Living for the Weekend

Posted: 26 March 2013

We all know people – in fact you may be one of those people – who live for the weekend. Every work place has people who function like countdown clocks perennially sharing the news of how much time is left before Friday rolls around. Mondays are the most painful day of the week because it is the longest time until the weekend, on Wednesdays relief is in sight and Friday…the whole day is a bustling excitement awaiting the clock to strike five. It is the weekend that gives such people hope and keeps them focused. Now of course everyone enjoys resting from work, that is natural, but are we really supposed to live our work lives just waiting to be set free like prisoners on weekend release?

For most of us, work will occupy a third of the prime years of our lives, and about a fifth of our entire lifetime will be spent working in some capacity. Work is therefore a fairly dominant part of most lives. The question is, should we understand work as something that merely gets in the way of our real lives, an activity that allows us to survive, or, should we consider work as a more valuable occupation, something that defines who we are and builds us up as people?

I was recently watching a documentary on the making of potato chips in the largest chip factory on earth. From the potatoes that arrived fresh from the farm we were led by one of the workers through the processes that churned out pallets of chips to soon be consumed from parties to playgrounds. What struck me was the commitment this man had to his work, he clearly felt a great passion for what he was doing and he took his responsibility seriously in doing his part to producing their particular product line. While at the end of the day, the man is not working to nurse the sick or relieve hunger (in fact his product is more than likely contributing to obesity in many places), that man in that chip factory is finding dignity in what he is doing. His work helps defines him and our work helps define us. While our value is not dependent on our ability to work or what type of work we do, our work allows us to contribute to humanity in some way. Work helps us to be included in the community of mankind. So long as the work is honest and upholds the dignity of the person, it does not even matter how great or small it might seem. From shoe shining to raising children to designing buildings, all work serves to build up ourselves and those around us.

To work is actually a privilege, just ask someone who due to disability or circumstance is unable to work. Few things are more harmful to the human spirit than the inability to contribute. Ongoing unemployment brings about a feeling of uselessness and can be debilitating. For those who do work, periods of rest are most certainly needed, but without work those periods of rest can become laziness and an unfair reliance on others to meet our needs. Even those who don’t need to work to survive are most often engaged in some sort of activity; no one can sit by the pool drinking cocktails their whole life.

Now of course not everyone can spend their career in their dream job and some jobs are most certainly less ‘interesting’ than others, but to know that in some sense we are contributing to society should allow us to find a goodness even in the most menial tasks. It is our capacity as human beings to work that distinguishes us from animals who only ‘work’ to fulfill their immediate needs. When we are engaged in fair and just work we provide for ourselves and our families, but perhaps even more importantly, we identify ourselves as part of the human family with the ability to offer something to others.

To live for the weekend, to see work as simply a means to pay the bills and have a good time turns work into something that more closely parallels the animal kingdom (of course one can also go too far the other way and worship work as if it is the sole purpose of their lives). Work is not a ball and chain that is bolted around our ankles for fifty years. Work is a unique opportunity to live within the human community and to leave our mark, however large or small on humanity.

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Modesty. A Sign of Respect for Men and Women.

Posted: 4 November 2012

So there I was at the train station minding my own business when a young lady walked past wearing a pair of tights. At least I think they were tights. It might have been black body paint for all I know, as it looked like she was wearing nothing at all below the waist. I have since been informed by a reliable source that tights are very much in fashion, which would explain why so many women seem to be getting around in them.

Now I am all for fashion, (after all it was in the name of fashion that I sold my maroon microfiber suit on eBay), but I question the appropriateness of an item of clothing that only serves to draw attention to the body and not the person. Regardless of why she was wearing the tights, as that young lady walked down the platform the message she sent was ‘don’t worry about who I am, just have a look at my body’. And that is exactly what an array of men did as they watched her move down the platform. I am certainly not stating that all men’s fashion is worthy of the human person either, but there is no question that women’s clothing that has the most tendency to be provocative.

Many women do not even seem to realise the extent to which their clothing is sending certain messages. A lot of this comes down to the way men and women are wired. For the most part men are visual creatures and they receive through the eyes. Women however are fed through imagery and story. Men understand what it is to notice a woman and immediately be drawn to her physical make up, but women do not instinctively respond in that way to men (even if trashy romance novels paint a different picture). This is the reason that in the traditional formation of young girls the teaching of modesty was an essential element. Because women do not have the same tendency to visually objectify a man’s body they do not naturally understand the need to dress in a way that introduces them first of all, and not their body.

Some years ago there was a terrible gang rape case in Sydney by some Islamic young men. One of the local imams came out and instead of condemning the men, accused Australian women of inviting rape because of the way they dressed. His comments were highly offensive and inappropriate. Days of public commentary deriding the cleric asserted the right of women to dress as they pleased and the responsibility of men to control themselves. And the commentary was correct. No matter how a woman dresses or acts; it is never an invitation for a man to be sexually violent towards her. In his famed Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth went a step further and called his hearers to a purity of heart saying that the man who even lusts after a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart. The point is a real man is one at all times, in thought and in action.

