The story of co-creation is the autobiography of every human life, both yours and mine. Responsibility for the world starts here, with you, with me. Life is not about traveling through. Life is about doing something that lasts beyond us, something that will eventually at least, bring the world one step closer to completion. Life requires that we do more than philosophize about what the world lacks. We must do something of ourselves to provide it. Otherwise, why were we born?

"Work," the Persian poet Gilbran writes, "is love made visible." The meaning is clear: We do not work for ourselves, we work so that others may not want. We work for the gain for the next generation. Work involves us in the exercise of world-building, of co-creation, and we must each of us,in each age, work in new ways to achieve it.

The Book of Ecclesiastes puts it squarely. "There is a time to gain," it says. There is a time to make a difference. There is a time to develop the best in ourselves so that we can make the best possible world for everyone else as well.

The truth is that the most telling indicator of the spiritual deterioration of the Western world may well be in its modern disregard for work. People work for money now, not for the sake of the work itself. People work so that they can do something other than work as soon as possible.

People work to be employed, not for the sake of creative expression. People work in segmented tasks that have no meaning to them. And so, ironically enough, we have separated work and life. Work is something we do because we have to do it, not something that we want to do because it is in itself fulfilling, meaningful, important to the world around us.

We work hard, yes, but we don't begin to live until after the workday is over. We work for personal profit now; we do not work for human gain or human expression. It is a sad commentary on creation. But with motives like those, it is possible to do anything of any caliber and never even realize the moral schizophrenia into which we have fallen. We have arrived at the point where people can work in nuclear arms plants and never feel an ounce of concern about the potential effects of their work.

We can work in places that dump chemicals in streams and rivers and lakes and seas without a quiver of conscience. We can spend our lives dallying in false advertising and slick brochures about barren land and cheap trinkets and never for a moment wince at the dishonesty of it. We can take sick days and use them for vacation time with impunity and do sloppy work without chagrin and turn mornings into one long coffee break and accept a wage for doing it and never even have the grace to blush.

Then we wander listless for years, wondering what our lives were really about. "We build statues of snow," the poet Walter Scott says, "and weep to see them melt."

Yet some of the basic questions of life are, "What am I doing and why am I doing it?

Who profits from what I do and who does not? What difference does this work make to the coming reign of God." The questions alone could change the world. They bring us to the mirror of life and ask us what we ourselves have done to make this world better or worse. Indeed, what the world needs now again is a conscious and conscientizing spirituality of work.

Work connects us to the rest of the world. It is our ticket to humanity, our permit to be alive. It is in our work that we share in a special way in the life of God. But the obstacles to a spirituality of co-creation run deep. Comfort, alienation, powerlessness and self-centeredness have a steel grip on the Western soul.

The notion that individuals can have whatever individuals can get turns greed into virtue in this society. We resent subsidized housing for the people who have been dealt out of the profit system, but we say hardly a word about the overruns and tax exemptions and sweetheart deals that keep corporate profiteering a ruthless business in America.

We criticize how the poor spend their food stamps but find no problem at all in the practice of cutting corners on tax returns. We forget that God will judge the poor on honesty and us on generosity.

We use the poor of other countries to provide labor at slave wages. Indeed, we export our jobs but not our pension plans or our fair labor practices or our wage scales. We use work to exploit people, in other words, rather to liberate them. We would like a better world but we ourselves go on sustaining this one by our silence, by our acceptance, by our assumption that what is now must ever be.

Somehow the idea escapes this generation that we have the responsibility to change it one heart at a time. Instead, the goals of this age have become disturbingly small. Past ages worked for the good of their children. We work for ourselves and leave our children to correct what we will leave behind - garbage in space, garbage in our waterways, nuclear garbage in our landfills.

In the making of assembly-line money, we have lost the vision that makes for holy responsibility.

Industrialization began the process that computerization now hastens at breakneck speed. Devoid now of creative manual labor, we no longer see the results of our work. We do not make products anymore. We count rivets or we stack paper. No one does the whole job. Compartmentalization has limited our sight, robbed us of a view of what we are really doing in life. Serfs never it had it so bad. Serfs saw a crop through from beginning to end, lived off of it themselves, canned it and planted it again. They knew the effects of what they did or didn't do and they knew them in their own lives.

