The Work of Our Hands

The benefits of our domestic labors are, perhaps, more direct and immediate. When I make bread, I get to eat it, or I get to enjoy watching my family eat it. When I plant a row of vegetables and tend them and harvest them and prepare them, I get to eat what I have grown.

Gardening is a rare pleasure in our world: to know that every second of your labor is one whose literal fruits you will quite literally be enjoying.

Or that’s the idea, anyway. This year, it seems I am gardening for the squirrels and the caterpillars.

They don’t even bother to sneak anymore. They just walk right up and eat my plants.

The ones I hate the most are the ones that grab a tomato off the vine just as it becomes perfectly ripe, eat half of it, and then drop it on the ground.

Gardening for thieves is one thing; gardening for wasteful, ungrateful punks is another.

It makes me snarly for a very basic reason: it absolutely sucks to work for no reward. Working for rewards that someone else takes from you by force or deception is demoralizing and even dehumanizing.

Believe it or not, to work for a mere monetary reward isn’t much better. We don’t seem to be built, physically or psychologically, to work solely for something as imaginary as money. And we certainly aren’t built to work for nothing at all.  We need to know that our work makes a difference.

That doesn’t mean I don’t also want to work for money, especially since that’s the only proxy for the labor of my hands that the grocery store will accept. (I’m not really cutting it as a gardener, you see.)

In any case, this is the idea that runs around my head every Labor Day. There are mottos and catchphrases aplenty in the Bible that someone who wanted to think Biblically about Labor Day might profitably reflect on. The worker is worth his hire, of course, and dishonest weights are an abomination to the Lord. Pay to everyone what you owe him, and do not keep back the wages of a hired man overnight.

Those are all good, and biblical, and could probably make more than a few present-day employers squirm in their church pews.

But this is the fundamental cry of the laborer to his God: Lord, prosper the work of my hands. And it is the fundamental measure of economic justice: that the laborer shares in the benefits of his work.

“Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and prosper for us the work of our hands.
O prosper the work of our hands!”
Psalm 90