My grandfather’s name was Clarence. By the time I knew him, he was quite a few steps slower than when he was a young man hauling animal feed in the back of the pickup he drove around selling to local farmers. My recollections of him are mainly of late-night card games and early morning ice cream runs, which made the waitress at his local coffeeshop smile as she scooped my “breakfast” into bowls usually reserved for oatmeal or sausage gravy.

Truthfully, though, there aren’t many people who have recollections of my grandfather anymore. The footprint of his life on the world, as many people conventionally think about it, was pretty modest. He didn’t have the kind of job we typically write hero stories about. The scales often used to weigh the worth of a life—legacy, impact, wealth, success—are things by which he would have been found wanting. His life was deeply tied to the dirt. The modest economic stability he carved out was attached to the fraught realities of agriculture. Except when he washed his old truck, there wasn’t much shiny about his day-to-day life.

I spend a good deal of my energy guiding college students toward a life of substance and meaning, helping them consider their contribution to the common good. Most of my students are in passionate pursuit of a life (and career) that “matters.” They have incredibly high hopes for themselves and, in the main, view their education as a vehicle for achieving something worthwhile. They have a concrete desire that borders on existential angst: to be known for something.

That desire is starting to worry me, particularly because the desire for legacy and impact often manifests as worry or fear. When my students tie their ideals and ambitions to their sense of the good life, they effectively render the good life contingent on corresponding levels of success and advancement. What if I don’t achieve something that others will consider meaningful or lasting? Hunger for impact is not easily sated. Without ever-increasing amounts of success, one’s longed-for impact will always outpace the reality of one’s life.

This is not unique to college students. Some years ago, I had a conversation with someone from my town who said something like, “If I don’t get out of here, I’m afraid I’m going to work in obscurity forever.” My conversation partner that day surfaced a casual disregard for his actual place in the world. He seemed to feel trapped by his local life, longing to find meaning, impact, and legacy waiting for him elsewhere.

I think the root of this vocational malaise has something to do with our confused understanding of the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent. Every day we walk on the earth—on the dirt from which God made our bones—while we are bombarded by the mystery of transcendent realities all around us. Sometimes the tension between the immanent and the transcendent makes us feel like we belong up there among the stars rather than being stuck down here in the soil of some typical Tuesday. From this perspective, our rootedness leaves us dirty and damaged and looking for a way to escape the bounded nature of our existence.

But to be a human is to be made from and for the earth and simultaneously to be invited to bear witness to the transcendence of the cosmos. This is an unmatched gift of grace. The collision between the two may cause a complex of wonder, awe, fear, angst, and longing, but it is not a problem. However, if we don’t see and receive it as a gift, our sense of the transcendent will, almost assuredly, foster disregard, if not disdain, for the deep beauty of the immanence—the earth-boundedness—of our humanity.

The roots of human folly crop up when we mistake the dance between the transcendent and the immanent as an invitation to transcend our immanentness. What was the Tower of Babel if not an exercise in conquering immanence? Possibly, too, the Age of Exploration and the Saturn V rocket? I sense the same intuition at work in the fears of my students and in those articulating a soft disdain for the placed life in front of them.

Nowhere do I find this confusion more than when it comes to how we teach, think, and speak about work. For at least the last few generations, the broadly US Christian world has attempted to build a frame for thinking about work that squarely centres this immanence/transcendence predicament. If you study the development of the faith and work movement, you can see a well-defined intuition about work as an arena to transcend the ordinariness of human life. The world of work is a space to overcome human limitations, to achieve something that can outlast our lives, to make a mark, such that the recollections of those who live on after we are gone include us and our achievements. Work is a place to leap from the soil and reach for the stars.

Ironically, this makes it difficult for many to honour the actual dignity of labour. If work is a way to shoot for the stars, we are all the more prone to disrespect workers like my grandfather, whose vocational efforts were decidedly earthbound. What, then, do we make of the wage worker, the blue-collar labourer, the many who expend their energies making, delivering, monitoring, and maintaining the systems that make our world work, but who do not hold titles that promise any sense of vocational status, let alone transcendence?

