“In nothing has the Church so lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand
and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become
separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as result, the secular work of the
world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the
world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in
religion.
But is it astonishing? How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems
to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The Church’s approach to an
intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and
disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church
should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon
him is that he should make good tables.
Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly – but what use is all
that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad
carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of
the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they
were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth. No piety in the worker
will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its
own technique is a living lie.
Yet in Her own buildings, in Her own ecclesiastical art and music, in Her hymns and
prayers, in Her sermons and in Her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate
or permit a pious intention to excuse so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling,
so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent draftsman.
And why? Simply because She has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal
truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the
standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred.
Forgotten that a building must be good architecture before it can be a good church;
that a painting must be well painted before it can be a good sacred picture; that work
must be good work before it can call itself God’s work.
Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in
his profession or trade – not outside it. The Apostles complained rightly when they
said it was not meet they should leave the word of God and serve tables; their
vocation was to preach the word. Bu the person whose vocation it is to prepare the
meals beautifully might with equal justice protest: It is not meet for us to leave the
service of our tables to preach the word.” -Dorothy Sayers (Why Work)
