BY THE SWEAT OF THY BROW

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

2 September 2001

Many many years ago, my father decided he wanted to move to the Florida Keys. I didn’t particularly like my job at the time, so when he and my mother packed up their worldly goods into a trailer, hitched it to the old Chevy, and took off, I accompanied them as sort of a lark, just for the trip itself. I figured I’d stay with them as long as was fun and then would hitchhike back to California.

After a week of hard driving we ended up in Miami, where I landed a job washing dishes in the kitchen of a large family restaurant. I was the only white kid there in the back of the kitchen. Most of the dishwashing staff, and there was a large staff at this place, were African-American, although of course we didn’t use that term in those days. In addition to the African-Americans, a handful of the dishwashing staff were Afro-Caribbean. This was an amazing experience for a California kid. All of that staff were extraordinarily kind to me, and I remember many of them vividly even today.

I learned a lot during my brief time there, more than I even knew at the time. One thing I learned at the time was to swig rum from a common bottle when the bosses weren’t around. But, for another, I learned something about hard work, and how it can go when listening to each other, following the rhythm of shared labor, and aiming to getting the job done. It has stuck with me all these years, opening many facets of my life in many different areas. So I’m particularly grateful for that time earning a buck an hour and coming home bone tired, but also feeling I really earned that dollar.

We’re talking a very brief period here. We only stayed in Miami a month. The work was fierce and I’m not sure how long I would have lasted. It was bone-wearing work. But the focus of this whole trip was my father and this intention of his of getting to the Keys, to some dream of a Papa Hemingway existence where booze and fishing and manly companionship would ease the hurt of his now great pile of broken dreams. At least that’s how I see it today, so many years later.

But mainly, what I remember about that time is that hot work in that hot kitchen. All those hands joining to a task, feeding people, a multitude of loaves and fishes, and then the scouring and scrubbing and cleaning up. I remember the hard hard work, and all the feelings that surrounded that time. Both how good the work could be, and how little we were paid for that work. This is Labor Day weekend, and I think it can be a worthy enterprise for all of us to think about work, our work, for both good and ill; and what this work has done to and for us as people, as human beings.

Now, I find it particularly interesting that in our congregation here, as with any number of other Unitarian Universalist communities across North America, we honor Labor Day mainly by not doing anything. Even in churches that have almost completely reclaimed a full year round worship schedule, Labor Day is the one day still kept hallowed by absence.

I know people were shocked, shocked I heard, to learn I planned on being here today. More than that they were deeply surprised I’d asserted I would share a full-fledged, not drawn from the ministerial-barrel-moldy-oldie, sermon this day. Some of our leaders didn’t know how to respond, other than to share they planned on being at the Cape or in Maine or some such place for this auspicious occasion. Then they wished me well; and you, too.

I’m glad we’re here. Labor Day really is an interesting holiday, and I believe worth more attention than we usually give it. It was birthed near the end of the nineteenth century during great turmoil about working conditions and the right of workers to organize. Let me tell you, even thirty years ago, a buck an hour was an insult to the value of honest labor. There are lots of issues to address on a day like today.

Now there are several claimants to first assertion of a need for a holiday celebrating labor. But in a celebration of work itself, perhaps we don’t need to seek a single person out, and hold him or her up as the creator. Such a holiday is really about everyone’s work, after all.

It was out of that visceral knowing of how this really is about us all that by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, gradually the majority of states had formal celebrations of labor, of work. In 1894 Grover Cleveland signed the first authorization for the national observation of a Labor Day into law. Interestingly, most observers saw it as something of a cover for his involvement in a particularly violent suppression of union activity regarding Pullman train cars in that same year. It’s probably worth noting 1894 was an election year. And within those layers of irony, it is probably worth adding it didn’t seem to do the trick for Cleveland. His party suffered devastating losses in that election.

Four years later, in 1898, Samuel Gompers, who founded the American Federation of Labor, observed about Labor Day that it is "the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed… (It is now a time) that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it."

