The school bell chimes at 3 p.m. and young children hurry to gather their books and escape the classroom.  College students celebrate reaching “Hump Day” and angrily lament the arrival of Sunday as a day when homework inevitably must be done and another Monday lurks just around the corner.  Adults complain about having to rise each morning for work and, with every birthday, rejoice at being one year closer to retiring peacefully for the rest of their days.

These are small examples of an endless cultural mantra.  Young and old, we seem to be united in avoidance and dislike of work.  Even those of us who enjoy our particular jobs often find work difficult and tire easily when performing necessary tasks.  We spend our working days always looking forward to the next weekend, the next vacation, the next time when no exertion will be expected of us.

But as college students, much of our future depends upon our ability to successfully manage constant responsibilities.  Having been diligent enough to be accepted into Notre Dame, we know how essential hard work is to achieving our goals.  We know, too, how easily life can devolve into a continuous stream of activities—problem sets, papers, club meetings, student council, service, sports, tutoring—and how quickly we can forget the big-picture purpose of the rat race we run.

Work is a universal challenge of human life, and despite the fact that today’s men and women dread working, most of us bear responsibility for completing one task after another.  Why do we hate that which composes so much of our activity and comprises such a significant portion of our lives?

At the beginning of the second creation account in Genesis, it is said that “the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground” (2:5).  Before Adam even lived, God recognized a void where man’s work ought to be.  He created Adam and Eve out of love and made them stewards of creation, to manage the resources at their disposal—in short, they were made to work.

With the Fall, however, the sin of Adam and Eve ushered many negative consequences into the world and cast upon the rest of mankind the weight of a nature marred by original sin.  Among these hardships was the fact that work became difficult and resulted in suffering.

“Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life,” God says after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Work was always intended to be a central part of human life, but it was with this sin that work began to involve toil.  As fallen, too, we cannot avoid the necessity and difficulty of human work.

There is, however, a way to give meaning to—and find fulfillment in—the ongoing tasks that consume our earthly lives.

Gaudium et spes speaks to this problem directly, emphasizing the importance of work done well.  Through his work, man “can exercise genuine charity and be a partner in the work of bringing divine creation to perfection,” the document reads.  “Indeed, we hold that through labor offered to God, man is associated with the redemptive work of Jesus Christ.”

This is the key to changing our perspective: sharing in the redemptive power of the Cross.  By sanctifying the daily grind, we can give purpose to that which seems meaningless and bring energy to tasks even when we are too tired to feel our original motivation.

Such a view of work—as powerful and redemptive—is captured especially by the mission of Opus Dei, a personal prelature of the Catholic Church.  Founded by St. Josemaría Escrivá in 1928, and approved by the Church in 1950, Opus Dei is particularly dedicated to the sanctification of daily work.  One of its central themes is that men and women can transform ordinary tasks into prayer simply by completing them with care and offering them to God.

Having attended an Opus Dei school for grades 7-12, I have spent the last 9 years hearing this message on an almost daily basis.  I can remember countless instances when I grumbled to my mom about having to suffer through boring pre-calculus homework or sweating through another day of softball conditioning.  Her response was almost always, “Offer it up.”  Now, in college, I remind myself of this mantra often, when one task or another becomes particularly tedious.

These moments of ordinary life, rather than being wasted in complaint or frustration, can be transformed into expiation for our sins and those of others.  This outlook gives a supernatural purpose to seemingly pointless, unpleasant, and repetitive duties.

The notion that such sanctification is for everyone is another core feature of Opus Dei’s teaching.  Escrivá’s foundational purpose was to proclaim the universal call to holiness, to show all men and women that they are meant to be saints.  This sentiment was bolstered in the writings of the Second Vatican Council, and has become more commonplace in contemporary Christian understandings of the lay life.  In the view of Opus Dei, work is a central feature of humanity’s path to sainthood.

“Sanctifying one’s work is no fantastic dream, but the mission of every Christian—yours and mine,” Escrivá wrote in The Furrow.  In The Forge, he counsels, “From there, where you are working, let your heart escape to the Lord, right close to the Tabernacle…”  For most of us, the journey to Heaven will be a simple one, and Opus Dei teaches us to sanctify our ordinary lives by working as perfectly as possible, with the greatest love.

Rejecting the early Christian idea that the difficulty of work was punishment for original sin, Escrivá espoused the belief that human work is inherently noble, and that, despite its tediousness, man is fulfilled through his work.  This view is vastly different from the modern dialogue, which seems to perpetuate the notion that work is something we finish as quickly as possible in order to reach “me time,” or our entitled moments of relaxation and laziness.

There is, of course, a place for leisure in this picture of human life.  The sanctification of work does not mean that one needs to spend all of his time working.  In fact, such an idea is opposed to the goal of Opus Dei.  Despite the cultural resistance to hard work, there is certainly a tendency to become overly absorbed in one’s career to the detriment of family, friends, and health.  The proper mentality is to apply oneself to one’s employment responsibly while still enjoying quiet time and cultivating social and religious life.

Another promising aspect of this vision of work is its capacity for universality.  Opus Dei holds that a prominent lawyer and a stay-at-home mother are both equally able to sanctify their work.  A barber can offer his day of haircutting to God just as effectively as the President of the United States can offer his busy schedule.  There is no preference given to one occupation over another; each person is capable of sanctifying any task he or she must perform.

In a March 24, 1930, letter, Escrivá wrote that “all the pathways of the earth can be an occasion for meeting Christ.”  He related a tale in Friends of God about his visit to the cathedral in Burgos, Spain, an anecdote that illustrated the importance of performing even the most simple work in the presence of God.

“I used to enjoy climbing up the cathedral towers to get a close view of the ornamentation at the top,” Escrivá writes, “a veritable lace-work of stone that must have been the result of very patient and laborious craftsmanship … I used to point out that none of the beauty of this work could be seen from below.

“I would say: ‘This is God’s work, this is working for God!—to finish your personal work perfectly, with all the beauty and exquisite refinement of this tracery stonework.’ … The men who spent their energies up there were quite aware that no one at street level could appreciate their efforts.  Their work was for God alone,” the letter continues.

This understanding of work is one that can give meaning to anyone’s life.  For college students—bogged down by week after week of tests and papers and looking forward to still more duties at a full-time job after graduation—the sanctification of work enables us to unite the completion of our responsibilities to the suffering of the Cross.  And not only for those of us in college; this sanctification is meant for all.

Escrivá wrote in The Way about unity with Jesus’ suffering and death by bearing the Cross in our work.  “As I raise my eyes from the microscope,” he says, “my sight comes to rest on the cross—black and empty.  That cross without a corpus is a symbol; it has a meaning others won’t see.  And I, tired out and on the point of abandoning my work, once again bring my eyes close to the lens and continue.  For that lonely cross is calling for a pair of shoulders to bear it.”

Alexandra DeSanctis is a junior political science major who has a bad habit of mishearing song lyrics.  Email her at adesanct@nd.edu.