A book review: Sanctify Your Daily Life

​“Work is man's original vocation,” wrote St. Josemaria Escriva. “It is a blessing from God, and those who consider it a punishment are sadly mistaken.”[1] This theological reality is communicated to us early within scripture. In the second chapter of Genesis, prior to the fall of Adam, we are told that the Lord “took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”[2]

Yet in our contemporary, modernized society, it is even rare for farmers to push ploughs with any regularity. Instead, as technology has expanded, more and more people have found themselves buried under a perpetual deluge of emails and invisibly tethered to their employers through their smartphones. Work as we know it bears little resemblance to the horticultural endeavor blessed in Eden. The passage of time seems to have transported the ennobling task assigned to Adam from the idyllic backdrop of Eden to the figurative Jerusalem of the industrial revolution as described by Blake: “And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?”[3]

Given the world in which we live, it is easy to understand why many often assume that the sin of Adam has deformed the nature of work in its very essence. The disparity between what was and what is has inclined many to think of work as something which ought to be overcome in order to pursue greater spiritual endeavours.

The Catechism, however, teaches us that “work is for man, not man for work.”[4]
Only through fulfilling both the social and spiritual duties attached to work do will fully cooperate with God’s plan. Rather than presenting a stumbling block to spiritual growth, work offers us solid steps upon which we can ascend closer to the Lord.

To engage in work in a way that will allow an individual harvest its spiritual fruits, one requires a deep understanding of the purpose and nature of work. In “Sanctify Your Daily Life: How to Transform Work into a Source of Strength, Holiness and Joy”, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski ably guides the reader by clarifying misunderstandings relating to the theology of work and offering concrete spiritual advice in everyday contexts.

Mentor and friend to St. John Paul the Great, Wyszynski demonstrates a personal understanding of the practical challenges of work: monotonous tasks, limited resources, intensifying responsibilities, time constraints, office politics, etc. Writing in post-war Poland, he also anticipated the challenges that have accompanied technological change, warning that as human work moves from a creative endeavor to one of procedural execution, technology descends from a “triumph of the human brain to being its enemy.”[5]

While systematically describing the spiritual virtues which are developed in work, Wyszynski also offers profound insights into the accompanying psychological and sociological hurdles which are present within our hearts, our minds and our work communities. As such, the text reads as a stimulating blend of both spiritual treatise and a business ethics guidebook.

Guided by Cardinal Wyszynski, the reader will come to understand that “the result of all human work should be not merely the perfecting of the thing produced, but also the perfecting of the worker; not merely external order in work, but also inner order in man.”[6]

[1] Furrow, 482
[2] Genesis 2:15
[3] William Blake, “Jerusalem”
[4] Catechism, 2428
[5] Page 27
[6] Page 141

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Written by Theodoric Nowak, Director of Social Justice & Outreach Ministries