Chris McDonnell, UK
christymac733@gmail.com

Previous articles by Chris   Comments welcome here

Give us a job!

Change can be stressful, rapid change even more so. When that stress is apparent across social groupings, then its consequences can be serious.

This month fifty years ago, May 68, saw upheaval on a massive scale in France . The nation was brought to its knees by the combination of workers and students protesting together on the streets. Yet within weeks this demonstration of united power diminished and a movement that saw violence and calls for radical change has become a footnote in history, rarely referred to.

So where do we stand fifty years on? What have we learnt that can be of use in managing where we find ourselves now?

In the intervening years, here in the UK , we lived with the  political Thatcherite view that ‘there is no such thing as society’. The unemployment of the early ‘80s was serious and disruptive. It gained expression through a television series in 1982, Alan Bleasdale’s “Boys from the Black Stuff”, a powerful drama about a gang of tarmac layers moonlighting for some extra cash. The central character was a Liverpudlian called ‘Yosser’ Hughes played by Bernard Hill. He gradually lost everything, his home and family and his pride. His pain was expressed by two phrases that became the reflective of the time- “Gizza a job” and “I can do that”.  It was almost a psalmist lament, a man looking for work, confident he had useful skills to earn a living, yet rejected as worthless.

According to national statistics, unemployment is currently at a low level. Yet the nature of the jobs that are available is cause for concern, with many being taken on zero-hours contracts and the level of payment not sufficient to manage a family. The growth of the need for food banks is evidence of the underlying stress. Capitalism has its consequent co-lateral damage. Recent reports identify an increase in the number of children in poverty coming from low-income families requiring help.

As the years go by our dependence on technology decreases the need for direct hand skills, with production lines automated to such a degree that production can be managed by fewer people. And we call it progress. For sure, the process cannot be reversed so we have to find ways to manage this changed society that are just and fair.

People still identify themselves by name, where they live and what they do. It is that personal pride that is crucially damaged by unemployment, it was that loss that was poignantly, painfully, demonstrated by Yosser Hughes.

A friend of mine who lectures in pastoral theology has a small note on the Notice Board by her office door informing those who call that the ‘Carpenter from Nazareth seeks joiners’, a job vacancy par excellence! In a similar vein when she works with groups in parishes her response when asked her trade is “I work for the carpenter’s boy”, a succinct definition of a Christian vocation if ever there was one. Being a Christian is an active role, a job that demands effort, not just a label for form-filling. It was a significant title that Dorothy Day gave her New York paper- the Catholic Worker. A Christian can’t just sit around, that’s not in the job description.

Sometimes communities of religious are criticised for avoiding the ‘real’ world. That is to ignore the very core of their vocation, their being deeply themselves. The American Cistercian, Thomas Merton described his vocation as that of the marginalised.

There’s a passage from Merton’s Asian Journal that indicates the monastic hope.

‘I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. And among these people, if they are faithful to their own calling, to their own vocation, and to their own message from God, communication on the deepest level is possible. And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech and beyond concept’.

The work of the monk or nun, for it is indeed work demands, as it does for all of us, good preparation, learning the necessary skills, acquiring knowledge, patience and understanding suitable for the task. It involves the transformation of our very being, rarely is it learned exclusively through books. The apprentice pattern of the learner working alongside the person of experience is indeed a worthwhile model. That is why our parish communities should be nurseries, novitiates, of our Christian lives, not merely replicas of drive-through coffee shops. We learn from being with others, we gain from their experience.  We need to assist each other in our work for the carpenter’s boy.

END

⁼⁼⁼⁼⁼