Ministers, priests, and rabbis, learn its depressing human impact as we talk with newly unemployed parishioners, or as we ourselves as clergy, contemplate finding a new appointment in a tight job market. Unfortunately the culture of justification by work' pervades people's lives right into their formal retirement. It is not fashionable in our society, it seems, to be leisurely retired. Somehow we have to reshape the notion of Christian vocation in ways that are faithful to the gospel of grace which at the same time recognizes the economic realities of our new workplace world. Never to be forgotten is that in addition to income, humans find work rewarding when their companions at work show some care for them, treat them as valuable, and work with them with a measure of mutual esteem to produce something deemed valuable to others.
Studies show that is what workers, retired early or late, miss most in retirement.
They miss having someone in their vicinity ready to acknowledge and celebrate the work to which they have given 40 or 50 years of their lives. Not to find oneself valued in the doing of one's present or past work is to suffer alienation for it. In part because they remember the unique closeness they experienced with comrades. Those who are forced to retire at 55 realize that they did not go to work early or spend weekends at the office only for the money. We as human beings want to be important to each other.