Even though this imam was completely out of place, the essence of his comment was that the way a woman dresses has an impact on men and to ignore that is to be foolishly unaware of the reality. We all know deep down how we should act but we also sense the very human struggle to act as we should. If I am inviting a friend who struggles with alcohol to my house for dinner, I am not going to offer him a beer as he walks through the door and an array of fine wines with the meal. To do that would be cruel to him and it would not be showing genuine sensitively for his particular struggle. I would be well within my rights to have the alcohol flowing throughout the meal but I certainly could not be called a true friend. We do not become better people simply doing what feels good; we become better people by being increasingly more aware of those around us.

I am sure the young lady walking down that train platform was a lovely woman. But by wearing clothes that detract from her personality and focus men on her body alone, she risks drawing only the attention of those who are interested in her body instead of allowing them to encounter the person within.

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The Useless People in Our Lives

Posted: 31 August 2012

I was scrolling through Facebook this week and I saw the following message; “KEEP people in your life that truly love you, motivate you, encourage you, inspire you, enhance you & make you happy. If you have people who do NONE of the above, let them go.” These sort of short inspirational messages are all over the internet and I have posted up a few of them myself. However as I read this one I found myself wondering what I should do with the people in my life who didn’t love me or motivate me or encourage me or inspire me or enhance me or even make me happy. And what if these same people did not motivate or inspire anyone? What if these people were a drain on me, their families and on the whole society?

It is important to surround ourselves with people who are going to encourage and inspire us. After all we become a reflection of the company we keep. If we spend our time with those who live to get drunk and party then we will end up doing the same. If we keep the company of those who strive for higher ideals then we will begin to strive for those same ideals.

It would be hard to get up every morning for an entire lifetime if there was never anyone to pat us on the back and say ‘you’re doing well, keep going’. At times we need encouraging and sometimes we encourage others. This is the story of good friendships, each person looks out for the other and when either one is struggling the other is there to pick them up.

However we might add another category of people in our life and that is those who are always a bit of a drain on us. These people are always down, always needy and they probably have no real prospects of making something noteworthy of their life. They may not be able to work, they may never marry, they may always be sick or they may just generally not ‘fit in’.

The reality is though our world is made up of a multitude of people from the strong and the successful to the unloved and those perceived to be ‘useless’. Throughout history various people and ideologies have tried to remove the useless from society and it continues to this day. It is estimated that China has approximately 35 million more males than females due to deliberate male sex selection. Have you ever wondered why you see less children with Down’s Syndrome these days? That is because 90 per cent of them are aborted when their parents receive a prenatal diagnosis of the condition.

Admittedly it can be difficult to embrace those who will make our life harder, but the mark of any of us is how we embrace the weak and those whom no one else will love. Jesus of Nazareth told his disciples in very explicit terms that to love the hungry, the sick and the lonely was to love him and to ignore the hungry, the sick and the lonely was to ignore him and thus salvation. This pursuit of such ‘useless’ people is what continues to make Mother Teresa of Calcutta an example of virtue to Christian, Hindu and Atheist.

As good as it is that we are all willing to open our wallets to the starving in Africa and the Tsunami victims in Indonesia I think the test of who we are is found much closer to us. It is in that friend from school who still calls us every week even though he has nothing to say. It is in our meddlesome aunt who lives alone with no one to talk too. It is in that person we have lunch with each month even though they probably get more out of it than we do. The truth is these are the very encounters that define us.

When the rich young Pier Giorgio Frassati died in 1925, it was the poor of Turin that packed his funeral in honour of the life he had secretly given in their service. It is good to surround ourselves with those who love, motivate and encourage us. But let us never dismiss or forget those who cannot and will not be able to offer us these things. The ‘rejects’ of society deserve as much friendship as the next person. For it is only by the undeserved grace of God that we find ourselves not in that category.

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Theology of the Body as it was in the Beginning

Posted: 21 December 2011

People ask a lot of questions of the Catholic Church, especially in regards morality. “What is the problem with sex outside of marriage?” Why is contraception immoral?” “Why does marriage have to be between one man and one woman?” People used to challenge Jesus with similar questions. At one point a group of Pharisees came up to Christ to ask him if divorce was permissible. To their surprise though He did not simply point them to the written law but instead he invited them to consider that “from the beginning God made them male and female” and created a marriage bond that could not be broken. The Pharisees complained that Moses had allowed them to divorce, but even though this had happened, Christ looked deeply at them and said “but from the beginning it was not so.”

Why direct the people to the beginning and not just the written law? Because Christ was directing them to the law written on their hearts. We exist in a fallen world, in a world where we struggle to do what is right, where the body and the spirit battle one another. However, it was not always like that, there was a time when humanity knew what it was to love God, love others and love themselves rightly. This time was before Original Sin entered the world and we read about it in just a few short passages in the book of Genesis. Thirty years ago a young Pope John Paul II began to give a series of addresses that delved back into the beginning so that we would know better the answer to the questions, ‘Who am I’ and ‘What does it mean to be human’. These addresses are known today as the Theology of the Body.