I don’t see this as the reality today. It seems to me for the most part we are not particularly conscious of Labor Day as a lull in the class wars. To my mind there is good to this shift and ill. Truthfully, I believe we should not lose sight of issues like living wage, and the connections and conflicts that always rise between those traditional categories of capital and labor. These issues of the relationships between workers and employers are profound, and the conversation definitely needs to continue. But, in fact, as I remember those hot days in that kitchen in Miami, such a reflection is ultimately not where I would like to go for this sermon.

For most of us these days, Labor Day is a lull between Summer and Fall; the beginning of a new cycle in our common life, a brief vacation before school and new energy is called upon in our various endeavors. I want to take advantage of that pause, of this pause in our lives, in the business, in the rush and tumble; and reflect just a little on what labor, what work really means at its deepest within our human existence.

Today, I want to largely leave the political and economic concerns, as important as they are, and to delve if only briefly into another aspect of our lives. Today, let’s spend just a little time reflecting on the nature of labor, of work, as a human activity. I remember the good of those hot days in that back kitchen, and I would like to take a little time to parse that out, to reflect on the deeper of our work.

The truth be told, we human beings have always had a problematic relationship with labor, with work. Certainly in no culture has it been more problematic than in what we are fond of calling "the West." Right at the beginning of our great western cultural myth, in the book of Genesis, as Adam and Eve are cast out of the primordial garden, God declares a list of curses.

They culminate with "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground..." Or, as we often rephrase it, by the sweat of your brow, you shall eat your bread… In this passage, with that poetic flourish, and a brief rubbing of our collective human faces in the dirt, our mythic ancestors are driven out of the garden. Then a cherub, one of the categories of angel, is set at the gate brandishing a flaming sword to keep them, and us, from ever returning.

Of course this isn’t just something in the Hebrew Scriptures. I’m sure just about everyone here knows that logia or saying of Jesus, recorded in both the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In Matthew’s version the good rabbi says "Why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin." In fact there is another point being made in that statement, but there is also a subtext with a negative assumption about work, one that has archetypal significance for us.

So often in our culture work is a curse, something we must endure. Whether we are washing dishes, sewing dresses or managing a thousand employees, we are all engaged in labor, in work. And, for the most part among us, it is seen as something that takes us away from something more valuable. But, what is that more valuable use of our time? What is it that we truly are called to? What is the heart of our lives as human beings? What is it we’re supposed to be about?

Our word work is of uncertain etymology. But, at some point enters northern European languages meaning in Webster’s Revised Unabridged, "exertion of strength or faculties; physical or intellectual effort directed to an end; industrial activity; toil; employment; sometimes, specifically, physical labor." It is with the term labor we find, I think, much of the hesitation or difficulty we often experience in our reflections on this fundamental human activity.

Labor seems to be an ancient word, one of those terms that go back to the Sanskrit and the hypothetical Indo-European. Labor derives it appears from labh, which means to get or to seize. Webster’s tells us labor means "physical toil or bodily exertion, especially when fatiguing, irksome, or unavoidable, in distinction from sportive exercise; hard, muscular effort directed to some useful end, as agriculture, manufactures, and the like; servile toil; exertion; work."

So complicated. For example, I remember when an old friend of mine was forced into early retirement. He had been a very important executive in the non-profit world, working at a national and sometimes even international level. There was a power struggle at the policy making level, and he lost. One day he was this important figure whose words and work were deeply valued by many people. The next day he’d cleaned out his desk into a couple of boxes and his keys were all confiscated by a pimply faced security guard not even half his age.

For weeks we his friends were deeply concerned for him. He stopped shaving. He didn’t bother to shower or put on clothes. Instead he lounged in his living room in his underwear, and holding onto a can of beer, a caricature out of a bad novel. His tastes didn’t run to television much, but let me tell you Richard Wagner can be a terrible accessory when one is exploring how far down one can go into emotional malaise. He had lost his work, and with it he had lost any sense of meaning in his life.

