Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker May 1, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Jeanerette is a dying town. Dying, but not dead. Nor is it without hope. Though it may never be quite what it was 100 or even 40 years ago, there is nonetheless reason to hope it shall yet be better than it is now. But that hope cannot lie in governmental policy or the sudden arrival of outside investors. Both of those can greatly help or greatly harm our prospects, but neither can be the foundation of a lasting hope. Indeed, even the Church as an institution cannot offer that. Hope for salvation, yes, but not necessarily for economic renewal.
Of course you know I will say that God must be that hope, that his providence means more than the clever schemes of men. That is always true. It’s why two different psalms (118, 146) remind us that “it is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in man” because if someone takes “their breath, they return to the earth, and their plans that day come to nothing.” It’s why we pray today in another psalm, “Lord, give success to the work of our hands.”
But that means something more than to just pray and hope. It assumes our hands are working. So, yes, our hope must be in God, but in God through our own work. Perhaps I should say, your work since I am only a temporary resident and my labor is primarily ordered towards a different goal. Yet, as a priest and pastor my work for souls includes care for your well-being and a certain prophetic responsibility. May what I say be better received than Christ was in today’s gospel.
In addition to the reminder that we cannot sit and wait for someone else to fix it, there are three things I think the Lord wants us to remember: The Sabbath, the Land, and the real value of Labor. I’ll only speak on the first right now and will continue with the other two later today during adoration. Both parts of this reflection will be posted online and I urge you to share them with those that need to hear it.
The Sabbath. There’s a reason that, on a day devoted to St. Joseph the worker, the Church gives us a reading about God resting on the seventh day. For all the emphasis I’ll put on work later on, we must begin by remembering that God alone can control everything. God can control everything, but he doesn’t. He allows us our freedom. He lets things be what they are rather than forcing them to be what they should be. If our work is to be truly effective, truly beneficial to us and the community of Jeanerette, we must learn that our work cannot control our future. The future and our work must be entrusted to God.
This is important because the devil and the world are good at twisting our intentions. What starts out as an effort to provide for ourselves and our loved ones turns into an exercise of pride. Work that’s meant to serve God and man ends up becoming an idol or serves to make ourselves into an idol. See how productive I am! See how much money I make! See how skilled I am!
No. Work is good, but it is a means to an end. It develops our humanity. It provides for us. It glorifies God. And the best way to keep work in it’s place is to deliberately and regularly set it aside for more important things, even if that costs us money. Especially when it costs us money! Work is not our salvation. Money is not our salvation. God is. And work will only benefit us as long as it stays in its place, cooperating with rather than replacing trust in God. If Jeanerette is to rediscover her greatness, we must take seriously the call to honor the sabbath not just for ourselves, but also for our employees and dependents. We can’t make others honor the sabbath, but we can at least make sure we are not complicit in their choice not to. Keep holy the sabbath so that your labor may work with God rather than against him.
Part 2 (during Adoration)
Jeanerette is a dying town. Dying, but not dead and not without hope as I said in the homily at Mass earlier today. The passage from Genesis that we used at Mass told us about the Sabbath rest, which is why I urged you that, if Jeanerette is to find real renewal, we must honor the Sabbath rest for ourselves and for our employees and our dependents, even if it means losing some money.
That was the first point of three: Sabbath Rest, the Land, and the real value of labor. That second point – the land – is also based on the passage from Genesis. Specifically, “God blessed them, saying: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth.” God also said: “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food.” The first thing God gave to mankind was each other: be fruitful and multiply. The second thing he gave us was the earth and everything in it. The greatest wealth is of course the wealth of love, of marriage, family, friendship, community. The second greatest? The earth itself.
All wealth ultimately comes from the land. That includes water too. Technology, currency, and information are all valuable but all of their value comes back to the land. We need food and shelter. No matter how much bitcoin you have or how clever your AI program, you will die without food and water. Even your technology will die without the physical resources that build and power it. Dig deep enough into any calculation of wealth and you will find it goes back to soil and water eventually.
What this means is that, in our pursuit of economic renewal and worthwhile living, we should remember that we already have the most fundamental building block: land. Yes, digital infrastructure, manufacturing, and luxuries would be good to have, but only if we have our feet on solid ground first. God gave man the land for wealth because working the land also works the man. The symbiotic relationship between agriculture and humanity is part of God’s design. For a long time, working the soil was called “husbandry” because of the dynamic life-giving effect it had on the one who “husbanded” the land. Part of our current situation is our history of moving from the land to the manufacturing plant. It was good while it lasted, but when the manufacturing left, a lot of wealth left with it. Yet the land is still here.
No amount of money or mass-produced goods will replace the effect that meaningful, real, land-based work has. Joseph was a carpenter and probably also worked with stone and other crafts. He made real goods that came from the land and depended on it.
