GroshLink

Another quote taken from cultureisnotoptional (cino) is given below. I first encountered material by Wendell Berry while an intern in Franklin & Marshall College's Geology Department the summer after my sophomore year in high school. His Big Picture thoughts brought down to challenges to daily habits and cultural structures are rich and challenging. Take a deep breath and meditate upon these words as they relate to how you understand your work/vocation . . .

The significance -- and ultimately the quality -- of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.

If we think of ourselves as merely biological creatures, whose story is determined by genetics or environment of history of economics or technology, then, however pleasant of painful the part we play, it cannot matter much.  Its significance is that of mere self-concern.  "It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing," as Macbeth says when he has "supp'd full with horrors" and is "aweary of the sun."

If we think of ourselves as lofty souls trapped temporarily in lowly bodies in a dispirited, desperate, unlovable world that we must despise for Heaven's sake, then what have we done for this question of significance?  If we divide reality into two parts, spiritual and material, and hold (as the Bible does not hold) that only the spiritual is good or desirable, then our relation to the material Creation becomes arbitrary, having only the quantitative or mercenary value that we have, in fact and for this reason, assigned to it.  Thus, we become the judges and inevitably the destroyers of a world we did not make and that we are bidden to understand as a divine gift.  It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signified nothing or has only a negative significance.

If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures--then all our acts have a supreme significance.  If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists.  All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use. -- Wendell Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation", in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community