8/9/53

(Scripture: Read Ephesians 6)

A Newspaper cartoon, appearing this past week in the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, depicted Korea in a box, and sawn in two by the magician of circumstance. The real magic now needed, and a major problem indeed, is for the magician (could he be the United Nations?) to get the two pieces together again.

Considering the vast difficulties involved, it will take some doing. But unless it can be done, Korea, like the Germany of the present time, will be a tinderbox of trouble. For the Koreans are passionately patriotic, proud of their own nation and dangerously unhappy over their present division. The gulf between (1) Western conviction that the majority should rule, with due consideration for the minority, and (2) the Soviet determination that the communist minority must rule, whipping all others into obedient conformity, is a wide chasm to span. But the temporary respite given by a precarious armistice must be used for just such heroic effort. Some way must be found for assuring the Korean folk that they will, in good time, have opportunity to become a reunited nation.

Picking up and putting together the pieces, after so serious a mistake as the forcible division of a nation, is no small task. It is easy to scramble the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle in a box, so that they are well mixed up. It takes vastly more time and patience to put the pieces together again in a unified picture. And the difficulty is immeasurable increased when some of the pieces have been deliberately broken and reshaped without reference to how they will fit into the others again. It almost requires the forming of a new puzzle picture.

Our personal lives are sometimes knocked to pieces. And we then need, more than by a mere trick, to pick up and put together the pieces, if not exactly as they were before, then in some new pattern that is still a worthwhile and satisfying picture.

Recently the books of Catherine Marshall, widow of the late Peter Marshall, have been widely read as “best sellers.” Peter Marshall was a Presbyterian minister whose last pastorate was in Washington, DC. Not only did he serve as minister of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, but he also served with distinction during the seasons of 1947 and 1948 as chaplain of the US Senate until his untimely death. A blow to the people of his congregation, to the Senate, and to his wide circle of friends, his death was of course a shattering blow to his wife. Those of you who read McCall’s magazine may have noticed that she has an article in its last issue (that of August) entitled “My Life Since ‘A Man Called Peter.’” The latter phrase in the title refers to one of the books which she wrote about her husband. The article sets forth some of the changes she has undergone as she puts together the pieces of her life in a new pattern that is even better, at some necessary points of service, than before.

Since she must do it, she is doing as well as she possibly may. Peter Marshall had a modest life insurance, but it was by no means sufficient to provide a living for his wife and their small son. So now she writes for a living, but more, because she likes to and can do it well. She says now that her most important inheritance from her husband was two cardboard cartons full of his notes from which she has searched out the materials for her books about him. During her marriage, her life had been definitely overshadowed by his. She fulfilled the many exacting demands laid upon one who is mistress of the manse. But her husband was the one in the public eye, and in hers. Since his death, she has, led by God, she believes, given disciplined attention to writing. Her physical surroundings have been different, she having moved from a large manse to a four-room apartment. Her vocation is changed. Her very relationship to her has had to be revised in time and manner.

But she has been putting together the pieces of a life that seemed shattered by the passing of her husband, into something very worthy -- a new kind of service, a more effective vocation than she had ever known before.

Each of us faces the fact, or the possibility, that we will have to put together the pieces of a life made different by some circumstance which we can not control. (Accident, bereavement, disablement, shift in jobs, community change.) Manufacturers have to shift their production to incorporate improvements over the old model; or to a new product, to meet the demands of a changing market in the desires of consumers. Statesmen have to shift the pieces of policy and statecraft to fit the probability that Russia now has not only the A-bomb, but the H-bomb. Attorneys have to keep up with masses of new legislation as the laws apply to the needs of their clients.

Suppose we give particular thought to the way our vocations fit together in the picture puzzle of life. Our work is important to us -- and to uncounted others. It is not necessary to prove that people want to work. It is a basic need that one have something to do, for complete idleness is foreign to our nature. We are a bit glib about the difference between work and play. And we sometimes say that one man’s work is another man’s play. A doctor at golf may be playing. But a professional golfer at practice for a tournament of professionals is at work. But for both it is a form of constructive activity, whether recreational or vocational.

People not only want to work, but most of them want to feel that their work is worthwhile, that it contributes to the value of life, that it may rightly be a source of pride. The carpenter with his plane, the surgeon with his scalpel, the attorney with a good brief, the architect with a well-executed drawing, the teacher with a workable lesson plan for the pupils, the musician with perfected art, the machinist with accurate tooling -- all have a pride in their work -- the feeling that they are doing something worthwhile, that fits rightly into the picture of community life.

