The Soulcraft of Work

Today’s post is the first of a series by guest blogger Bob Sessions:

In my final years of full-time teaching, I asked my community college students in a course on Working in America to create a list of characteristics that make for bad work. To my surprise—and then to my growing dismay the more I thought about it—the students put physical labor at the top of their list. If they had been students at an elite institution who had little exposure to such work I wouldn’t have been surprised.  But community college students, many of whom were the children of farmers, plumbers, fire fighters, and carpenters?

Their viewpoint is not unusual, unfortunately. Physical labor gets a bad rap from young people today in part because of the perception that so-called white collar work is easier and more lucrative.  Neither belief is true, of course.  Many of you likely know how debilitating office work can be, and many two-year college vocational graduates (for example, electricians, auto mechanics, and welders) have better-paying careers than business or liberal arts graduates of four-year schools.

Another reason many young people dislike physical labor (besides the fact that they haven’t done much of it) is their belief that it cannot be fulfilling. In a wonderfully thought-provoking book with an evocative title—Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work—Matthew Crawford argues that manual labor that has not been degraded by mass production often requires significant intellectual effort and knowledge as well as great skill.  His main examples come from his work as an motorcycle mechanic, but I believe his well-wrought thesis applies to most other manual labor that calls on a multitude of talents and virtues of the worker. Craftsmanship is craftsmanship, whether it happens on a farm or in a boardroom.

St. Benedict (the sixth-century abbot famous for his book of monastic rules) understood that while Crawford is correct, there are further dimensions to manual labor that can contribute to our fulfillment. Besides a heavy diet of worship and contemplation, followers of Benedict’s rules must have significant periods of manual labor in their daily lives.  For one thing, such work reminds us that we are physical beings. It can help integrate our spiritual and intellectual aspects with our bodies and with the natural world in which we are incarnate.  The ideal physical labor is done with others and for the well-being of the community. Its meaning derives from this layered embeddedness.

My oldest son, Erik, who is a small-scale vegetable farmer, understands well what Crawford counsels. To succeed at this type of farming requires imagination and complex thinking as well as a lot of hard work.  It also requires the kinds of community relationships the Benedictine order wisely creates, for without his interdependencies with fellow farmers, shop keepers and customers, Erik’s enterprise would fail economically and would also be bereft of much of the meaning his human ties provide.

I’m not sure if Erik yet comprehends a further dimension of manual labor that I am beginning to understand as I have returned in retirement to a life filled with physical craftsmanship. More on this in part two of this meditation, which will focus on what we might call the spiritual economy of manual labor.