Why work?

A day or two before many of us return to work, here are a couple of quotes from a 1942 essay by Dorothy L. Sayers, entitled Why work?

[W]ork is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. ... A ... consequence is that ... we should no longer think of work as something that we hastened to get through in order to enjoy our leisure; we should look on our leisure as the period of changed rhythm that refreshed us for the delightful purpose of getting on with our work.

The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.