Labor Day: Ora Et Labora

Ora et Labora: Pray and Labor – a central pillar of the Benedictine movement.

It’s corollary – Laborare est Orare, or To Work is to Pray – is also succinctly descriptive of the idea that working is a deeply personal way to become at one with the Almighty.

It also meant that labor – like prayer – is a humbling act which is all well and good if it had not also arose from the concept that labor is not a respectable act, not something done by someone who could do something – anything – else and that troublesome thread that has run through Western history.

Then, people either labored, prayed, or fought.

What started as a way to delineate social betters – the rule of the lords and vassals over the serfs – continues to this day and while Mike Rowe and his “Dirty Jobs” show tried to rectify this a bit the idea is too ingrained in the culture to truly be dislodged.

Because labor is so improperly viewed as demeaning, we now have professional everythings with odd job titles given to actual workers by their bosses in an effort to not call them “workers” because they – the bosses, not the workers – see it as an insult. While on the surface it may appear to be a  positive team building exercise or some such other HR nonsense, it actually shows – and breeds – the contempt too many people hold for those who, as the saying goes, actually work for a living.

This also leads to silly credentials abound as markers not of skill or talent but the ability to sit in classes and follow orders.  

For example, being a reporter was once seen as being a craftsman, a person who worked in the paragraph factory; now reporters are journalists, they get advanced degrees, they marry government PR people, and they take money directly from “non-profits” that shape their stories – the media is much better since that started to happen, don’t you agree?

The Benedictine rule was not too much about honoring labor itself but about keeping all of those monks busy…idle hands, and all.

Medieval society was very strictly stratified – lords and such, then the clergy, then everyone else and everyone else kept the lords and clergy alive so they could fight and pray, hence the sideways aspect of “ora et labora” as a way to produce goods, yes, but also as a way to teach humility.

The incomparable UCLA historian Eugen Weber described the arrangement thusly – those that could fight, did; those that could pray, did “…and all of the serfs provided all of the work and, in return, got temporary permission to stay alive.”

Note – for anyone interested in Western history – and/or if you happen to home school – Weber’s PBS lecture series is a fascinating must and can be found pretty much ad-free here. …don’t worry, it more than 30 years old so it doesn’t have the currently dreaded public television disease.

Personally, I have done every job in a restaurant except the two hardest – wash dishes or own one – and I do continue to see writing as a form of labor – I am a craftsman and hopefully a good one. And lucky I can type because, while I can clean or maybe even paint, any request beyond that is, well, beyond me. Ask me to change the oil in the car or ask me to build a cold fusion nuclear reactor – the chances of success for either project are equally nil.

In other words, I’m not handy – in fact, I’m handy-capped.

But I digress.

Labor takes many many forms but, it’s position in society – unless we are talking about giant government unions who completely control California’s government – can be on occasion a tenuous one even though “professionals” labor as well.  It’s a cultural hangover, in part, an attitude born of a sense of superiority, in part, and – I think more importantly – an attitude born out of fear and jealousy – that’s that can’t do, as it were, really wish they could.

Unlike many professions, the results of labor honor itself, the process, and the person – or at least it should.

So have a wonderful Labor Day and pray for the best.