Work

For our culture, work is the serious business of life, the essential thing of life, *real* life activity.

Non-work is 'spare time', leisure, the implication is of unstructure, loose, disconnected, of personal importance only [as opposed to work being societal, the thing you do for society and others]

There are historic reasons - we worked for survival, it was an activity demanding most of one's waking hours [six days a week] or else starvation.

So work is your contribution to the survival of your society [that's why we get paid for it], which is why we tend so strongly to define our place in society by our job.

The other things we do, however interesting or worthwhile in themselves, are ornamental, incidental to our *real* contribution to the world. They are what society can let us indulge in because it can survive momentarily without our hand on the wheel [a largely material view of survival].

The problem is, for most of us, church falls into the 'spare time' category, and so it is hard for us to avoid trivialising or privatising it, even if only subconsciously, because that is the basic mindset of our society and we all pick it up to some degree.

And so when we are at work it is hard to maintain a sense of connectedness to the rest of the Body of Christ, to bring into the workplace our sense of the Kingdom of God that we have been part of at the weekend - because the doors shut behind us on Monday morning severing us from our weekend activity and we are in the 'real' world again. The 'real' world of work is self-referential, it only takes seriously those activities which are part of itself - has only reluctantly addressed as important the need for leisure activities, and then only because it maintains/increases the capacity of people to do work.

In a society where most people work on the land or close to it [and which is not scientifically adept], God is a real part of the productive economy, being the basic and necessary provider of the raw materials, weather etc.

In an industrial/scientific society humanity feels self-sufficient, lives in a man-made world largely insulated from natural factors outside human control which might make us acknowledge our dependency on God. So [even if believed in] God's sphere of operation becomes purely 'spiritual' - which being invisible and hard to define in terms of measurable results, is too easily disregarded in favour of the hard rational facts of food in bellies and money in pockets.