Love and the Work of the World

a spider on its web, doing the work it is called to do
 in Spiritual and Emotional Themes  tagged Justice / Love / W. E. B. Du Bois / work / World's work by

The World’s Work

Between 1909 and 1910, W.E. B. Du Bois wrote prayers for the students of Atlanta University, a historically black school. They were collected and published in the book, Prayers for Dark People. In one of them, Du Bois points to the importance of rain and storm so that plants can produce fruit. He speaks of “hurt and suffering” in the human life that allows us to “bring the world’s work to its highest perfection.” [1] What is this work he’s talking about, and what does he mean by the “highest perfection”?

Could it be, as he adds later, that the “the great web which hangs holy to the lord” is the perfection, and that our weaving of it, as we twine the “sterner aspects of life together with its joy and laughter,” is the work? [2] Yet is he talking about the work the world does, about the work we do for the world, or is he referring to the work humans do in the world, the digging of gardens, the crafting of pottery, the planting and weeding and teaching and pruning and baking and building? In her poem, “To Be of Use,” Marge Piercy writes about those who “strain in the muck and the mud,” whose work that is as “common as mud.” [3] Is this common toil what Du Bois is referring to?

Durham, North Carolina

In an essay published in the early twentieth-century magazine, World’s Work, Du Bois offered his impression of Durham, North Carolina. There, the black community, supported by their white neighbors, manufactured appliances, sold goods, taught school, and provided insurance for one another. It was one of the few places where, as Du Bois wrote, “a black man may get up in the morning from a mattress made by black men, in a house which a black man built out of lumber which black men cut and planed.” [4] In Durham, there were black churches, a black hospital, and factories owned and staffed by black employees. These were his people doing the work of the world.

This is the kind of labor Du Bois believed was so important. He saw such grassroots cooperation as an answer to the problem of poverty. In another essay, he pointed out that in America, there were enough wealth, supplies, and efficiency to provide for everyone. We could make sure that all citizens of this country “could be fed and clothed and sheltered, live in health and have their intellectual faculties trained.” [5]

In Durham, African Americans not only imagined, but created, such a world, because the people with the greatest need were offered the opportunity to provide for themselves, and they took it. They did work that mattered to them and that provided them enough money to sustain their families.

ant climbing a leaf, doing work for the good of its community
Photo by Christian Lischka, SJ

The Use of Our Hands

Impressed by what he saw in Durham, Du Bois advocated for “putting into the hands of those people who do the world’s work the power to guide and rule the state for the best welfare of the masses.” For him, the masses are the ones who do the work of the world. [6] Or, as Marge Piercy put it in her poem, they do “work that is real.”

This “real” work is the work of our hands. It means building mattresses, constructing homes, selling groceries, tending the sick, feeding families, weaving cloth. The world’s work harvests and holds. It makes things that are meant “to be used.” [7] According to David Whyte, work is “the place where the self meets the world.” [8] It is our calling, our greater purpose. As Frederick Buechner put it, our vocation, our true work, is found in “the place where [our] deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” [9]

The world’s work isn’t about profit. Not that making a living is wrong. To survive, we must pay our bills. But so much of the true work we do is unpaid, at least with money. If we judge our career by how much we earn, Du Bois tells us, we are making “a grave mistake.” Such a focus leads to a life of “hell.” Instead, we ought to seek “satisfaction” through service. That means, we should do what the world needs of us. What can we, uniquely, offer? When we figure this out, we will find the job that is right for us. Then, as Du Bois said, “life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get.” [10]

Meaningful Work

If, then, we are doing work that is meaningful, that satisfies us, and that serves the world, and if we make it possible for everyone to do such work, then joy and laughter will flow throughout the land. This matters not only because it’s good for people to be happy. Happy people are more kind, they collaborate more, they are willing to listen, and they are more peaceful than are people who feel sad, angry, fearful, and stressed. Suffering is part of the weave that makes up the holy web, but so is happiness.

We claim that the United States was founded on the notion that every person deserves the right to pursue happiness. If so, we ought to make it possible for every person to do work that satisfies, that sustains them economically, and that provides something the world needs. When they’re talking about the needs of the world, Du Bois, Piercy, and Buechner aren’t talking about apps or commercials or breast enhancements. They’re talking about bread, honey, homes, forests, and caregiving.

A Sacred Calling

Doing the work of the world is a sacred calling. It is responsible and ethical. Such work allows us to feel good about ourselves and what we offer to others. If we are doing what is holy, what is real, then our success will not be for us alone, but also for our families and our communities.