Now and then one hears the joking, almost derisive, inquire, “What’s your racket?” The expression probably comes from gangland where the effort of perverted souls is to squeeze a dishonorable living away from the constructive effort or savings of others. How deep is our loss when the effort of some degenerates into a mere “racket.” It is not even enough that we “make money,” or “make a living,” or “build a success,” if we truly live only when we are away from our office, or bench, or stove or study. If our lives are to fit into the picture, with some sense of pieces that belong, we need a sense of vocation about our work, that assures us of its worth.

One observer says that those who now have the least sense of vocation and pride of accomplishment and respect for their own endeavor, are the middle classes, the middle-men; so-called white collar folk. There may be reasons for this attitude. There is a sort of snobbery attached to the professions and intellectual pursuits -- medicine, law, and other allied fields. This snobbery, if it be such, is not always within those fields so much as without the fields. One raises a son to be a lawyer; another to be a dentist; a third to be a surgeon. It is in his pride that it becomes snobbery, rather than in the thinking of the hard-working son.

A teacher? Well, yes, it’s a very good profession, but of course you won’t get rich at it, son. An engineer? There seems to be need for quite a few of them; and it does take a college or university degree. A machinist? Well, perhaps. A musician? Lots of artistic satisfaction about it, no doubt, but very precarious --- and so on. But the profession! Ah! (Dr. Sprague to RWK).

Well, if there is a snobbery of this kind about the professions, there is an inverted and equal snobbery, in some quarters, about manual labor, especially skilled work. This snobbery, where it exists, is aided and abetted by the Marxist theory that after all it is only the “worker” who produces. All that the middle man does it to squeeze a profit. The miner, the farmer, the carpenter, the tractor operator, does things. The white collar man is just a parasite on the working class.

Such thoughts, where they exist, are based on fallacy. They ignore the nature of the economy in which we live, and the true nature of production. Our modern society, with rapidly increasing national, and world, population, requires great division of labor. In this division, all participants are important to our society.

It is a marvel to most of us how a doctor can bring healing to the sick. But the doctor can not do it by himself. He needs, and makes use of, the services of nursing, a profession more numerous than his own. Ambulance drivers play a part, the brick layer is needed to build hospital walls, the glass-blower to form test tubes, the multitudes of chemical workers and biologists the medicines he prescribes, the pharmacist, the janitor who sweeps the floors, the receptionist to order the arrival and arrange the interviewing of patients, and countless others are absolutely essential to the doctor.

We advance or fail, forge ahead or falter, together. The price which our labor brings depends, in large part, on the need of others for it. When there was low demand in 1933, bank clerks as well as stone masons were on relief. Those producers of the very food to feed the body, farmers, worked at “made jobs” along the roads bordering their land to supplement their existence. It was a time of painful reminder that we all depend, each on the efforts, the welfare, of many others. The pieces have to be fitted together.

Take the matter of being a producer or a so-called non-producer. There is a fallacy in the very words. Does an oil worker produce oil on the drilling fields? No. He only does his part to take it out of the ground. He could take all the oil in Texas out of the ground and it would do no good in Iowa or New York without a vast army of refinery workers, scientists and executives, transport workers, distributors, even advertisers. All of these so-called middle men are just as essential as the driller if oil is to get from the subsoil of Texas to warm the homes of Minnesota, fuel the tractors of Iowa, the autos of Pennsylvania, the planes that take off from Chicago airport.

All the cotton in Mississippi is of no use if it stops with the grower. It is not even product without the machines, the fertilizer and all that assist the cotton farmer. It would never get to any man’s back as a shirt, without the host of folk in many vocations who transform cotton into thread; thread into cloth; cloth into shirts --- without those who move it from one place to another, who buy the shirts from the garment makers, put them on the shelves and in display cases, wait on customers, write up charges, make change -- all to see that a man has a shirt on his back.

Every person in the whole process of training, growing, transporting, merchandising, maintaining health, and so on, is a producer. He produces changes in condition, time and place; and all the pieces must be put together. If they fall apart, or are torn asunder by catastrophe, they must be put back together.

Listen to Edwin Markham’s lines:

To each man is given a day and his work for the day.

And once, and no more, he is given to travel this way

And woe if he flies from the task, whatever the odds

For the task is appointed to him on the scroll of the gods.

There is waiting a work where only your hands can avail,

And so if you falter, a chord in the music will fail.

Yes, the task that is given to each man, no other can do,

So your work is waiting, it has waited through ages for you

The nations surely need patient and skillful putting together. Personal lives need rearranging after minor and major changes. And the work of all of us must be fitted together in a sense of vocation.

For God is the Lord of order. His designs become known to us in marvelous ways as we seek to know them, and Him.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, August 9, 1953.