Susan Maros observes this dynamic playing out on many college campuses because “‘serious students’ don’t hang Sheetrock.” Since my grandfather dropped out of school after eighth grade, I guess you could say they don’t sell livestock feed either. I’m sympathetic to the desire for work with substance and purpose, but the motivation for infusing our work with a transcendent disposition is rooted in a misapplied connection between work and the image of God. Work is a primary way we give expression to our status as imago Dei, but it is not a portal to transcend it. Quite the opposite actually: Work ought to commend our time-bound connection to the earth and encourage us to embrace the beauty of an immanent, ordinary life.

Yet too often it does the opposite because we don’t truly know what to do with our sense of the sacred. To sense the sacred is, as Richard Viladesau describes it, to have a “heightened awareness of the mystery” of God’s presence in our midst. All of life can be sacred space since this world is truly the arena of God’s presence. The word “sacred” is a differentiating term; it differentiates something from the profane. Something sacred (a space, object, experience) moves the mind and heart beyond the thing and toward God. Profane things lead our minds and hearts away from God. It’s possible, of course, to take something meant to be sacred and treat it profanely, the way one might speak the name of God in a profane manner. Our collective capacity to profane what could be sacred is well known.

“Sacred” is often used interchangeably with “holy.” But something’s sacredness does not necessarily make it holy. “Holy” is not a synonym for “sacred,” nor is it the opposite of “profane.” The Scriptures use the term “holy” in different ways. At times it is used as a kind of character trait: “Be holy, for I am holy.” But other times—and it is in this way that I’m using it—it is used as a description of type. The designation “holy,” in this sense, is given to those things we set apart for a special purpose. The holy men of ancient Israel were from the tribe of Levi, set apart for service to God. The temple was a holy place, specifically designated for acts of worship performed only in that place. Holy water plays a particular function in Catholic sacramental life. The table settings from your grandmother’s wedding—the ones you take from the china cabinet only on special occasions—could be called holy too. They are set apart for specific, special purposes.

But what about the millions of Israelites who didn’t come from the set-apart tribe of Levi? If they aren’t holy, does that make them profane? What about the structures built in and around the temple in Jerusalem, the water we drink outside the basilica, the dishes we use for everyday meals—are these all profane? Of course not. They aren’t profane. But they aren’t holy either. They are ordinary.

The distinction is important because there is a value judgment implicit in the distinction between the sacred and the profane. We’d say that the sacred is profoundly good, and the profane bad. But it would be wrong to make the same judgment about things holy and things ordinary.

Any given thing’s holiness is not a critique of any other thing’s ordinary nature. The millions of non-Levites in ancient Israel all bore the divine image, and every single person we encounter radiates the glory of God. To see a person rightly is to have a sense of the sacred in ordinary life. So, too, the homes we inhabit, the tap water we use for cooking and cleaning, the day-to-day dishes on which we share meals with friends and family. Every ordinary person, every ordinary thing, every ordinary task contains the possibility of the sacred.

That makes the ordinary profoundly good. I’m compelled by Tish Harrison Warren’s sensibility about the interaction of the ordinary and the sacred in the day-to-day. The sacred nature of everyday life can and should be embraced and embodied. But any impulse we have to take the sacred ordinary and make it more special—in other words, to make it holy—might be evidence that we don’t always know what to do with our sense of the sacred.

I’m reminded of Peter at the transfiguration, standing on the hillside with Jesus and a couple other disciples. They all shared a powerful experience of the sacred, the literal transcendence of God in their midst. Like many of us, Peter didn’t know what to do with his sense of the sacred, so he tried to make the moment holy. He said, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah” (Matthew 17:4). Peter’s instinct was to take this sacred experience and set it apart, build a temple of sorts that would forever call out that space as special. Jesus’s response was to just come down the mountain and instruct his disciples to keep what they’d seen to themselves.

The vast majority of our collective labours—the jobs we do for pay, the work required to make life happen—are ordinary and unholy. And that would only feel like a bad thing if we’ve cultivated disregard for the unholy, even unintentionally. We foster discontent toward the ordinariness of our work when we try to, like Peter, inject labour with some kind of set-apart sense of specialness or when we critique it for what the labour theoretically lacks. Work is a thoroughly immanent endeavour; it draws us deeper into what it means to be human and helps us embody (not transcend) more of our humanity, including its frail, rooted, finite characteristics. Seeing work as a way to transcend those things is a fraught and fruitless path.

