Two things came together in my mind recently:

In some random movie I was watching, I heard the character personify the universe - you know, so the writers can talk about divine Providence without giving credit to God - so the character says something like, "I guess the universe wants me to..." This kind of thing has always annoyed me, but I never thought about it too much.

Around the same time, I read Wisdom 16, specifically verses 17 and 24-25, which say, "the universe fights on behalf of the righteous... For your creation, serving You, its maker, grows tense for punishment against the wicked, but is relaxed in benefit for those who trust in you. Therefore at that very time, transformed in all sorts of ways, it was serving your all-nourishing bounty according to what they needed and desired." In other words, in Scripture the universe IS personified, but NOT deified. The universe is a created thing that God uses to provide for his people, but it is currently in a state of tension because of human sin, and so creation itself waits in anticipation of the redemption of all things. But the universe does not have a will for your life, any more than the fire hydrant or your car does. The universe is on the same side of the Creator/creation divide as we are.

St. Paul describes this tension that creation is in, as something like being in labor (See Romans 8:22-24). But of course, Paul got this from Jesus (see Matthew 24:6-8). There is a sense in which, in the Church age, creation is like a woman being in labor, beginning with the first contractions of Jesus' passion (John 16:20-22) and ending with the "birth" of the revealed Kingdom of God. There is suffering in this life, and all of us created beings long for the time when the labor is over.

This is what I think of when I think of "labor" - all the stuff in Scripture about creation being in a state of anticipation. But this is precisely because the universe is created, and needs to be redeemed.

So, as Christians, let's never allow ourselves to fall into this habit of personifying the universe in a way that makes it a secular replacement for God. It may get to the point where it sounds odd to give credit to God in casual conversation (if it doesn't already), but do it anyway. Bring God back into the conversation! The universe does not have a will, the universe cannot want anything for you, except what it wants for itself (and that only by way of analogy), which is redemption. Without God, the only "will" the universe has is the law of entropy, which says that everything decays. Without God, everything decays, and dies. With God, we hope for resurrection, and life.

So happy labor day - and may we all let it remind us that in God there is relief after the suffering; there is rest after the work.