Fortunately for him, he rather quickly re-found the savor in life. First with more work. He signed up as a volunteer for various projects. Later, as his wife retired, he found joy in discovering the possibilities of play that accompany and enrich our work in a life-rhythm that can be beautiful and harmonious. I talk about play every now and again, most recently only a couple of weeks ago. And no doubt, I’ll return to that subject. But, today, I still think of those hands joining together to get the dishes washed, to my friend’s longing for a job; and I want to keep the focus on work.

In her powerful poem describing some of my own experience in a commercial kitchen, Maxine Hong Kingston sings about a "Restaurant." "The main cook lies sick on a banquette, and his assistant/has cut his thumb. So the quiche cook takes/their places at the eight-burner range, and you and I/get to roll out twenty-three rounds of pie/dough and break a hundred eggs, four at a crack,/and sift out shell with a China cap, pack/spinach in the steel sink, squish and squeeze/the water out, and grate a full moon of cheese./Pam, the pastry chef, who is baking Choco-/late Globs (once called Mulattos) complains about the disco,/which Lewis, the salad man, turns up louder out of spite.

"’Black so called musician.’ ‘Broads. Whites.’/The porters, who speak French, from the Ivory Coast,/sweep up droppings and wash the pans without soap./We won’t be out of here until three a.m. In this basement/I lose my size. I am a bent-over/child, Gretel or Jill, and I can/lift a pot as big as a tub with both hands.

"Using a pitchfork, you stoke the broccoli and bacon./Then I find you in the freezer, taking/a nibble of a slab of chocolate as big as a table./We put the quiches in the oven, then we are able/to stick our heads up out of the sidewalk into the night/and wonder at the clean diners behind glass in candlelight."

Life just as it is. Work just as we are. Like every human endeavor work is shadowed, nuanced, sometimes good, sometimes evil. No grown up should be paid a dollar an hour for their labor, not even thirty years ago. But there is so much more here, as well. The nuance takes us to who we are, and what we can be. Our need to work seems as deeply engrained within us as our need for a living wage, for recreation, for a break from work. There is a natural rhythm, that when we find it, when we enter the groove, and live it; can be a blessing beyond naming.

And that needs to be remembered. And that needs to be celebrated. And that needs to be felt from the depths of our bones. The problem is that we don’t often find the rhythm. Instead, we are caught in a grind, in the curse. Work should be a liberating possibility, and within the rhythm become an expression of the fullness of our humanity. But, instead, it often is merely what we endure, only what we struggle through, waiting for that time, however brief, of our liberation from toil.

But, today, this minute, not forgetting the rest of it, let us take a breath and celebrate the raw humanity of work. Let us remember how we can fulfill ourselves, and see the connections, and celebrate the physical, our bodies, our true and full nature, within nothing so good as work. There is nothing so precious as being of use. Let us celebrate the reality of being of use.

This is how we find the wisdom of Marge Piercy, who titles her poem so appropriately, "To be of Use." "The people I love best/jump into work head first/without dallying in the shallows/and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight./They seem to become natives of that element,/the black sleek heads of seals/bouncing like half-submerged balls.

"I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,/who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,/who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,/who do what has to be done, again and again.

"I want to be with people who submerge/in the task, who go into the fields to harvest/and work in a row and pass the bags along,/who stand in the line and haul in their places,/who are not parlor generals and field deserters/but move in a common rhythm/when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

"The work of the world is common as mud./Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust./But the thing worth doing well done/has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

"Greek amphoras for wine or oil,/Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums/but you know they were made to be used./The pitcher cries for water to carry/and a person for work that is real."

Today, is Labor Day. Let us celebrate; let us remember that joyful work that is useful, that is real. It is a good thing. And it is, shadowed and nuanced, as it is, a holy thing. Enjoy this Labor Day. And enjoy your labor as well as the pause. Stop, notice, and celebrate the fullness of the great rhythm of existence. This is the great work itself.

Amen.