This summer, I decided to return to the city of Pittsburgh for my July vacation. I have been there twice before, and I continue to be captured by Pittsburgh’s big city feel like that of Philadelphia where I grew up, but also with its mid-West hospitality which I experienced in every encounter I had there. During my recent visit, I spent a good deal of time wandering through museums, spending a holiday with art and history. In addition to learning more about Western PA icons like Andy Warhol and Fred Rogers, I was also drawn into the settings of various paintings and photographs of the Steel City, both past and present.
When I viewed the images of working-class neighborhoods, bridges, and riverways, I could not help but reflect on the many people whose livelihood depended on the products of industrialization so prominent in the Steel City. I saw steel factories with their smokestacks billowing across the city skylines formed by family homes, churches, and warehouses. I also viewed illustrations of furnaces in which hot molten iron is poured creating colorful sparks.
All of this brought to my mind how labor is inherent in the fabric of the streets and workplaces of my native City of Brotherly Love. Likewise, they are found in similar vestiges of factories and farms across eastern Pennsylvania not so dissimilar to those of Pittsburgh, past and present, which caught my attention. Most of all, as an Oblate of Saint Francis de Sales, these thoughts reminded me of the times and circumstances in Troyes, France where our Oblate founder Blessed Louis Brisson (1817-1908) lived, ministered, and founded our congregation at the end of the nineteenth century. One of his first ministries was to educate and care for the young teenage girls who worked in the textile factories. He established clubs where these young women could safely gather, become educated, and build a community with values counter to the vices experienced in the working rooms and streets of the industrial city.
A man who enjoyed the joys and challenges of labor – whether in his teaching and preaching, or his scientific studies and scientific inventions, Louis Brisson formed a spirituality of work. This spirituality drew upon his prayerful practice of the Direction of Intention of his patron Saint Francis de Sales as handed down to him via the Sisters of the Visitation of Holy Mary for whom he was chaplain. Not only did he direct his work – either manual or intellectual – to the glory and praise of God in the present moment, but our founder also saw how such labor reflects the same activity done by a Creator who fashioned the universe. From the smallest molecular particles to the vast constellations of stars, the created world, of which we are a part, was designed and fashioned by a loving God who desires to save all his creations, especially the human family.
Seeing work as “excellent” and a “thing of awe and blessedness,” Father Brisson recognized how when we work, we cooperate with God, and such “cooperation in the action of God is sanctifying.” Not only does our work take on this special character, but it also demonstrates respect and love for the objects of our labor. In a retreat conference given in 1888, Louis Brisson reminded his Oblate confreres that their daily work “will take on a character so elevated, so complete in its union with God that we will treat all things as holy and sacred and as requiring our attention, our care, and our devotion.” Thus, there is great value in the daily work we do, no matter what kind of labor that may be. Reflecting on my Pittsburgh experiences, I see this evident in the manual factory labor of construction materials, the intellectual and social labor of education given through Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood, the artistic labor viewed in Warhol’s commercial art and silkscreens, and the hospitality labor offered in the hotel and restaurants of the city in which I vacationed.
We began this week reflecting on the dignity of work and labor, so may we continue to recognize the blessedness of our daily labors – small or large, by hand or by mind, and give praise to God for the holiness of His creation of which we contribute to its fashioning and cultivating. May God be blessed!
Bro. Dan Wisniewski, OSFS
Provost
DeSales University
