I Feel His Love when I Work. Hallelujah.

Early Christianity took a similarly bleak view of labor, adding the even darker thought that man was condemned to toil in order to make up for the sin of Adam. Working conditions, however abusive, could not be improved. Work wasn't accidentally miserable--it was one of the planks upon which earthly suffering was irrevocably founded. St. Augustine reminded slaves to obey their masters and accept their pain as part of what he termed, in "The City of God," the "wretchedness of man's condition."

I am a waiter, as you who have read my bio know. Today, Labor Day, I am pulling a double shift.

While I was waiting to clock in for another period of indentured servitude, I read that paean to the worker, and instead of expressing rage or my customary bitterness, as you would expect, I smiled. I smiled because I realized that later today when I am suffering through the lash of words my boss will rain down upon me, when I am being summoned to a table by the rattle of ice in an empty glass, dismissed with the wave of an eater's hoof, I will be fulfilling my Divine purpose on Earth, making God smile.

I can see Him, walking about with a goofy grin on His face, shaking His head, holding His sides, a sight, one that provokes a seraphim or archangel into to asking, "What's up with You? It looks like You're about to bust a gut in the firmament."

"I'll tell you what's up," He will say in that well modulated baritone for which he is famous. "See that guy down there, mixing his spittle into that surly customer's merlot? Yeah, that guy, Loman. He pleases Me."