Article December 16, 1967 Issue

What Is Work?

STELLA DENISE COUSINS

Many employed people are without joy and enthusiasm in their hearts. They trudge each day to an office, a shop, or a factory. They count the days to each weekend, the weeks to their vacations; they reckon up the years to retirement. Others, unemployed, sit idly at home waiting for the day when they will have something profitable to do. Both employed and unemployed seem to have accepted the false premise that mankind have no option but to submit to forces beyond their control—forces of competition, of supply exceeding demand or demand exceeding supply, of the survival of the fittest, of limited opportunity, of restrictions and controls.

A knowledge of Christian Science soon awakens us to see that limitations and frustrations may arise from false concepts of what work is and from failure to realize that work, rightly viewed, is necessary in human experience. Material activity never of itself brings true and lasting reward, but spiritual activity is both rewarding and satisfying. It has as its foundation the spiritual creation described at the beginning of the book of Genesis, which establishes without question that man is made in the image and likeness of God, infinite Spirit. From this basis we can understand not only that the real man is spiritual but also that all his activity is spiritual.

Spiritual activity is true work, of which our own particular job— management, teaching, bricklaying, housekeeping—can be seen as an individual expression. We can give to our work its full purpose and glory when we see it as the human manifestation, or expression, of the action of the spiritual idea, which is the real. Referring in her Miscellaneous Writings to the effect of the Christ, Truth, on human experience, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, says: "This action of the divine energy, even if not acknowledged, has come to be seen as diffusing richest blessings. This spiritual idea, or Christ, entered into the minutiae of the life of the personal Jesus. It made him an honest man, a good carpenter, and a good man, before it could make him the glorified."^{ Mis., p 166;}