My CLAC Shaving Mug
I collect coffee mugs – sort of. I have to add “sort of” because I am not a serious collector; I break and lose too many to have any need or desire to build “bigger barns” in which to store them. I just use them. Each one is accompanied with a memory – a speaking engagement, a special occasion, serving on a board and so forth. And then there is my Christian Labour Association of Canada 40th anniversary mug. I use it as my daily shaving mug and therein lies a story.
I grew up as a Dutch immigrant in the Vancouver, B.C. area; my father’s family were shopkeepers and my mother came from a line of peasant-labourers. And yet here I am with a Ph.D. and just retired from a job as a seminary professor. I love my vocation and am confident that it was exactly what God wanted me to do. I am also profoundly grateful for our immigration from the Netherlands when I was only three years old. My life in North America has provided opportunities and a rich Christian community life that I am not confident I would have had if we had stayed in Europe. God is good and I am deeply convicted of my childhood faith in his providence.
At the same time, my peasant, labouring roots are very strong. I spent a good deal of my childhood leisure time “working” with my grandfather and uncle on their dairy farm in Ladner, B.C. My high school summers were spent working on farms for $1.00 an hour, driving tractors, bucking hay bales, loading and unloading sacks of potatoes on a flat-bed truck and the like. The summer I graduated from seminary and was waiting to receive a call from a church, I took a job in landscaping knowing it would likely be the last time I did real work. That’s the peasant-labourer prejudice coming out: “real work” is milking cows, digging ditches, planting and harvesting wheat, driving truck, building a bridge, plumbing a house and planting trees.
The dignity of work
After more than 40 years in my vocation, in which the most physical work-related thing I regularly did was to climb the rolling ladder in my office, I do believe that reading and writing books, talking to and listening to students, thinking about God in dialogue with the great minds of the church, even sitting in committee meetings and marking exams – all of this is honest work and that I earned my paycheck legitimately.
But I also know that my kind of work and my position are rare privileges and that my body is spared much of the physical toll taken from those whose labour is physically demanding and for whom working conditions are frequently less than optimal. I am therefore grateful for those whose daily work sustains me and others by providing food and building the homes, hospitals, roads and bridges that make community possible. Then there are the many who sacrifice a great deal to rebuild homes and infrastructures after floods and tornadoes, who risk their lives fighting fires and wars, who protect and serve so that my living conditions can be so good.
And that brings back to my CLAC shaving mug. I begin each day by holding in my hand a tangible reminder of the dignity of work and give thanks for my own work, for those whose work makes my flourishing possible, and for the by now 60+ years that the Christian Labour Association of Canada has been an honourable and honest worker’s association and a witness to the Lord of our work. On this Labour Day 2018 I salute you for the work you do and for that testimony.
