Today is St. Joseph the Worker’s feast. Let’s expand our idea of work, said Fr. John Cordero of Holy Family Artesia, “Work is simply our participation in the creative work of God. If we only work for ourselves, our ego, how vain is that the beneficiaries of our work are just us? God worked 6 days and shared this creative power with mankind. Our work is part of the creative process of God–it is part of creating people with wisdom and grace. Your children become wise because of your examples as parents – their wisdom is the fruit and can be the fruit of the wisdom that you plant right now. We can all be creative agents of God’s creative process, a sense of connectedness between God’s creative process and our work here on earth.”
The word ‘work’ is used by the Bible to describe God’s activity, Pope Francis said. God’s hands over this means you need to work so you can continue to be with God. Work is what makes you similar to God.
I want to earn the bread that I bring home.
An unemployed man who went to Caritas in Rome
In history, we read about brutality, of how they took slaves home to America. Even now, they are not free, forced to work, it is unjust. It brings men to live with trampled dignities.
We read about a gentleman in Asia, beating his employee, paid hardly nothing. That takes away his dignity, but also dignity from all of us, his brothers and sisters. There are amongst us, dayworkers, made to work minimum wages for 8 to 14 hour days. Or domestics, without health benefits and pensions. Every injustice you do to a person tramples on their dignity, but also to you, the person who trampled on theirs, you have lowered your own dignity by your injustice.
To create, to recreate, to work God’s vision happens only if we respect the dignity of workers. There are good employers who manage their businesses justly, even if they themselves lose. A businessman in Italy asked for prayers, “Pray for me as I don’t want to lay off anyone because it is like firing myself. St. Joseph, pray for us that there be work for all, to have work with dignity, not for workers to be slaves, a just wage.”
#peoplebeforeprofit #trustbeforegains are the values of an ex-prisoner, unjustly imprisoned by a rich corporate owner who covered up his son’s unjust crimes of assault and accidental murder, a 16 episodes of a Koreanovela, created by Gwang Jin, aired in South Korea, from Jan. 31 to March 21, 2020.
This has kept my attention for some nights and kept me thinking of the workers in Tyson chicken processing plant, whose working conditions have resulted in 40% of them testing positive for #CoronaVirus. It has kept me thinking about the 50 nurses and frontliners in New York and 150 nurses and frontliners, all Filipinos, have died in London, and who bore the frontline burdens of Coronavirus. Statnews.com‘s Lee McFarling described that 150,000 of nurses in the US are Filipinos and nearly 20% of registered nurses in California are Filipinos.
The #45thUSPresident responded by ordering chicken processing workers back to work, without ensuring their health and safety. It is akin to government imposed servitude for working slaves. This is also the period where USDA has relaxed its enforcement of health and safety regulations, given the federal government’s weakening of oversight and regulations.
This is also the period, over the 23 days of pandemic from COVID-19 that 614 billionaires’ wealth expanded from $2.9 trillion to $3.2 trillion, according to BusinessInsider.com. This is an explosion growth, while 30 million workers have applied for unemployment benefits, and in California, 5.3% unemployment rate, with 3.1 million filing for unemployment claims.
Lord, is Your anger forever? Fill us with Your love, shine it on Your children. Help them to be fair and just.
My prayer for today, as I attended two masses:
- Is it Your will, Lord that we reopen all churches, with more reverential beliefs in Your Powers? Grant us your grace to love more, each other. Allow us an in-person celebration of partaking in the Bread of Life, the Eucharist.
- Thank you, Fr. John Cordero for your beautiful homily of interconnectivity with the Lord’s creative process – including what we do in parenting, in working for a living, in raising our children and intending that we are all interconnected to God and glory belongs to Him.
- Blessed you, Pope Francis for making our world better than you found it, for letting us see that the indignities to laborers also degrades our collective dignities, which separate us from our innate goodness; that employers’ injustices to their workers trample not just their workers’ dignities, but also diminishes their own dignities, as well, as our dignities as men and women, created with goodness by Our God. Thank you for letting us see that employers’ indignities to their workers also trample on their consciences and separate their connections to the goodness of God’s creative hands. Thank you Pope Francis for your spiritual wisdom that is such a bright light.
With collective prayers during these livestreamed masses from March to April 2020, I witnessed God’s healing mercies to 5 folks who recovered from Coronavirus: 1 senior nurse in London, 1 young doctor in the Philippines and 3 blind triplets, all college students, living in a group home. Thank you for having us see Your Grace!
(Cover Photo) A capture of a spot where I attend mass, livestreamed. The heart-shaped ceramic of Mama Mary and child is a work of art, from Portugal. The sleeping St. Joseph is a gift from a high school classmate, Beatriz De Castro. The book, Revelations of Divine Love, is by Julian of Norwich, a 14th century hermit, whose story was shared in a homily by Bishop Marc Trudeau. The photos on my wall were taken by Enrique de la Cruz, my husband, a steady anchor of baked goodness from breads he baked, to the crops he grows in our backyard, daily jokes and impromptu hugs plus teamwork in keeping our house clean and neat.
