The Virtue of Prudence: Meaningful Work

Exploring how the virtue of prudence can help us live more meaningful lives has led us to examine our leisure. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the virtue of knowing what is truly good and making a plan to get it can also help us make our work more meaningful. It also shouldn’t surprise us that our pragmatic, secular, humanistic, frenetic culture has led us down the wrong path.

Distorted View of Work

Distorted views of work flow from the errors adopted by our culture. Pragmatism and utilitarianism place value only in what is useful. Humanism is in many ways opposite of pragmatism. It’s the belief in unlimited human potential and focuses on personal fulfillment. Secularism or materialism is the belief that the physical world is the only reality. These philosophies share a sometimes uncomfortable alliance within modern culture. Our distorted view of work tends to be a mixture of all of them.

• Pragmatism: utilitarianism – an excahnge of skill and labor for money.
• Humanism: defining our identity by what we do and seeking fulfillment in our work. The value of our life is determined by what we accomplish.
• Secularism: since the physical world is all that exists, our work becomes all-consuming as our main temporal activity. We sacrifice our time, our relationships, and even our health for the sake of material activity and material gain.

The reason these distortions are so convincing is that there is a partial truth in each one. However, the view of work that they give us robs our main daily activity of its true meaning and purpose. It can therefore leave us anxious, exhausted, frustrated, and empty.

The Virtue of Prudence and the Meaning of Human Work

An important part of exercising prudence is to understand our life’s priorities and to order our lives around them. Our greatest priority is our relationship with God. Our next greatest priority is our relationship with others, especially those who fall within our vocation to love as Jesus loves. These priorities help us to understand a deeper, more satisfying approach to work.

First of all, work is a participation in the creative act of God. Through our labor, we make use of the raw materials of creation and we craft them into forms that are more useful for human flourishing. This is really the source of private property as we invest ourselves into the common resources of creation and in a real sense make them ours. That’s why we have the right to an exchange of goods if we do the work for the benefit of others. We invest ourselves in our labor, offer that labor for the good of others, and receive what we need (usually in the form of money but sometimes in barter) in exchange. In this way, we serve God, others, and ourselves in the same act.

In his encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), Saint Pope John Paul II teaches that human work is at the same time a reminder of the consequences of original sin in its toil and part of human dignity in its ordained mastery over Creation. He points out that work without toil was part of God’s original plan before the Fall, and its purpose was participation in the act of Creation. This is what God means in the book of Genesis when He tells humanity to have dominion over all of Creation.

Secondly, our work is the way we use the skills and abilities that God has given us in order to serve our community. Contributing to the “common good” is a vital part of living as part of a society. So humanists correctly identify work as part of the way we can achieve fulfillment, but our fulfillment really comes from using our labor to serve others and to serve God in love.

Thirdly, most of us have jobs and career to support our families. This dimension of work is seriously downplayed in our culture today. But the money we earn at our jobs is part of the vocation to marriage and family life for the begetting and education of children.

Reflect Then Live

The virtue of prudence calls us to examine our lives with careful reflection, and then to live out the greatest good and deepest meaning. Taking time to reflect on the meaning that God gave to human work from the very beginning of Creation can rescue you from the sense of hectic hopelessness that can grip our hearts in the modern secularized world. Then approach your work with an attitude of loving service and see how your attitude toward the “daily grind” changes. This is another example of how prudence can reach into every area of our life and lead us to the greatest possible good.

This is what makes prudence one of the key spiritual virtues for building a lay rule of life. If you’d like to learn how to develop the virtue of prudence and the other spiritual virtues, please explore the special opportunity to get more involved with From the Abbey below. Rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith!

Brought to you by Jeffrey S. Arrowood at From the Abbey, dedicated to helping you rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith so you can grow in intimacy with God.