“Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest,” Jesus promised. (Mt. 11:28) How many laborers down the centuries have heard those words and put aside their fishing nets, stethoscopes, computers, lesson plans, business reports, sewing machines, or grease jobs to turn their eyes to Christ and find in him the reassurance that their work counts where it matters most.

Though Labor Day is a secular holiday, it is also a holy day in many a worker’s heart, for Jesus, the Worker, the Healer, and the Crucified blessed the labor of our hands, our minds and hearts. He blessed the labor of our suffering and the labor of our dying. He has raised us up when we’ve been down, brought peace out of the chaos of our stumbling ways and planted our feet anew on right paths.

Have you, every now and then, wanted to go up and ask someone whom you’ve admired, “How do you do it? How do you get through your days?” As I’ve told in another column, I wanted to do just that when riding a bus carrying African-American women to their jobs in hotels and hospitals in Chicago’s Gold Coast area.

They were dressed, almost exclusively, in flat, white shoes, cotton skirts and blouses, with sweaters tossed over shoulders. Silent, they were, as though 6:30 were too early an hour for conversation. Or were they husbanding their energy for the tasks ahead? Were they praying?

I wanted to stand up in the aisle and ask them to sing a spiritual, as the bus passed smart shops with the latest fashions on Michigan Avenue. I didn’t, of course. Their traditional hymns were born in the suffering of their common slavery, hard-won treasures not easily shared with outsiders, no matter their hunger.

Centuries ago, men and women would trek into the desert to beg the hermits for a word, a message from the Lord, and I was sorely tempted to do the same, to ask those women for a word from the desert of their lives.

What Bible passages enabled them to face another day of peeling potatoes until their hands ached, or of leaning over beds to pull corners on fresh sheets hour after hour, or of carrying heavy trays of polished silver?

Jean Vanier tells of a Cleveland woman from the ghetto who told him, “I’ve walked with the Lord for 40 years.” Saints in white shoes and cotton blouses.

I left the bus and headed for the Grand Old Lady on Lake shore Drive, the Drake Hotel, where the lobby whispers of gentility from another era.

In the former Oak Terrace Dining Room, now known as The Drake Brothers, one can see Lake Michigan, stretching like an ocean to meet the sky, with diamonds sparkling on the waves beneath the morning sun.

Over breakfast, men and women, in smart business attire, seized the day, negotiating contracts in modulated voices, careful not to appear too eager for successful closures, upon which rested mortgage payments and orthodontist appointments, the subject of many a prayer while modern pilgrims fought the morning traffic.

Other laborers have simply come to relax with friends, seeking a touch of humanity before reporting to hospitals or law firms or brokerage houses in the area.

Still others are alone, choosing solitude and the morning paper. You might find an elderly man at a side table, wearing an impeccably tailored suit, frayed at the cuffs.

Time was, when he had been holding conferences like the younger visitors at the next table, but that day had passed. He breakfasts on oatmeal, coffee and toast, for his budget sends eggs benedict into the forbidden column.. His wife’s prolonged cancer had drained almost all their savings. Even the meager breakfast was a luxury, but since her death, loneliness had wrapped around him like a vise, making the spacious lobby and dining room a kind of emotional life jacket, where he might, on chance, meet an old friend and escape for some minutes from the feeling of anonymity.

Around lunch time, a number of workers from the bus and the patrons from the Drake will converge for Mass at Holy Name Cathedral, sanctuary for the homeless and millionaires alike, workers in the vineyard.

In his excellent book, Work and Love: the crucial balance, Jay B. Rohrlich, M.D. tells how devastating retirement can be for those who cannot find meaningful work in their leisure hours.

“Without specific work products to define and reinforce a self-concept, many people experience retirement as a stage in the death of the self. For them, the difference, emotionally, between retirement and actual death may be minimal.”

In nursing home after nursing home, the lament can be heard: “I wish I had some work to do. I feel so useless. I’m sure I could do something, if they would only let me.” Government regulations forbid the residents from doing so much as setting a table. Not easy to get up in the morning and see the hours stretching uselessly ahead. Finding meaningful work for the people is a formidable task for social workers and families alike.

Work can do more than pass the hours; it can actually save lives. In Man’s Search for Himself, Dr. Vicktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who developed the school of logotherapy, tells this story: “When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly my deep concern to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camp. For instance, when I fell ill with typhus fever, I jotted down on little scraps of paper many notes intended to enable me to rewrite the manuscript, should I live to the day of liberation. I am sure that this reconstruction of my lost manuscript in the dark barracks of a Bavarian concentration camp assisted me in overcoming the danger of collapse.”

Frankl goes on to say: “... mental health is based on a certain degree of tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become... What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

High on the list of planning for retirement, at least as important as one’s saving account, is meaningful work that one can handle with comparative ease and the least amount of expense as possible. Better than a dozen bottles of pills.

Happy Labor Day to each of you and your families! God bless and keep you working as much and as long as you are able, and enjoy what you are doing.

Peace and love. Amen.

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