NINE TO FIVE

People who go to church do not come to pay their respects to God. They come to pray the liturgy, to do the public work of the church. They praise and thank God for the lives and the gifts they offer. They ask for their needs. They lament sickness and suffering. They carry these attitudes - praise, gratitude, petition, and lament - into their everyday world.

People also work at jobs. Or they seek work. Not just any kind of work. But good jobs that pay well, that have benefits. Jobs with a future: where the worker has some voice, some say. Where there is some measure of security, where the worker will not become redundant or disposable like a machine part.

And more. People want jobs where they feel some measure of satisfaction from their work. They do not want tedious, boring jobs. They do not want an atmosphere where they are degraded or subjected to gender or racial discrimination or sexual harassment. They want meaning, significance, and a sense of personal dignity and worth in their work.

Sometimes people don't think abut their work. They just do it dutifully day after day. Why do some people never think about their work? Sometimes because it is just a job. It pays the bills. It wears on them. Sometimes because people feel trapped. They hate the job, they dislike their boss, they feel no connection with fellow workers. They feel a lot of pain. They wait for the weekend. They wait for retirement.

Sometimes people feel that they do not count, that their work just doesn't matter very much. Or they sense that others look with disdain on them, their job, and their effort.

Alice McDermott brilliantly captures the thoughts of one mother at the breakfast table. Mrs. Holtzmann looks on her son, Dennis, who is about to leave for work.

"She'd lean up against the counter and watch her son, assessing: the cut of his suit, the knot in his tie, the prospects for his future. Although at that time in her life she had held only two jobs herself - one in a bakery in Brooklyn, one in the mailroom of the gas company - she had a considered opinion about what the workaday world could do to you, and it wasn't a very high opinion, either...

In part, she objected to the monotony of nine to five, the tedium, the hours and days you ended up wishing away, swinging from one Saturday morning to another like a monkey in the zoo. In part it was the anonymity: Forget what dreams you'd dreamt the night before, forget the adoring eye that beheld you over breakfast, or even the grief that had been wringing out your soul all night long, because the way she saw it, once you boarded the subway or the bus or joined the crawling stream of automobiles or found your space in the revolving door, the elevator, behind the desk or the counter or the machine, you became what you really were - you became, when you get right down to it, what you really were, one of the so many million, just one more...on a slow march to an unremarkable end (Charming Billy, 92-94).

Everyone is a unique creation. Every worker counts.