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There is a tremendous truth contained in the realization that when God became man, he became a workingman. Not a king, not a chieftain, not a warrior or a statesman or a great leader of nations, as some had thought the Messiah would be. The Gospels show us Christ the teacher, the healer, the wonder-worker, but these activities of his public life were the work of three short years. For all the rest of the time of his life on earth, God was a village carpenter and the son of a carpenter. He did not fashion benches or tables or beds or roof beams or plow beams by means of miracles, but by hammer and saw, by ax and adze. He worked long hours to help his father, and then became the support of his widowed mother, by the rough work of a hill country craftsman. Nothing he worked on, as far as we know, ever set any fashions or became a collector’s item. . . . There was nothing spectacular about it, there was much of the routine about it, perhaps much that was boring. . . .

He worked day in and day out for some twenty years to set us an example, to show us that these routine chores, too, are not beneath man’s dignity or even God’s dignity, that simple household tasks and the repetitious work of the wage earner are not necessary evils but noble and redemptive works worthy of God himself. Work cannot be a curse if God himself undertook it; to eat one’s bread in the sweat of one’s brow is to do nothing more or less than Christ himself did. And he did it for a reason. . . . He did it to make plain that the plainest and dullest of jobs is—or at any rate can be, if viewed properly in respect to God and to eternity—a sharing in the divine work of creation and redemption, a daily opportunity to cooperate with God in the central acts of his covenant of salvation.

—Walter J. Ciszek, S.J.
He Leadeth Me, ch. 10, “Work” (1973)

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— work — Commonplaces #219 — Jan/Feb 2025 —