Here's another quotation from Dorothy Sayers from the same essay mentioned in the previous entry. If you are not familiar with Sayers, here is a link to the Dorothy L. Sayers Society's brief bio about her. This quotation illuminates the need for workers who serve their work rather than the community and reveals the confusion of means and ends when the aim of the worker is merely serving the community with their work. This is a long one but well worth your time.[The] worker's first duty is to serve the work. The popular catchphrase of today [this was 1942 but still very relevant today] is that it is everybody's duty to serve the community. It is a well-sounding phrase, but there is a catch in it. It is the old catch about the two great commandments. "Love God--and your neighbor; on those two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."
The catch in it, which nowadays the world has largely forgotten, is that the second commandment depends upon the first, and that without the first, it is a delusion and a snare. Much of our present trouble and disillusionment have come from putting the second commandment before the first.
If we put our neighbor first, we are putting man above God, and that is what we have been doing ever since we began to worship humanity and make man the measure of all things...."Service" is the motto of the advertiser, of big business, and of fraudulent finance. And of others, too. Listen to this: "I expect the judiciary to understand that the nation does not exist for their convenience, but that justice exists to serve the nation." That was Hitler yesterday--and that is what becomes of "service," when the community, and not the work, becomes the idol. There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work....
The only way of serving the community is to be truly in sympathy with the community, to be oneself part of the community, and then to serve the work, without giving the community another thought. Then the work will endure, because it will be true to itself. It is the work that serves the community; the business of the worker is to serve the work (pp.111-114).
Ms. Sayers' thoughts here have widespread implications for the arts, economics, and any other vocation fitting for a person to enter.
4 comments:
And perhaps, when you're serving the community rather than the work, you end up with propaganda.....I'm thinking of art, specifically.
I love this quote. After 4 years of detox from bad church experience, it is only now that I feel like I can serve/work for the love of God. It seems a much more authentic way to live...
Indeed. Serving the work is serving God. Excellence in creativity, farming, or whatever is the mandate for the Christian. It is more authentic because it allows us to fulfill our chief aim--to reflect the image of God in us--his creativity and excellence (imago dei).
I also meant to add to the previous comment that such view of work as the one Sayers espouses in Creed or Chaos does not allow for the false dichotomy of sacred and secular spheres of reality--though the comment above does imply this without my having to spell it out.
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