The very first, white-hot migraines marched into my life while in uniform, behind a steering wheel. As an Asbury student and Army cadet, I headed every Wednesday to UK’s Buell Armory for our ROTC training labs, often returning with pounding headaches, nausea and light sensitivity. Thankfully, because I spent these commutes with Zach, we also developed a deep, years-long friendship, which eventually blossomed into romance and marriage. Yet my problematic relationship with work as a strategy for “being okay” began in that season, and the headaches might have been a warning sign.
In search of vocation
While pursuing a double major at Asbury, I joined an independent study exploring the idea of Christian vocation made possible by a grant from the Lilly Foundation. “Vocation” from the Latin vocatio or “calling,” was often defined by a paraphrase of American theologian Frederick Beuchner as “where your great joy meets the world’s great need.”
“Vocation is where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”
– Frederick Beuchner, “Wishful Thinking”
Photo credit: FrederichBuechner.co
Work, as we learned by digging into various books and discussion groups on the subject, was both a blessing and a curse. (A great overview is Gilbert Meilaender’s Working: Its meaning and its limits.) Four main views of work emerged for our study, and combinations of them, as well:
- Work as irksome but necessary for survival, and therefore dignified.
- Work as necessary for leisure and thriving.
- Work as co-creation with God.
- Work as a divine calling, through which we reflect the imago Dei, the image of God.
I am what I do?
My best teachers on this subject would not be men and women with high-powered careers, health practitioners with resilience studies, stress management techniques and letters after their names, or academics with office hours and letters before their names (though all these types have been helpful, of course). It was instead our children who taught me the difference between work as soulful delight and pursuit of divine purpose, and work as a false way of avoiding difficult emotions, by numbing grief and the painful anxiety of becoming.
They let me know through their tears, their hugs, and even their tantrums, that I would have to slow way down, and learn a different pace of life, before I could remain truly connected to Christ, the True Vine, and the Father, our vinedresser. Seedbed.com Author J.D. Walt rightly points out that delight must always precede discipline, if the lesson is going to stick. Children do this naturally, to a point. Eventually, though, the stamina developed in the mature adult mind has the opportunity to re-parent itself, applying the wisdom of age, and recovering the childlike wonder of work as delight. In her essay about one kind of work, “On The Right Use of School Studies,” Simone Weil argues that:
“The Key to a Christian conception of studies is the realisation that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it. It is the highest part of the attention only which makes contact with God, when prayer is intense and pure enough for such a contact to be established; but the whole attention is turned towards God. Of course school exercises only develop a lower kind of attention. Nevertheless they are extremely effective in increasing the power of attention which will be available at the time of prayer, on condition that they are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone.”
Photo credit: French philosopher Simone Weil, 1909-1943
…prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God.“
Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer. When we set out to do a piece of work, it is necessary to wish to do it correctly, because such a wish is indispensable if there is to be true effort. Underlying this immediate objective, however, our deep purpose should aim solely at increasing the power of attention with a view to prayer; as, when we write, we draw the shape of the letter on paper, not with a view to the shape, but with a view to the idea we want to express.”
Simone Weil
You might say that discipline and delight take turns opening the door for each other, depending on whose hands are full.
Bringing together Walt’s point on delight and Weil’s point on discipline has become the theme of my 30s. Delight precedes discipline, then discipline in turn builds capacity for deeper delight. You might say that discipline and delight take turns opening the door for one another, depending on whose hands are full! Before this epiphany, I could show up at work in very high-powered, effective ways that at least passed for servant leadership to some. I was told the only limits on my future career in the Army, and later in public school teaching, was simply my ability to pace myself and be strategic in each season of life. It always felt like I was doing my utmost for God and country, both in uniform and in the classroom, and that this was the right thing to do as a Christian. I had great teams and a few excellent mentors, and I enjoyed the challenge of applying learning in new settings. I adapted my liberal arts education to any mission I was given. I was even able to recover from my first bout with workaholism and burnout as a young lieutenant, setting better boundaries for myself in each new assignment. Having learned that lesson well in the military, I managed to avoid burnout in my four years of teaching public school–no simple feat, as most sources agree that one-third to one-half of new teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years.
