]ork is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God. . . . [We need] to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people. . .must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work. . . . It is not right [to accept] the notion that a man’s life is divided into the time he spends on his work and the time he spends in serving God. He must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected

as the medium of divine creation.

In nothing has the Church so lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand

and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become

separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as result, the secular work of the

world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the

world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in

religion.

But is it astonishing? How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems

to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The Church’s approach to an

intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and

disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church

should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon

him is that he should make good tables.

Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly–but what use is all

that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad

carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of

the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they

were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth. No piety in the worker

will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its

own technique is a living lie.

Yet in Her own buildings, in Her own ecclesiastical art and music, in Her hymns and

prayers, in Her sermons and in Her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate

or permit a pious intention to excuse so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling,

so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent draftsman.

And why? Simply because She has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal

truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the

standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred.

Forgotten that a building must be good architecture before it can be a good church;

that a painting must be well painted before it can be a good sacred picture; that work

must be good work before it can call itself God’s work.

Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in

his profession or trade–not outside it. The Apostles complained rightly when they

said it was not meet they should leave the word of God and serve tables; their

vocation was to preach the word. Bu the person whose vocation it is to prepare the

meals beautifully might with equal justice protest: It is not meet for us to leave the

service of our tables to preach the word. . . . The only Christian work

is good work well done. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people

and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it

is church embroidery, or sewage farming. As Jacques Maritain says: “If you want to

produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which

you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose.”