good work
”I didn’t know there was but one idea about work – until it is done, it ain’t done, and when it is done, it is.”
- William Faulkner, "Shingles for the Lord" quoted by Wendell Berry in an interview with Mindy Weinreb
“It is.” Those two little words at the end of that quote can be read in the fullest sense of the verb "to be." God reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3 as "I am who I am." Thomas Cahill writes in "The Gifts of the Jews" that we can also read this name of God to mean, "I am who am," which is to say "I am all there is. All that is, is me." This reading is reinforced by the first chapter of John's gospel: "Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made." Annie Dillard, in "For the Time Being" (which title, by the way, can also be read as "For the Time, Being") makes a useful distinction between pantheism, the belief that God is everything or, more correctly, that everything is God, and panentheism: the belief that God is in everything and its being is dependent on him, although his being is in no way dependent on it.
When we work well, when we find our work to be good as God found his to be good, we participate through his grace in the act of divine creativity, of bringing into being. Our work, and the fruit of our work, "is" as God's work "is," as God "is." Bad work, work that is merely done for an end that is not related to the outcome of the work, for money or prestige or power, is merely destructive. It takes away from the world and its apparent gains are illusory. It can not create. Good, creative work and the desire and willingness to do it must be at the heart of any understanding of sustainability. This is the work suggested by the psalmist in Psalm 90, which happens to be "a prayer of Moses;" a prayer prayed in exile, out of a longing for home; a prayer prayed in the face of the grim reality of the shortness of our lives, and the futility of so much of our effort:
"establish the work of our hands for us -
yes, establish the work of our hands."