Unchecked and unconsidered, this is the kind of disposition toward ordinary work that makes it nearly impossible to honour the dignity of all labour with integrity. We may pay lip service to the value of workers and the ways in which people across all manner of labour sectors contribute to the flourishing of society. If obscurity and the ordinary are the enemies of the good life, then people like my grandfather who do obscure, ordinary, and unholy work will always find themselves on the outside looking in on our conventional ways of speaking about work that “matters.” A deep and honest embrace of the value and worth of workers will always evade us unless we embrace the profound goodness of unholy work.

But what if our work was something wholly other than an endeavour to transcend the ordinariness of life? What if there was a different way to respond to our sense of the sacred in the ordinary realities of our work?

Another sacred encounter comes to mind. Moses’s encounter with God in the burning bush is, like the transfiguration, an example of that dance between the transcendent and the ordinariness of everyday life. And how does Moses respond? He doesn’t build a tent over the bush or set it apart with velvet ropes. He doesn’t try to make the sacred holy. Instead, he takes off his shoes. He’s not trying to make the moment, or the place, feel more special. Instead, Moses seems to cultivate a particular kind of disposition to the sacred showing up in an unholy place. It might seem ironic for those of us who actively foster a disregard for the ordinary, but Moses’s encounter with the transcendent God leads him to put his feet in the dirt. Moses seems unconcerned with the soiled, dirty, earthbound nature of his human life and shows no instinct to overcome his earthbound reality. Instead, his experience with a transcendent God reconnects him to his fundamental immanence. Moses knows what to do when he senses the sacred. It returns him to the dust; it roots him in the soil from which and for which he was made.

It seems to me particularly urgent that we come to terms with this as our world accelerates into a future full of promises to help us transcend our rooted realities. The proliferation of technologies like artificial intelligence taps into the same sensibility as the Tower of Babel, promising ways to overcome human limitations and make us more-than-human. We need to learn to help others—students, friends, our children, our colleagues—connect the dots between the cultivation of disregard for the ordinary and the uncritical embrace of things like the promises of technology. The moral injury of that kind of idolatry will harm us all, but the majority of the casualties will be those who live on the outside of our various social hierarchies. The social hierarchy of labour will embrace the promises of artificial intelligence the same way it embraced the promise of the industrial revolution a century and a half ago, and workers will pay the price. Resisting those promises is among the most Christian of tasks before us.

This is also how we make better sense of life and make meaning out of everyday toil. It’s how I’m wrestling out the questions I have about the kind of life my grandfather led. Did he have a good job? By almost any social accounting of labour, no. Narratives about salesmen tend to be a bit more tragic. But when I extricate myself from the sacred/holy confusion, something clearer comes into view for me. There is something of an assertion of dignity in any job that contributes to the well working of a community. My grandfather certainly did that. That very few might see it that way is an indictment on our capacity to see, not his ability to bear, the image of God at work in the world.

And that realization challenges the way I think about my own labour and my sense of place in the world. It challenges the very foundations of the idea that “working in obscurity” is a negative moral pronouncement about your place in a community. If work isn’t a mechanism for notoriety or title, but something much more ordinary and earthbound, couldn’t we be free from so much of the vain striving we see within and all around us? When I think about how much would or could change if I weren’t constantly contending—but instead collaborating—with my rooted life on the earth in a community, I find myself breathing a sigh of existential relief. I don’t find myself “settling” for a dirty life. I am reminded that good fruit comes from the dirt, and that’s true for the apples on my table and the aspiration in my mind.

Seen rightly, the sacredness of labour returns us to the earth as an act of reverence for the divine dance of transcendence happening all around us. I know I stand to learn from the many workers who ply their labour in the world while making room for such a dance. This disposition toward work should sense the sacred and respond appropriately—embracing our soiled reality, learning to love a life of unholy, sacred, and ordinary labour.