If we want Jeanerette to thrive, that means we need the people of Jeanerette to thrive. Simply having enough houses and food does not make us thrive. Enabling ourselves to do meaningful work is a must because it dignifies us, builds up virtues and self-respect, and also provides resources that we need. Do I really need to point out all the ways people suffer when they have food and shelter, but nothing useful to do? To point out the evil we turn to with such superficial providence? This is part of what’s wrong with socialism and communism. They separated the connections between ownership, labor, and goods. Having my own wealth that uses my own labor to produce what I need and what others need is part of human flourishing. You can’t just arbitrarily assign labor, deny real ownership, and then churn out food. Well, you can, but then you strip man of his dignity and, eventually, of his will to live.
There are many kinds of meaningful work we still have that aren’t literally working the soil and the waterways. But, when you really get down to it, land and water are the most obvious, most abundant, most guaranteed to be meaningful sources of both wealth and worthy labor. They may not always give us enough to have wifi and streaming services, but, worked well, they will give us food and drink. Especially with how much land there is here and how fertile it can be. Some methods have shown that carefully, personally working as little as 200 square feet can almost feed a person year round.
Just putting in personal and communal gardens can do much to supplement the real wealth of Jeanerette even if it doesn’t completely feed every hungry mouth in town. What good is a lawn of grass if that same land could feed my body and strengthen my soul? When weather and circumstance make it impossible for machines to harvest food like a corporation, is it so wrong to allow those who need it to do so as individuals, by hand if need be? If it’s a loss already, what difference is it to an owner if it rots in the ground for no profit versus being picked by the hungry for no profit?
We are not yet so isolated or post-apocalyptic that we need total self-sufficiency, but we really must take steps to get at least some self-sufficiency for as many individuals, families, and communities as possible. We have land. Ergo, we have the potential for real, meaningful wealth. We have only to see it and work it.
As you may have noticed, my third point on labor has already come up. In short, labor is worth more than money! Labor is worth more than profits! Labor is – or is supposed to be – good for the laborer. Even if he does not own whatever he works on, productive labor is about more than the money he makes for the owner. It makes him money, yes, but it also allows him to express his humanity, to express the image of God in him by creating like God.
It is necessary that businesses in and around Jeanerette make a profit. You can’t run a business forever if you only lose wealth. But, profit is not the most important goal of a business. The most important goal is to provide for human beings; goods and services that allow human beings and the things they care about to flourish. Joseph didn’t try to maximize profits by taking advantage at every chance. He made stuff that people needed, which in turn made him the money he needed to literally feed God. Jesus, God incarnate worked with his hands to make stuff for people. We never once hear about his profit margins. We can assume he made enough to live on until he started his itinerant preaching, but his annual revenue growth was simply never considered.
Business owners, major land-owners, entrepreneurs, bosses – these all provide an important service to the world. But the instant they make their power about maximizing profits at the expense of everything else, they have committed idolatry. God wants brilliant and productive owners! But he wants them to be good at what they do for the good of real people. And I’m not talking about for the good of distant, wealthy shareholders who have more than they need already. I’m talking about the good of both laborers and customers.
I won’t pretend to know all the complicated ins and outs of labor requirements and viability for businesses in and around Jeanerette. But I do know the principles of justice and human development. A business that makes money is good for the community it’s in. But money isn’t all it’s good for – at least, it shouldn’t be! A good business ought to also build up good people in the community it belongs to.
I get it. If I can pay someone else less money for more work, that’s more profit for me and therefore more wealth for the people I care for. But there is a trade-off. I’ve now invested in the good of one person rather than the other by hiring one over the other. That’s fine and competition can be good and maybe that person needed it more. But, what if the person I invest in doesn’t live here and the person I don’t invest in does? Ideally, they find some other kind of work and still grow as a person.
But what if they don’t have options? Or what if a combination of bad policy, currency instability, and bad habits has made it so that that person simply can’t compete? What if my neighbor is unwilling to go to extreme lengths to compete with someone who is desperate enough to put up with extreme demands? Just because one person agrees to be taken advantage of, it doesn’t make it okay. And it certainly doesn’t justify expecting other people to accept injustice just to compete.
Again, I don’t intend to cast judgments on particular situations. I’m saying that it is possible that, if you zoom out enough, some choices to improve a profit margin might come at the cost of unfairly leaving our own neighbors without meaningful and realistic opportunity.
I’m just asking, what good is it to be rich if it means 70% of my community is left behind in perpetual dependence? Would accepting smaller profit margins – not bankrupting myself, but trimming the fat – would that allow me to offer wages and hours that make meaningful labor accessible to my own neighbors?
If none of this applies to you or anyone you know, okay. I am not the judge and do not claim to know. I only speak the principles and truths God has placed on me, hoping that your own conscience may judge what I cannot. Or at least inspire you to see problems I do not.
I love Jeanerette and the people in it. St. Joseph, for so long the patron of a school that taught many of the people in this community, is our patron still. May St. Joseph, the patron of workers and patron of Jeanerette, intercede on our behalf. By his prayers, by God’s grace, may we be given the faith to trust God with our future, the hope to risk a change in the way we live and work, and the love to make that work truly serve God and neighbor so that it yields the greatest profit of all: eternal life shared with everyone we love.