This warrants a beer. Seriously, too much to cover here. The book recommendation from Davey and Austin is certainly dead-on, and I’d encourage you to read it. However, it’s also one of a growing chorus of laments about how much modern society sucks. In it you will find commiseration, an excellent articulation of the problem; what you may not find are any satisfying answers.

I’d like to add something rather personal here. I was very privileged to spend some time with your family a few years ago, and I still reflect frequently on it: that month was one of the more significant months of my life. It taught me for the first time that home is something meaningful, that death is profound and solemn but a necessary and conquerable thing, that friendships can be mended through the chopping of wood, and it taught me the utter humiliation of sucking mightily at something yet also the sweet grace of being paid to do it anyways.

Your ties to your home – and your father’s profession – may have at one time seemed adorably wholesome or even quaint to me. To a city boy like me, a “damned Yankee” as one fellow put it, that quiet country life seems to small, too mundane, too full of “Goat Ladies” and too empty of places to get coffee on the way to work. But one night, when we were chopping wood, you said these words to me and I have never forgotten them, because they are as wise as anything the city ever taught me: a worthless worker is worth his wages.

Your father is a wise man, and a good employer; I assume he passed this wisdom down to you. At the time you were explaining to me why I had so loathed the job that expected so much of me but paid so little. I think, though, that this wisdom speaks to you now as well. If all you are working for is Mammon, Gabe, that is all you will receive. And it will truly be worthless. This is why all of the “wealth” in our society has evaporated almost overnight; that work was not done in love, and was utterly useless, and we our now receiving our wages. Put another way, we all eat by the sweat of our brows, and not the blood of our brothers; sweat and profit are not the same thing. In all of this, God is not mocked, and is certainly just. Our work has been worthless, and God has given us our reward in full.

I think your post comes from the very obvious fact that you understand this principle. You know that there is more to what you do than just sticks and nails; it is your art, and while doing it you nakedly exert the imago dei in which you were created, and with it you love the world and make it good. That is worth more than money. To somehow make profit the goal of this utterly sublime work of yours is, as you suspect, utterly depraved.

I have a suggestion, something that might relieve this tension. Look to your father. He is not a businessman, though he runs a business. He is not a capitalist, though men depend on him for his paycheck. He is a steward. He has skills and equipment and relationships and a reputation that he must manage well. He must manage all of this well because men and his families rely on him to do so.

Your father is not a profit-hungry man. Yet he must look to profit as a tool to understand whether or not he is managing his company properly. If the business is not providing for its customers and also sufficiently for its workers, it is not turning sufficient profit, and it will fail. A farmer in a primitive society without markets must work on much the same principle: he must grow enough to feed his family and have surplus with which to barter; if he cannot, he is not working hard enough, or perhaps he is growing something ill-suited to the environment, or perhaps he actually sucks at farming. Here sustenance and surplus should not be called “profit” or “success,” but rather hard work, provision, frugality, shrewdness, and stewardship. “Division of labor” becomes “Doing what you are good at,” which can also be considered humility, or submission, or even just common sense. You can divide labor because of profit, or because you recognize that a company – just like the Church or any other community of people – is like a body, and nobody wants to meet a guy made out of pinky toes.

We have gone astray as a society because we have put profit – the accumulation and propagation of capital – at the center of our economic lives. But you needn’t do that. Just as mastering the family budget doesn’t take away from the mystery of your marriage, so keeping a business ledger won’t cheapen the work you do. You are free to be a craftsman, Gabe. Of course, such things are hard. You may never be rich, and you may never even be comfortable. When you’re not making a living by standing on the throats of others, some years can be hard – as I’m sure you know from growing up as you did. But hard years are still blessed years, and the salary is more than just bread on your table. It is mana for your soul. Remember the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the Fortune 500″ didn’t even make the first round of edits.

Lest what I said earlier be forgotten: Let us beer.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciated your post, Gabe. My intellectual pursuits have always been pretty frivolous, for my own amusement. But there’s a gravity and a practicality to these questions, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about their cultural ramifications. It’s very encouraging to know there are other people thinking about them, too.

Wonderful post. I’m sure that I’m the farthest removed from your questions of everyone — still 5-7 years out from gainful employment.

Before I saw Austin’s post, I was also going to suggest Crawford’s Shop Class book. Although, I’ve only read a long excerpt that appeared in the NYT. I’m in complete sympathy with your basic conflict. (Frank: I don’t think Gabe was expressing discontent about having to keep good business records; I think he was expressing a fundamental dissatisfaction with the impersonal, profit-is-king ways that many businesses are run.)

As much as I’d hope otherwise, I know I’m going to run into the same dilemmas in academia (should I ever find one of those mystical associate professorships at some weird liberal arts school). Vocations have become jobs. Lifetime callings turn into career ladders. You play the system and forget the people. Or at least, you can. I’m glad I had the stellar examples of student-centered profs at NSA.

In many ways, I envy your individual calling, perhaps because I’ve never been good with my hands. But also because I can see that you know, and love, your place and calling. And there’s something special about ownership, especially when your work consists of your own hands and tools, and not some ephemeral software “made” of binary numerals — which is pretty much all I’ve ever done. But you have a chance to make your work a service to your community. In essence, your business can be a two-way charity, merciful to those who need you, and grace to your wife and fat son, who will be very expensive to feed, I imagine.

There are some really insightful books on all this out there. Some are more readable than others. You might enjoy: “Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.” There’s also the pope’s latest encyclical…