So here are my conclusions on how to react to the world with specific reference to work.

Basically it boils down to this : Culture is not a monolithic power we must defeat. It is the battering weather conditions that people, harassed and helpless, endure. We are sent out into the storm like a St. Bernard with a keg around our neck, to comfort, reach, and rescue those who are thirsting .. * God has not called us to change the weather. Our primary task ...our best hope for lasting success, is to care for individuals caught up in the pounding storm.-Frederica Mathewes-Green Heres The rest of my conclusions. None of these is original thought, it all is taken verbatim or summarized from other various sources : Relate to the world within the dialectic of affirmation and antithesis. If there are benevolent consequences of our engagement with the world, it is precisely because it is not rooted in a desire to change the world for the better, but rather because it is an expression of a desire to honor the creator of all goodness, beauty, and truth, a manifestation of our loving obedience to God, and a fulfillment of Gods command to love our neighbor. The objective is to retrieve the good to which modern institutions and ideas aspire, to oppose those ideals and structures that undermine human flourishing, and to offer constructive alternatives for the realization of a better way.

We are to pursue others, identify with them and offer sacrificial love. Do whatever we do as working for God - what we do has value when done for God, -as opposed to idolizing work as god, sacrificing family and health to A job etc Do what we can to create conditions in the structures of social life we inhabit that are conducive to the flourishing of all. Generate relationships and institutions that are fundamentally covenantal in character, the ends of which are the fostering of meaning, purpose, truth, beauty, belonging, and fairness. Organize life not around market principles (ie maximize benefits minimize costs) but ethical principles. Employes and customers have greater intrinsic value than just as mere tangible economic actors . Employers should ask themselves : What do employers owe employees besides payment foe services? Employees should ask themselves :What do employees owe customers besides mere service? Create space that fosters meaning purpose and belong which resist the instrumentation that reduces value of people and

the worth of creation to mere utility - whether that utility is oriented toward market efficiency, expanding power, or personal fulfillment. Use gifts, influences, and resources (even though they cannot be justified on economic grounds because it cannot measure up to contemporary standards of efficiency) to provide physical, intellectual, and social health for the community. Accommodate yourself to existing social conditions and call them into question by being different. Do not resist work but strive to make it more "full" - more humane, more just, more beautiful etc (true example - check out girl at supermarket would always ask about customers families and say she would pray for them. Dozens of customers showed up at her funeral.) Our greatest moral obligation is to develop an unselfish love for God, our neighbor, and the realization that all of mankind is our neighbor. We must see the foremost order of morality as a transformation of the heart, and not in the enforcement of a legalistic code of external behavior. "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery; it means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist." - Emmanuel Clestin Suhard

55 Maxims from Thomas Hopko

1. Be always with God. 2. Pray as you can, not as you want. 3. Have a keepable rule of prayer that you do by discipline. 4. Say the Lords Prayer several times a day. 5. Have a short prayer that you constantly repeat when your mind is not occupied with other things. 6. Make some prostrations when you pray. 7. Eat good foods in moderation. 8. Keep the Churchs fasting rules. 9. Spend some time in silence every day. 10. Do acts of mercy in secret. 11. Go to liturgical services regularly 12. Go to confession and communion regularly. 13. Do not engage intrusive thoughts and feelings. Cut them off at the start. 14. Reveal all your thoughts and feelings regularly to a trusted person. 15. Read the scriptures regularly. 16. Read good books a little at a time. 17. Cultivate communion with the saints. 18. Be an ordinary person. 19. Be polite with everyone. 20. Maintain cleanliness and order in your home. 21. Have a healthy, wholesome hobby. 22. Exercise regularly. 23. Live a day, and a part of a day, at a time. 24. Be totally honest, first of all, with yourself. 25. Be faithful in little things. 26. Do your work, and then forget it. 27. Do the most difficult and painful things first. 28. Face reality. 29. Be grateful in all things. 30. Be cheefull. 31. Be simple, hidden, quiet and small. 32. Never bring attention to yourself. 33. Listen when people talk to you.

34. Be awake and be attentive. 35. Think and talk about things no more than necessary. 36. When we speak, speak simply, clearly, firmly and directly. 37. Flee imagination, analysis, figuring things out. 38. Flee carnal, sexual things at their first appearance. 39. Dont complain, mumble, murmur or whine. 40. Dont compare yourself with anyone. 41. Dont seek or expect praise or pity from anyone. 42. We dont judge anyone for anything. 43. Dont try to convince anyone of anything. 44. Dont defend or justify yourself. 45. Be defined and bound by God alone. 46. Accept criticism gratefully but test it critically. 47. Give advice to others only when asked or obligated to do so. 48. Do nothing for anyone that they can and should do for themselves. 49. Have a daily schedule of activities, avoiding whim and caprice. 50. Be merciful with yourself and with others. 51. Have no expectations except to be fiercely tempted to your last breath. 52. Focus exclusively on God and light, not on sin and darkness. 53. Endure the trial of yourself and your own faults and sins peacefully, serenely, because you know that Gods mercy is greater than your wretchedness. 54. When we fall, get up immediately and start over. 55. Get help when you need it, without fear and without shame.

A poem and some thoughts on work by the farmer Wendell Berry :

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that wont compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didnt go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection." Wendell Berry

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it." Wendell Berry "Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." Wendell Berry

"Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare." Wendell Berry "A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance." Wendell Berry "The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray." (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)" Wendell Berry To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.
The old and honorable idea of vocation is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know and know how to do when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?

Even to ask such questions, let alone answer them, you will have to refuse certain assumptions that the proponents of STEM and the predestinarians of the global economy wish you to take for granted.

Wendell Berry