That quote from Du Bois about the “world’s work” comes from a prayer, a prayer that encourages us to use the good and the evil in our lives to do work that is meaningful. He imagines we might perfect that work one day so that we can weave a web that “hangs holy,” not just in our own estimation, but in the Lord’s, as well.

Working for Justice

Such work is work that promotes justice. Derrick Bell, in his book Ethical Ambition, explains that justice work requires a commitment and engagement “quite like that so many black people in America have been doing since slavery: making something out of nothing.” Like other dispossessed peoples, African Americas have done their work with nothing except “imagination, will, and unbelievable strength and courage.” [11]

The world’s work arises out of imagination and courage. It seeks justice. The wisdom that feeds such work is a wisdom that considers the future, the seventh generation. It cares about the plight of the land and the creatures who live among us. The world’s work must be done carefully and well. It “has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident,” writes Piercy. [12] If we consider “the world we will leave behind us,” Bell writes, “we can use that consideration to motivate right choice and right action.” [13]

This is the work of the world. It is not the promotion of glitz and addictions, the production of widgets that distract us and numb our souls. As Du Bois reminds us, work is meant to provide us with more than money. Real work serves the world rather than destroys it.

Monk working the land
Photo by Eduardo Prim

The Work of Love

When all is said and done, the work of the world, the work that nature does as it blooms and fruits, the work of birds who sing and build nests, of foxes who suckle their cubs, of sheep who provide wool, of predators who cull the herd, is love. The world’s work is to love.

If we humans are to take part in this work of love, which is tending and building and listening, then we must learn to love our bodies. Nature’s work is to bloom and fruit, to birth babies, gather food, even die so that another might eat. Nature’s work is embodied. We might fear the intensity of this sensual energy, but we humans are part of it. How can we love the work of the world, that which is “common as mud,” that weaves suffering and joy into one web, if we do not love the way our limbs move, the way our hands knead bread or craft furniture or brush an elder’s hair?

Embodying the Work

Touch, smell, feel the movement of air through our bodies as we sing, the spasm of pleasure in our loins as we gaze at something beautiful, whether a sunset, a swallow, a lover. Let us be part of this body that is the earth, and let us learn to love that body as we love our own. Water the garden, take only what we need from the forest, clean the oceans, steward the land. That is how we show our love to the earth; that is the work of the world.

True, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote, “nature is red in tooth and claw.” [14] The world creates and the world destroys; it gives and takes away. For nature to thrive, for our children to live, we all must some day die. Sometimes this death is cruel, and nature is part of that ugliness, though we humans have brought our immense creativity to devising horrors and punishments that nature herself could never imagine.

In spite of that, our hands and our hearts are meant to create beauty out of mud, dead leaves, imagination. We are here to take the misery and ugliness that is part of living in a land that requires death to sustain life and to transform it into something glorious and inspiring. That is the world’s work. That is what “hangs holy to the Lord.” May we learn how to do that work, and may we embody it so deeply that, one day, we wake up to discover we have perfected it.

In faith and fondness,

Barbara

Credits

  1. Aptheker, Herbert, ed., Prayers for Dark People by W. E. B. Du Bois, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980, reprinted in Oman, Maggie, ed., Prayers for Healing: 265 Blessings, Poems, and Meditations from Around the World, San Francisco: Canari, 1997, 61.
  2. Ibid.
  3. From Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982, reprinted by Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use, accessed 2/26/21.
  4. From W.E.Burghardt Du Bois, “The Upbuilding of Black Durham. The Success of the Negroes and their Value to a Tolerant and Helpful Southern City,” Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Detached from World’s Work, vol. 23, Jan. 1912, 338, electronic edition, https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/dubois/dubois.html#p338, accessed 2/26/21.
  5. Du Bois, W. E. B.. Dusk of Dawn (the Oxford W. E. B. du Bois), edited by Henry Louis, Jr. Gates, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2007, 179.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Piercy.
  8. Whyte, David, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, Langely, WA: Many Rivers Press, 2016, 241.
  9. Buechner, Frederick, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, New York: HarperOne, 1993.
  10. Du Bois, W. E. B., quoted in Bell, Derrick, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth, New York: Bloomsburg, 2010, ebook.
  11. Bell, Derrick, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth, New York: Bloomsburg, 2010, ebook.
  12. Piercy.
  13. Bell.
  14. Tennyson, Lord Alfred, “In Memorium A.H.H., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Memoriam_A.H.H., accessed 2/26/21.

Spider web photo by freestocks from Unsplash

Copyright © 2021 Barbara E. Stevens All Rights Reserved