Pope John Paul saw such importance in the beginning, because he believed that even though humans now lived in a world marred with Original Sin, they carried within their hearts the remnants of what it was to live without sin, before Adam and Eve ‘ate the apple’ (there really was no apple, check your bible). In his catechesis, John Paul named three original experiences that existed before the Fall. He called them Original Solitude, Original Unity and Original Nakedness. After Original Sin these three became ruptured but when Jesus points the Pharisees back to the beginning he is saying that this is the way they are called to live. No longer does he want us to live under the weight of the law but rather to understand that when we know who we are as human persons, the knowledge of what is right and wrong wells up from within us.

In the experience of solitude, God had created only one person and God recognises it was not good that the human person be alone. This person was invited to name all the animals and through that find someone similar for himself. Yet after giving names to all the animals of land, sea and sky, the human discovered there was no one like him. Why? The human had a body and all the animals had bodies so what was lacking? The difference was that the body of the human was symbolic; it contained a person, a spiritual being. The human realised that he was not an animal or an object but he was a subject with reason and free will.

In the experience of unity God created a second being from the rib of the first being and creation was completed with male and female, equal in dignity. At the sight of the woman, the man cried out with a great joy because here was a body that also represented a human person. Their bodies had differences but it was their diversity that made true unity possible. The man and woman realised that their bodies called them to love and that they were created to be a gift to one another.

In the experience of nakedness the man and the woman enjoy a total trust and defenselessness before each other. They rest in the knowledge that the other person would never use them as an object but always see them as a person to be loved. There was a total unity between the spiritual and the physical sides of the human person.

This was the paradise we were created for but we all know something changed.

That change was Original Sin and it ruptured all the future generations understanding of what it was to be a human person. It was as if a great amnesia came over humanity. It has become hard to sense God in our lives and recall that we are spiritual as well as bodily. The differences between men and women became seen as obstacles and causes for blame. There became a tendency to use one another, in their lusts men dominate women and in a confused desire for love women allow themselves to be used. Everything has been turned upside down.

When Christ is speaking to the Pharisees he is also speaking to every human person and he invites us to simply remember who we are. Every moral question has an answer at the dawn of creation. This was the whole reason Christ came; to point the way out of amnesia and remind us that that “in the beginning it was not so.”

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Can I employ someone as a doormat?

Posted: 26 September 2011

Have you ever walked through the city and seen those people holding signs advertising something? They can be found on busy street corners or open air shopping malls. Their signs point the way to a restaurant lunch deal, the nearest bottle shop or cheap parking. You might have similarly seen someone outside a pizza shop waving a sign to passing traffic highlighting cheap lunchtime meals.

I have a problem with this; in fact we should all have a problem with this. It is not a problem with advertising; it is a problem with the fact that people are being used simply as sign posts. Sometimes the people are handing out advertising material as well and this lessens (a little) the problem because at least there is interaction with people as part of the job. However to simply strap a sign to a human person and have them stand in one place or even walk around effectively treats them as an object; it is below our dignity as people.

I am sure they get paid for this task, although of course it would not be much, but even so, payment does not make an unjust action just. I might decide to hire a person to lie across the threshold of my door so that I can wipe my shoes on them as I enter the house. I may pay them, and pay them well for being my doormat, but, is it right to use a person as a doormat? If someone freely chooses to sell their human dignity to me, am I able to buy it? I would say the answer is no.

Each of us is a personal subject, a being that thinks, perceives and intends. We belong to no one else. A subject directs what actions will take place. An object on the other hand, has actions directed to it, I am using a chair to sit on, I am using a mug to drink coffee. An object is always just that, an object, if my mug cracks, I will just get another one, it is dispensable. We begin to encounter problems when we lose the distinction between subjects and objects. If I turn a person into my doormat, I have made that person into an object, similarly, if I pay a person to act as a signpost.

The thing with human dignity is that it is innate; it is naturally within each of us. Dignity is not something that society bestows for passing certain milestones. It is not like acquiring a driving licence and it is not like graduating from university. It cannot be sold and it cannot be lost. That is why the life of the migrant, the intellectually disabled adult, the brilliant scientist, and the drug addicted gangster are all of equal worth. Christian tradition would say that every human person is sacred because they are created in the image of God but belief in the dignity of human life certainly extends beyond Christianity.

Early in his Pontificate, Pope John Paul II, wrote an encyclical titled, Laborem Exercens, which was on the subject of human work. The Pope wrote at length about the value of human work and that determining its value is not primarily in “the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person”. Whether one is employed to govern the nation or sweep the streets of that nation, John Paul writes that work must enable a person to become “more a human being and not be degraded by it”. A person who is working should never experience a lowering of their dignity.

It is not to say that difficult work or boring work is below a person, but when the person doing the task is seen as only an impersonal force and not as an individual then we begin to move into problems. Even though we all need to work to survive, the essential distinction is that work is for ‘the person’ and not the person ‘for work’.

If employers wish to erect signs advertising their products and services then they should seek permission from the council for a sign post, and not offer a “job” where the person is given no more value than a metal pole. Offering jobs that are below human dignity does not benefit society; they only serve to make all of us a little bit poorer because we begin to perceive things that are not normal as a part of normal life.

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