Building a foundation for strong Catholic lives, integrating faith, work, and practical life.
At St. Therese Institute of Faith and Mission, we spend a good part of the year striving to develop a contemplative heart and an informed mind. Eventually, though, this inner life must somehow find expression in the outer world. Our St. Joseph the Worker course is a new one-week intensive that examines this critical Catholic duty.
For the St. Joseph the Worker course, our “classroom” is along the still-frozen shores of Birch Lake, SK, where we come to stay at a hands-on learning retreat center, operated by Jason Reinhart and his family.
Jason is a one-of-a-kind Catholic husband and father, with a strong business record in construction and industrial property management. He also has significant achievements in the US and Canadian music industry, and he and his wife Janelle also founded a media company together.
For two years now, Jason has collaborated with St. Therese Institute to develop the St. Joseph the Worker course, and it is becoming a crowd favorite among the young adults in our program.
St. Joseph the Worker course participants trade their pens for welding rods, their textbooks for pipe wrenches, and their sneakers for skidsteers, as they apprentice alongside both skilled trade people and the experienced Reinhart family. It is an exercise in incarnating the Gospel through experiencing the trades first-hand, coupled with discussions on “adulting” topics like parenting, job search skills, and money management.
The Silent Figure of the Worker
To understand the benefits of spending a week learning about brake pads and heavy equipment, we begin with a theology of the Holy Family that can prioritize Joseph as well as Mary.
Nick Pierlot, one of the St. Therese Institute program directors, notes how the common Catholic emphasis of “Marian” dimensions of faith can sometimes leave the “Josephite” dimensions behind. For Nick, a spirituality of Joseph isn’t only for learning handy skills. It’s about the “universal priesthood”—the calling of every Christian to lead the material world around them back to the Father through the work of their hands, as Joseph did through his life-long commitment to carpentry.
Breaking the Secular/Sacred DivideÂ
If any participants come to this course believing in an impermiable wall between “holy work” – like ministry, prayer, teaching – and “secular work” – like trades, business, and finance – the St. Joseph the Worker experience takes a sledgehammer to that wall.
“For the majority of the times when I’ve thought ‘trade,’ I’ve thought like just work with very secular people in very secular environments, but this week has really helped me to understand that we can still apply the spiritual knowledge that we’ve gained here at St. Therese to the physical work we do just with our day-to-day labor.” — Daniel Côté
Gap Year participant Noah Huber explained that the week gave him a sense of hope regarding the vocation of marriage and the practicalities of providing for a family. “The week gave us an understanding of the life of a vocation to marriage, and what that calls us to in our career and work, and how to integrate that all together. It gave us an understanding and a confidence that it’s possible… it gives us hope.”
Developing the Mind and Heart through the HandsÂ
St. Joseph the Worker course teaches that physical labor is a mirror of the interior life. In carpentry, if your measurements are off, the board doesn’t fit. If you are lazy with a weld, the joint breaks. This physical reality demands a level of presence and diligence that directly translates to the spiritual life, and in both cases, faking it just doesn’t cut it!
“I was really struck by how you train your mind through your body. Learning diligence in your actions, learning precision and paying attention to detail in the work that you do with your hands, is training you to grow in spiritual diligence and mental precision as well. …It’s all connected – spirituality isn’t separate from the work that you’re going to do or the careers you’re going to pursue.” — Emma SkubanÂ
In a culture where many young people feel alienated from the physical world, the ability to look at a leaky kitchen facet or a noisy car and say “I can fix that” can be transformative, as a person moves from being a passive consumer to an active steward of creation.
For Jason Reinhart, enabling that transformation is one of the reasons he built the retreat centre where he hosts the St. Joseph the Worker course. “It’s amazing to see participants get big-eyed when you show them how a light switch is wired or how to solder a fitting on a copper pipe. It’s really simple, but so many people have no idea how it all works. When you understand how to do things like this, moving forward to try other things in life becomes easier.”
The participants rotate through a variety of stations, learning as they go. Some of the activities are made into games. At the automotive station, course participants race to see who can change brake pads the fastest. Other stations have participants craft items, like charcuterie boards at the carpentry station that are then judged against criteria for workmanship and resale value.
The Business of the KingdomÂ
Throughout the week, mentorship is provided by Jason, his wife Janelle, their family, ages 11-23. Even the 11- and 14-year-olds teach skills like equipment operation and carpentry!
As a successful entrepreneur himself, Jason teaches about the “spirit of entrepreneurship,” leading sessions on negotiations, sales, finance, career discernment, job interview strategy, and more. As the founders of a Catholic media company, Jason and Janelle have had to learn to integrate a faith perspective with their business and family priorities. They shared about marriage and about raising children, and their whole family shared their musical gifts by leading praise sessions around the fire.
The family instruction sessions were a highlight for Mikayla Klover, who admits to having “low expectations” going into the week. Instead, she walked away with a new vision for her future.
“Jason made us take a look at our life and our values. He talked about a variety of things that are so needed to be talked about, especially for people our age. He had some really good talks on finance and jobs. It really expands my knowledge about what I could actually do in the future.” — Mikayla Klover
This practical wisdom is a vital part of the New Evangelization. We need Christians who are “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (cf Mt 10:16) in the heart of society and the marketplace—men and women who can build businesses and manage finances with a heart ordered toward the Gospel.
A New IntegrationÂ
As we moved into the final weeks of our year, our participants did so with a more “integrated” sense of themselves. They had seen that the “Little Way” can be practiced plumbing in a kitchen sink as well as in a chapel. They had a taste of how one can integrate the “Marian” yes of the heart and express it through the “Josephite” labor of the hands.
Social Media and Promotions intern Olivia Mase, who observed the week from behind her camera lens, saw the fruit of this labor in the very look of her peers. “I think the thing that I noticed as soon as we got there was that everyone was alive, and I think they recognized that it felt good to move and to do things with their hands. My biggest takeaway was just recognizing that living a life of virtue and living as a saint here on Earth also includes learning how to make money and do work well, and those things aren’t necessarily separate.”
Nick Pierlot summed up the success of the week. “I love those moments where your fundamental preconceptions and the emphases get challenged, not so that things get disintegrated, but so that you yourself change in the process and become more integrated as a person.”
Ora et labora; laborare est orare. Pray and work; to work is to pray. The workshop is open. The work is good. And the Gospel is being incarnated, one workday at a time.
James Riley has been at St. Therese Institute longer than any of the rest of the mission staff can remember. He has seen many things and has worn many hats. He currently serves Christ here as the Deputy of Operations.