Labour Day is part of the rich Protestant heritage of Ontario, that once included Orange parades, excellent public schools, unequal separate ones, fall fairs with bagpipes, temperance societies, and the Lord’s Day Act to shut everything up on Sundays. One of our ancient Presbyterian countrymen, of ye Scotch extraction, once told me his mother had taught him that, “Labour Day is the day when we work especially hard, to show how much we have gained in diligence and efficiency over the last year.” That is the true Quixotic spirit, to say nothing of the Sisyphean, and as a product of that Scotch lineage myself, I salute it with tears in my eyes.
Granted, the first immigrants to Upper Canada were not all from Scotland, but were a multicultural brew. There were effete Englishmen, too, and care-worn Irish, Dutchmen, and Ukrainians soon enough—many of all these being transplanted Yankees. But the Scotch (please allow me this Canadianism, I’ll have no truck with “Scots” or “Scottish”) set the pace and called the tune, and if my reader doubts this for a moment, I will drown him in Gaelic chauvinism.
I am notoriously a Roman Catholic convert, and I’m aware that cradle Catholics often resented such “Scotch” institutions, though to my reasonably certain knowledge, most were never introduced with a view to alarming them. That was just a bonus; the chief motive was ever to manifest “who we are” as a people. My memory is supplemented by that of previous generations, and revived by occasional contact with some small rural Ontario communities still arguably out-of-the-way, where one still finds, in a fine old eye, or a stiff old neck, the qualities that turned our share of endless wilderness into the thriving environmental blemish we see today.
But the idea of “industriousness” crosses denominational lines—you could even be Jewish—and it is hardly inculcated from the pulpit. The virtues and vices of a people are deeply communicated, from the parent to the child; from the great-grandparent to the great-grandchild. They are not so easily lost or exchanged as the politically correct imagine, and even today, when we have foresworn so much of our heritage, I see people around me who are just so unmistakably Ontarian.
It amazes me to see, for instance, such habits as getting up and going to work; of feeling guilty for slacking; of fault-finding and problem-solving and deadline-tracking—still alive and well in a welfare state wherein everything possible has been done to snuff them out. It amazes me to see so many still going to church on Sundays, generations after the final spiritual coroner pronounced God to be dead. Or that people still have children, when the economic and social inconveniences of doing so have been demonstrated beyond the possibility of doubt. And—can you believe it?—make personal sacrifices for them, in preference to demanding assistance from the state. It amazes me that kids still play ball hockey, for that matter.
The word “faith” is a subtle one, and what I remember each Labour Day is that it is closely allied with “labour.” This may seem at first a paradoxical pairing, but what I mean by it is what our ancestors of all religious persuasions understood: that faith is embodied in habit, and action, much more than in words. It does not go unspoken, but rather it is articulated most eloquently in how a person lives. Faithlessness, likewise.
This is not irrational, but strictly speaking, super-rational, like all the fundamental truths of nature. Moreover, faith is not only in God directly, nor necessarily is it consciously anchored in God. Every notion of what is decent, right, honest, true, fine, accurate, necessary, is an embodiment of faith, and is manifested in labour. Such that, without faith we are nowhere and nothing; and we work to no purpose. And such that, the most hard-bitten atheist may show more real faith than the most hypocritical Christian, in a single spontaneous act of kindliness.
“Hands to work and minds to God,” went the old Quaker motto, whose meaning is neither shallow nor sectarian. One of its many meanings is that when we work, to a good end, with such attention and such sincerity that we lose ourselves in what we are doing, our minds are with God. Conversely, we often stray when we are thinking—to no purpose, to no task. Prayer, in this view, is the most exacting labour.
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