I can tell Wendell Berry is influencing my reading of Paradise Lost. As I read Book IX, I thought it was fascinating that on the day Eve succumbs to the Serpent's temptation, the reason Eve wants to be alone from Adam (and thus more susceptible to temptation) is her inordinate desire to do efficient work. When Adam and Eve get up that morning, Eve says to Adam,

     Let us divide our labours—thou where choice
     Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind
     The woodbine round this arbour, or direct
     The clasping ivy where to climb; while I
     In yonder spring of roses intermixed
     With myrtle find what to redress till noon.
     For, while so near each other thus all day
     Our task we choose, what wonder if so near
     Looks intervene and smiles, or objects new
     Casual discourse draw on, which intermits
     Our day’s work, brought to little, though begun
     Early, and the hour of supper comes unearned! (ll. 214-26)

Here, Eve thinks that because they are working together, they will get less done. In response, Adam reminds her that work is not an end in itself. God gave us work for our enjoyment, not for our misery. And when work is exalted to a place where it divides us from each other, there's a problem.

     ... Not so strictly hath our Lord imposed
     Labour as to debar us when we need
     Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
     Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
     Of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow
     To brute denied, and are of love the food—
     Love, not the lowest end of human life.
     For not to irksome toil, but to delight,
     He made us, and delight to reason joined. (ll. 235-43)

Everybody knows there is something about human life that is out of line or out of whack. We can be happy at times but not totally fulfilled. Even when we have happiness, we fear we'll lose it. Worse, every day brings us fresh news of old evils -- of nature ravaged, of God blasphemed, of people cheated, battered, terrorized. Every day brings us news of people whose misery is almost impossible to fathom.

For centuries, philosophers, theologians, novelists, and artists have described the human predicament and then prescribed a cure, or at least a salve. ... That is, they've offered a prognosis. Hope is the reach of our hearts for the cure. It's the reach of our hearts toward what we think will fulfill us, secure us, save us--and not just us, but also the whole world. To be a Christian is to participate in this very common human enterprise of diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis, but to do so from inside a Christian view of the world, a view that has been constructed from Scripture and that centers on Jesus Christ the Savior, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives him glory too. To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a sloppail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Principle or Foundation"

The first step toward overcoming our detachment is to turn our homes into sites of production, not just consumption. ... Simple acts such as making our own bread or our own music can become significant ways to reshape the way we approach the material world. Making things gives the maker an appreciation for the labor involved in producing what he consumes. It also increases our sense that we are not merely spectators of life - for example, hours spent passively watching and listening to entertainment that others make - but active and creative participants in the material world.

William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

It is through the common activities of daily life that God establishes his uncommon kingdom. God's kingdom may not be of this world, but it is certainly meant to come into this world, and it does so in rather ordinary ways. Whenever you calculate the accounts payable, double-check a lab result, haul away the trash, serve a hot meal to the homeless, finish your history homework, help a customer find the right size, water the geraniums, or snap the lid on a sippy-cup, you are doing kingdom work. You are doing kingdom work provided, that is, you do whatever you do in submission to God's rule, for the sake of His royal honor. You are doing kingdom work, not because doing these things will necessarily change the world, but because by doing them, you show how God has changed you.

Philip Ryken, When You Pray: Making the Lord's Prayer Your Own

The nearly intolerable irony in our dissatisfaction [in our lives] is that we have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove "drudgery" from our lives. If I could pick any rule of industrial economics to receive a thorough re-examination by our people, it would be the one that says that all hard physical work is "drudgery" and not worth doing. . . .

That [harvest] can be drudgery is obvious. . . . But for me, and I think for most of the men and women who have been my companions in this work, it has not been drudgery. None of us would say that we take pleasure in all of it all of the time, but we do take pleasure in it, and sometimes the pleasure can be intense and clear. Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.

The [harvest] is the most protracted social occasion of our year. Neighbors work together . . . There is much talk. . . There is much laughter . . . And there are memories.

The crew to which I belong is the product of kinships and friendships going far back. . . As we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields remembered. . . . Old stories are retold; the dead and the aabsent are remembered. . . . Such talk in barns and at row ends must go back without interruption to the first farmers. How long it may continue is an uneasy question; not much longer perhaps, but we do not know. We only know that while it last it can carry us deeply into our shared life and the happiness of farming.

On many days we have had somebody's child or somebody's children with us, playing in the barn or around the patch while we worked, and these have been our best days. One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children . . . [But] the small scale and handwork of our [harvest accomodates their play]. In their play, the children learn to work; they learn their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.

God's pleasure in all things must be respected by us in our use of things. . . This bountiful and lovely thought that all creatures are pleasing to God . . . is unthinkable from the point of view of an economy divorced from pleasure, such as the one we have now, which completely discounts the capacity of people to be affectionate toward what they do and what they use and where they live and the other people and creatures with whom they live.

It may be argued that our whole society is more devoted to pleasure than any whole society ever was in the past, that we support in fact a great variety of pleasure industries and that these are thriving as never before. But that would seem only to prove my point. That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless ability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places. . . .

More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement. More and more, our farms and forests resemble our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons--why else should we be so eager to escape them? . . . We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasaant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are aagain defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them.

Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finially mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?

Wendell Berry, "Economy and Pleasure," from What Are People For?

The great question that hovers over [the issues of urban unempolyment and rural destruction as a result of government agricultural policies] is the question of what people are FOR. IS their greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal? One would conclude so from our attitude toward work . . . and from our rush toward mechanization, automation, and computerization. In a country that puts an absolute premium on labor-saving measures, short workdays, and retirement, why should there be any surprise at permanence of unemployment and welfare dependency? Those are only different names for our national ambitions.

Wendell Berrry, "What Are People For?"

As a measure of how far we have "progressed" in our industrial economy, let me quote a part of a sentence from the prayer "For Every Man in His Work" from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer: "Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as thy servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men." What is astonishing about that prayer is that it is a relic. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, it has become steadily less prayable. The industrial nations are now divided, almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of workinig in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God's servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people.

Wendell Berry, "God and Country," from What Are People For?

The organized church [has made] peace with a destructive economy and [has divorced] itself from economic issues because it is economically compelled to do so. . . . No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to "spiritual" subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.

There are many manifestations of this tacit allegiance between the organized churches and the "economy." . . . [One is] the phrase "full-time Christian service," which the churches of my experience have used exclusively to refer to the ministry, thereby at once making the devoted life a religious specialty or career and removing the possibility of other callings Thus a . . . preacher is a "full-time Christian servant," whereas a . . . farmer, . . . so far as the religious specialists are concerned, must serve "the economy" in his work or in his failure and serve God in his spare time. The professional class is likewise free to serve itself in its work and to serve God by giving the church its ten percent. The churches in this way excerpt sanctity from the human economy and its work just as Cartesian science has excerpted it from the material creation.

Wendell Berry, "God and Country," from What Are People For?

More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement. More and more, our farms and forests resemple our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons--why else should we be so eager to escape them?

Wendell Berry, "Economy and Pleasure," from What Are People For?