Unlearning the worship of work
A near miss: my Army boot stopped lawnmower blades and saved my foot, Summer 2022
I learned that an intentional practice of Sabbath could do wonders for my outlook, as well as those migraines, and I could see myself spending 20+ years as a public servant of one kind or another. Even the less than ideal situations were instructive: I survived periods of meaninglessness that are always part of bureaucratic institutions, reasoning that when nothing else made sense about our mission, or the way we were going about it, that I was called to be “salt and light.” I could always and everywhere participate in the trinitarian work of co-creating, co-sustaining, and co-restoring with God in my humble little corner of responsibility, in the smallest of ways. And this truth was a light to me in some very dark places–even while deployed to Afghanistan, working long days and weeks without a formalized sabbath.
It all worked so well… right up until it didn’t. I recently had a reminder of this rude awakening. While mowing grass around the garden, my foot slipped under the spinning blade, which came within inches of my toes. My old Army boots were enough to avert the loss of toes, but my imagination was not spared visions of what might have been. For days I had phantom pains and pangs of anxious regret.
Last year, in similar fashion, my favorite pair of combat gloves gave out, while I worked with the girls in the garden. I realized that we’d been laboring together for the better part of an hour, and no whining or yelling had occurred. The holes worn in my gloves reminded me that many, many hours of repetitive practice working outside together–learning to respond to setbacks rather than react–had led up to this peaceable moment. Paradoxically, through these artifacts from my past and present, work had shown me both its deep meaning, and its strident limits.
Our oldest daughter Gwyn began revealing this paradox (and calling my bluff) in the years following my return from deployment to Afghanistan. She got through to me in ways that my husband Zach had also tried, but she was less tactful, and more dependent on me to make things right. Her growing stubbornness and tantrums–which looked like defiance–alarmed me, but I didn’t link them to my own chronic over-functioning until it was almost too late. At just the right time, our church family at St. Peter’s, and formation leaders in the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, gently reoriented me to look at the ways in which I relied on my work as my identity, as a way of rushing my own spiritual development, as a numbing agent against pain that I needed to stop and process, and as a distraction against much-needed lament.
Newton’s First Law of Motion states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Gwyn was that unbalanced force of nature that first resisted, and then halted all my false, forward-leaning momentum, inviting me to slow down for loving union with Jesus, and face the soul work I desperately needed. Even as she tested these new limits, she came to thrive in the new-found freedom, delight, and connection that we found together as I continued my own spiritual formation as a mother and catechist of the Good Shepherd.
Affection in learning
In the Atrium–-a place prepared for children to pray and work with the Scriptures–children are invited to choose their work each week. This environment, along with the catechist or assistant who prepares it, is a richly equipped response to the child’s unspoken request: Help me to come close to God on my own. As 3-6 year old children, they deepen in their affection and recognition of Christ our Good Shepherd, until they know His voice. Then, the 6-9 year old child begins to feel drawn to work as a way of abiding in Christ, the True Vine. They are aware they are part of a larger life than just their own. Both kinds of work – to know and be known, and to practice connection and abiding – are really our life’s work, too.
The relationship between freedom and restraint that children enjoy in the Atrium is mysterious. They are invited to choose their work, and yet there are limits in place to guide them into peaceful, contemplative work that can occur in solitude or community. There is limited space, and limited materials, too. The materials themselves are simple, not designed to be entertaining, and repetition is commonplace. Sometimes, a child encounters frustration requiring an adult or older child to model a solution. One might even surmise, watching the children work, that it was a total waste of time. Yet, this is the very place we sense the mystery of their freedom to work. They often delight in this simplicity, and return with ever deepening insight to the same works year in and year out. I suspect it works this way for us adults, too: we spiral through the same truths, within our experience, and yet our ability to deepen our insight is endless. Our human experience of limits becomes an invitation to restfully use our five senses. And this becomes a discipleship practice of abiding and delighting in Christ.
Where have you experienced limitations or obstacles in your work, which might serve as an invitation to deeper abiding and delight in Christ?