St Joseph the Worker

Happy feast day to you all. Let us commend to St Joseph the Worker all those who labour, that they may recognise that the Lord is with them and blesses them in their work.

St John Paul learned of the dignity of work in his time working in the quarry. To celebrate this day of work, the new Saint's poem on work:

Material

1

Listen: the even knocking of hammers,

so much their own,

I project on to the people

to test the strength of each blow.

Listen now: electric current

cuts through a river of rock.

And a thought grows in me day after day:

the greatness of work is inside man.

Hard and cracked 

his hand is differently charged

by the hammer

and thought differently unravels in stone

as human energy splits from the strength of stone

cutting the bloodstream, an artery

in the right place.

Look, how love feeds 

on this well-grounded anger

which flows in to people's breath

as a river bent by the wind, 

and which is never spoken, but just breaks high vocal cords.

Passers-by scuttle off into doorways, 

someone whispers: "Yet here is a great force."

Fear not. Man's daily deeds have a wide span,

a strait riverbed can't imprison them long.

Fear not. For centuries they all stand in Him, 

and you look at Him now

through the even knocking of hammers.

2

Bound are the blocks of stone, the low-voltage wire

cuts deep in their flesh, an invisible whip--

stones know this violence.

When an elusive blast rips their ripe compactness

and tears them from their eternal simplicity,

the stones know this violence.

Yet can the current unbind their full strength?

It is he who carries that strength in his hands:

the worker.

3

Hands are the heart's landscape. They split sometimes

like ravines into which an undefined force rolls.

The very same hands which man only opens 

when his palms have had their fill of toil.

Now he sees: because of him alone others can walk in peace.

Hands are a landscape. When they split, the pain of their sores

surges free as a stream. 

But no thought of pain--

no grandeur in pain alone.

For his own grandeur he does not know how to name.

4

No, not just hands drooping with the hammer's weight, 

not the taut torso, muscles shaping their own style, 

but thought informing his work,

deep, knotted in wrinkles on his brow,

and over his head, joined in a sharp arc, shoulders and veins vaulted.

So for a moment he is a Gothic building

cut by a vertical thought born in the eyes.

No, not a profile alone, 

not a mere figure between God and the stone,

sentenced to grandeur and error.

St Joseph The Worker

 

Well, they may be marching up and down Red Square today, but all over the Catholic world we are celebrating the feast of St Joseph the Worker.    Yes, it is probably true that today's feast was meant to distract from socialism's May day, but in reality, it brings us to reflect on work as part of the Christian life. 

 

If we want to truly understand what work is for us as human beings we need not look at Marx, Lenin or Mao, but rather to the humble carpenter who did not need a bloody revolution to draw attention to his ideas, we see them clearly in his witness to service to his family and his God.  In his work St Joseph found his dignity as a human being and as a child of God, he was not mere proletariat, but rather a living soul who helps transform the world through his labour and his vision, a vision which is given by God and one which calls for the creative cooperation of man.  In reality in Marxism man becomes a cog in a system, in Christianity's view of work, as seen in St Joseph's example, man becomes an artist and a saint.  That, I believe, is the difference between Marxist socialism and Christianity.

 

To all our workers, I wish you a happy feast day.  May your patron, St Joseph watch over you.