As we take a day of genuine leisure from our labors in the form of family time, reading, self-improvement or tending to our hobbies, it’s worth reflecting on what work really means.

First of all, work can be joyful, just like working out at a gym, or playing a rigorous sport. These three facts are connected because they affirm the goodness of our existence in human bodies, as amalgams of flesh and spirit. As John Zmirak wrote last week at The Stream, one of the darkest and deadliest temptations to which human beings are subject is to see our bodies as worthless or even wicked, and our willful intellects as the only important thing about us. To the Gnostic, the body that you were born with is not a precious gift from the Creator, but a creaky and fragile Rube Goldberg that constrains your boundless spirit. It is of no significance, really, compared to your “freedom of choice.” Hence the political label “pro-choice” as an alternative to “pro-life.” Because for some people, sheer arbitrary choice is more important. They don’t want to live without it, and they’re willing to kill to keep it.

To them, human beings who don’t yet have, or who seem to have lost, the power of choice aren’t even people, really. They’re “products of conception” or medical “vegetables,” whose bodies we may treat as we choose to. That Gnostic path, which seems at first like the high road, leads only to boundless pride and fathomless cruelty. If you would be “as god” you will surely end up just like the fallen angels, and among them.

Work is also intrinsically dignified. It marks us off as persons who take seriously our responsibilities to ourselves, our families and the broader human community — who pull our own weight, who as long as we are capable care for ourselves, and contribute to the well-being of others. Some people mistake the meaning of man’s Fall as suggesting that work was imposed on us as a curse. Far from it. We had already been hard at work when the Serpent came on the scene. We were tending the Garden of Eden and playing peaceful steward to happy Creation. When he goaded us to grasp the power of God to “know” both good and evil, that piece of human hubris made it bitter to us. Suddenly work could be painful, dreary, repetitive and taxing to the spirit.

But God thought work important enough that he pressed it upon us as a necessity: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken” (Gen. 3:19). That wasn’t really a punishment so much as an instance of tough love: Only through work could we begin to discipline our wild, rebellious spirits. It would be through our work that we could show our love and dedication, and begin to prepare ourselves to accept divine Redemption when it was offered. So the worker pope, St. John Paul II, wrote in his first encyclical Laborem Exercens.

Because we are fallen, we try to squirm away from God, even from His blessings. The dark side of politics down through the ages could be summed up, briefly, as one group of people trying to force all the others to do their work for them, so they can live in idleness. The aristocrats of Egypt, the warrior caste of Babylon, the “free” slave-owners of Greece, the senators of Rome with their armies of conquered captives and a lazy mob in the capital, hungry for bread and circuses. All of them saw “work” as a hot potato that they would toss to somebody else, and each of them had a story about how “real” human life did not entail breaking your back to make things or honestly trade them. That was for the lesser beings, whom even Aristotle rationalized were “natural slaves.” True liberty, for the master class, consisted in accepting the fruits of others’ labors, and dilettantishly playing with ideas and objects of art.

The coming of Christ turned all of this on its head. Or rather, we might say, man had been standing on his head through all his history, and Christ planted us back on our feet. The Second Person of the Trinity was the hard-working son and apprentice of an independent businessman — a contractor, a carpenter, whose skill and sweat with a lathe was what brought customers calling, not his royal blood. Jesus preached to sweaty workers and stinky fishermen, and Christ’s most potent apostle was a tentmaker named Saul.

When the church’s high moral code attracted aristocratic followers, who had looked in vain among pagans for traces of old Republican, Roman virtue, there was indeed a danger that they would corrupt the Christian creed with their inherited veneration for slothful delectation. And indeed, uncritical embrace of Aristotle would lead many Christians astray on this point.

But much more potent than old Greek books was the example of the monks. It was St. Benedict who demanded of his followers that they work long, difficult days; he even taught them to think of their daily work as a form of prayer. So it was his monks, and those inspired by him, who painstakingly recopied every ancient book we still have; who cleared the forests and drained the swamps and built beautiful, durable abbeys.

We today need to remember more than ever the inner dignity of work. Not just brain work but arm work and back-breaking work of the kind that mows our lawns, digs out our sewers, puts out our fires, defends our country and enforces its laws. Increasingly, our dominant chattering classes have taught us to view the latter kinds of work with an aristocratic sneer. They think of the people in our army and police uniforms almost as alien mercenaries, or highly intelligent drones. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans are locked into cycles of intergenerational dependency on welfare, which deprives them of the character lessons and hard-earned self-respect that honest work brings.

My grandfather served his country as an infantryman in World War II and Korea, then came home from those freezing battlefields to work as a tool-and-dye maker for Ford. My father worked in a factory, volunteered for the U.S. infantry during the Vietnam War, then returned to work in a lumber yard. He moved on to serve as a shoe salesman at Marshalls, where he worked his way up to the office of corporate vice president. I myself was a high school dropout who joined the U.S. infantry, then emerged to work through college at stores like Home Depot, to wait tables and build movie sets, until I got my bachelor’s degree and drifted into the white collar world. And do you know what my biggest worry is? That I cannot quite fill the shoes of my father and grandfather. Their work shoes. But I will try.

Our culture has gone far down the Gnostic road to nowhere. We can walk back home by planting our feet straight back down on the ground, and picking up a hammer or a rake. We can learn how to change our own oil, and take off and put on a tire. We can teach such skills to our kids. And as we do it, we can work in spiritual solidarity with the carpenter of Nazareth. As the folks at Home Depot like to say, “Let’s do this!”