I thought it might be nice to get some thoughts of work. Thirty-five years ago, writer Stud Terkels did some research on American attitudes toward work. Mr. Terkels found that most Americans didn't have polite things to say about their jobs. I will post some quotes later.

Here are my 2007 interview questions about work:

1. Do you enjoy your work?

2. What do you like the most about your work?

3. What do you like the least about your work?

4. Would you change your work/career? If so, what would you like to do instead?

In advance, thank you for sharing.

In 1972, Studs Terkely published a 589-page book called, Working: People talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What they do.

He interviewed 133 people about how they felt regarding their work:

"A job should be a job, not a death sentence."

"Jobs are demeaning. You walk out with no sense of satisfaction."

"One minute to five is the moment of triumph. You physically turn off the machine that has dictated to you all day long."

Here is the opening paragraph of the book:

"This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence-to the spirit as well as the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents. About shouting matches as well as fist fights. About nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us."

In 2007, 35 years later, do you still agree with Terkel's summary about work?

Everybody have a great weekend!!!

"Humanly speaking, our efforts to show our love for God by purifying our hearts, refresh and delight Him. It is for this that He 'thirsts.' His Sitio is for the purity of our hearts, the emptiness of our hearts, that His joy, His freedom and His immensity may fill them. If He can be said to thirst it is because He thirsts to do us good, to share His infinite Life with us. But we prevent Him by our selfishness from doing so. Detachment will procure for us the greatest good, the pure love of God for Himself alone because He alone is good: amor amicitiae. That is the bond of perfection that unites us to Him. "Above all things have charity, which is the bond of perfection and may the peace of Christ exult in your hearts, in which you are called unto one Body. And be grateful.' It seems to me that all mystical theology is contained in these two lines. Super omnia: this love is above all things because it is the end for which we are created. It is perfection and sanctity. It is the only thing necessary. It is beyond all mode and all law. It is the bond that unites us to God. It unites us immediately to Him and it unites us to one another in Him. And so we become one in Christ and Christ lives in us and His peace exults in us. There is no other true joy."

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, p. 39

Have a nice weekend everyone!

"In so far as men are prepared to prefer their own will to God's will, they can be said to hate God: for of course they cannot hate Him in Himself. But they hate Him in the Commandments which they violate. But God is our life: God's will is our food, our mean, our life's bread. To hate our life is to enter into death, and therefore the prudence of the flesh is death.

The only thing that saved me was my ignorance. Because in actual fact since my life after my Baptism was pretty much what it had been before Baptism, I was in the condition of those who despise God by loving the world and their own flesh rather than Him. And because that was where my heart lay, I was bound to fall into mortal sin because almost everything that I did tended, by virtue of my habitual intention to please myself before all else, to obstruct and deaden the work of grace in my soul.

"But I did not clearly realize all this. Because of the profound and complete conversion of my intellect, I thought I was entirely converted. Because I believed in God, and in the teaching of the Church, and was prepared to sit up all night arguing about them with all comers, I imagined that I was even a zealous Christian."

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 230-231