We need new ideals of work. We need a heightened sense of sacramentality. We need to realize that everything that is, is holy and that our hands consecrate it to the service of God. A spirituality of work has seven major characteristics:

1. It sets out to create our private world anew: When we sweep the street in front of a house in the dirtiest city in the country, we bring new order to the universe. We tidy the garden of Eden. We make God's world new again. When we repair what has been broken or paint what is old or give away what we have earned that is above and beyond our own sustenance, we stoop down and scoop up the earth and breathe into it new life again, as God did one morning in time in order to watch it unfold and unfold and unfold through the ages.

When we compost garbage and recycle cans, when we clean a room and put coasters under glasses, when we care for everything we touch and touch it reverently, we become the creators of a new universe. Then we sanctify our work and our work sanctifies us.

2. A spirituality of work puts us in touch with our own creativity: Making a salad for supper becomes a work of art. Planting another evergreen tree becomes our contribution to the health of the world. Organizing a good meeting with important questions for the sake of preserving the best in human values enhances the humanity of humanity.

3. Work enables us to put our personal stamp of approval, our own watermark, the autograph of our souls on the development of the world. In fact, to do less is to do nothing at all.

4. A spirituality of work draws us out of ourselves and, at the same time, makes us more of what we are meant to be. My work develops myself. I become what I practice all my life. By trying again when trying seem futile, we come to test the limits of our strength and know the mettle of our lives.

5. Work that up-builds the human race rather than risks its destruction develops qualities of compassion and character in me.

6. My work develops everything around it. There is nothing I do that does not affect the world in which I live. In developing a spirituality of work, I learn to trust beyond reason that good work will gain good things for the world, even when I don't expect them and can't see them. And in that way I gain myself. I come into possession of a me that is worthwhile, whose life has not been in vain, who has been a valuable member of the human race.

7. Finally, a spirituality of work immerses me in the search for human community. I begin to see that everything I do -- everything -- has some effect on someone somewhere. I begin to see my life tied up in theirs. I begin to realize that work is the lifelong process of personal sanctification that is satisfied only by saving the globe for others and saving others for the globe.

Once upon a time, the ancients tell, past the seeker on a prayer rug came the beggars and the broken and the beaten. The pray-er was appalled and looking up to heaven cried out, "Great and loving God, if you are a loving God, look at these and do something!" And the voice came back from heaven, "I did do something. I made you."

A spirituality of work is that process by which I finally come to know that my work is God's work, unfinished by God because God meant it to be finished by me.

Floyd Brown: I really enjoyed your message. What you said is so good, about making our work really a meaningful contribution to life. But when we've got the pressures of trying to make a living, down-sizing, people without jobs, it's hard to focus on that. How do we get that kind of focus in what we do?

Joan Chittister: I'll tell you four things that I take as my own criteria. The first is: Am I doing whatever I'm doing the best I can do it? Secondly, am I giving an honest day's work for an honest day's wage? Am I myself being honest and just? Thirdly, do I know what my company does, and do I believe in it? Can I make the way I go into that office a ministry? And fourth, if none of that is true, if I am simply forced into a position where what I have to work for in this particular way is to put bread on the table, then my work in the world must be what I do outside that work. Work is more than the job that I'm in. Work is something to do about the way I spend my life, what I believe in, what I support in others, and what I do for no money at all.

Brown: I think we all reach a stage in our lives, though, when we question: What am I really contributing, what am I really doing in life? And, to focus on what you're doing after work, doesn't that take away from what you're doing at work, as your contribution to life if I say my contribution is going to be what I do at five o'clock this evening as opposed to what I'm doing here from nine to five?

Chittister: That is what worries me. People separate those two elements in this society anymore, and they're losing a sense of the value of their own life. I believe that when we get to the point in life where we're asking those questions, that's the point of sanctity.

Brown:  So it's healthy is what you're saying.

Chittister: Holy and necessary!

Brown:  And of course this is something that we can do in our religious experience as well and in discussions and getting together. Is this something that should be going on in the church or in the community or somewhere? At work? At our jobs?

Chittister: Ask every psychologist in town if it isn't. Because what we're seeing in the office day after day are people who think that their lives have been for nothing, and don't know how to make those lives valuable.

Brown: That's a wonderful thought; it's thought-provoking and we really appreciate it. Always a pleasure to have you, Sister. Thanks for coming by.