Lately, I’ve been attempting to make stools from a grand old white oak tree that some friends had to have cut down about four years ago. One of the straightest limbs was milled into three-inch planks, which they stacked carefully in a storage unit. A furniture maker counseled us to allow roughly a year per inch of thickness for a green board to dry, so the lumber should be more than ready by now.
I was also gifted an old lathe this year, which I’m slowly learning how to use. Taking on the challenge of learning a new tool and learning which sections of a plank contain straight enough grain to turn into tapered barstool legs is a lot to take on all at once. But I’m having a ball. Well, most of the time I am. A line from the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is teaching me too: “There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.”
Woodworking is a spiritual practice for me because it lives very much in the tension Heschel names. As long as it’s the labor itself that I’m loving, time loosens its grip, my focus narrows to the sharp tip of my gouge and its just-so pressure and angle against the spinning length of oak. But when my mind turns to gain … when I decide I need to be finished with this thing in order to get onto another one more quickly … I’m in a very different frame of mind.
I don’t think it’s quite right to say a love of efficiency is the enemy here. Part of almost every maker’s joy is the challenge of saving a step or simplifying a process. There’s an elegance we recognize as efficiency in movement, and love can be expressed in different kinds of care for one’s labor. It’s when I begin to obsess only about output or results that misery encroaches on my joy.
When Christians speak of unconditional love, I often think of it as a moral achievement. As gaining ground on a way of loving that God likes better, which means God will like me better when my love is less conditional. But I wonder if the kind of love Jesus modeled and taught is really about those moments when any interest in gain just evaporates. Moments when you love only whatever or whoever you’re putting your energy into and, in a very real sense, lose all care for outcomes.
In a friendship, we know misery creeps in with conditions. When I’m using you to make something of myself or get something for myself, when some gain is in the mix, the friendship is something less. But when you’re simply captivated or delighted by the person in front of you or the conversation that’s unfolding between you, there’s no additional benefit you’re after other than what it feels like to be alive in a moment like this one.
In such moments we glimpse that unconditional love for the world isn’t just one more hard moral obligation. Unconditional love is the way of being in this world that we were made for. It’s the wildly free aliveness Jesus knew all human souls are searching for. Because there really is happiness in the love of labor. There really is misery in the love of gain.
Whew, there’s a LOT here! You’re so right about how the obsession with results robs us of joy. That’s exactly why I won’t ever use AI in my writing (though I use it for myriad other things). Practicing writing well isn’t quite turning oak into a stool, but it’s when I abandon myself to the process that I enjoy it the most. Thanks for this.
There is indeed happiness in the Love of labor.
Many times I wish I could impart this to persons of all ages. Recently I have watched the Joy of achievement in the labor my Granddaughter has put into her therapy sessions to once again walk. The evidence of her labor is reflected in her smiles of achievement and the patience of a loving acceptance. Thanks be to God for the patient grace afforded all who Labor with Love!!!