Working With Spirit. Lucy Reid
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poet and author David Whyte writes in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of Soul in Corporate America, “If work is all about doing, then the soul is all about being…. [We are exploring] the possibility of being at home in the world, melding soul life with work life, the inner ocean of longing and belonging with the outer ground of strategy and organizational control” [Whyte 1994, 201].
The spirit within us needs purpose and meaning as much as the body needs food and water. The context of the workplace, in which we spend so many of our waking hours, raises profoundly spiritual questions, if we choose to hear them, such as:
Is this all there is?
What would I be doing if I didnt have to earn a living?
Is my work worthwhile? Does it benefit the world in some way?
Am I what I do, or is there more?
Where is God in my work?
On my death bed will I look back and be glad I did this?
Each of these questions addresses something deeper than the surface issues of productivity, employability, income level, seniority, and so on. These are the questions that float up and catch us unawares in unguarded or vulnerable moments. They can accuse and confuse. No one has prepared us for these, in the way we learned how to write exams and résumés, manage interviews and people. Our workplace throws these questions at us, but supplies no answers. Even discussion of such matters is rare and uncomfortable at work, and we risk being seen as religious fanatics when we raise them. Yet the questions remain, and they have a way of haunting us and tripping us if we try to ignore them, sending us physical and emotional symptoms such as headaches, insomnia, irritability, restlessness.
When we dare to ask ourselves, “Why am I spending my life's energy in this way?” we are setting foot on a path that can open the heart to a renewed sense of vocation and purpose, and a deepened understanding of life. This path leads us to God, to the Spirit beyond and behind and within our spirits. And so the workplace need not be the enemy of our spirituality, but the crucible in which our spiritual life is burnished and shaped.
Spirituality in the workplace, then, is not a cunning managerial strategy to make us more docile drones, nor is it a token nod in the direction of God at work, like saying the Lord's Prayer at school. It is the pursuit of meaning and integrity, the attentiveness to deep questions, the unleashing of creativity, by which our work is humanized and sanctified. This book is oriented to the spiritual explorers of today who seek understanding of how their work relates to thfefr spirituality. Spiritual explorers seek a richer life for themselves, their families, and their colleagues at work. They want work that goes beyond a pay cheque and rungs on the corporate ladder. They search for a higher purpose to their work and lives. They search for a way to handle life's hardships: the death of a colleague, a sick child, divorce, job loss.
For many of us, most of the time, our work feels anything but sacred. Where the rubber hits the road, there are skid marks more often than smooth acceleration to God. As we were working on this book, for example, we became distracted and bogged down by the demands of full-time work, the ups and downs of family life, problems at our churches, personal health issues, and sickness and tragedy among friends — in short, the tangled stuff of life. We wanted to write about finding God at work, but were in danger of blatant hypocrisy as we struggled unsuccessfully to balance our own lives and live by our spiritual beliefs.
We are not experts, then, so much as people who care enough about the questions to ask them aloud and embark on the journey toward answers. We are all too aware of the problems and pains of the workplace in this twenty-first century world. We know that work is stressful and hard, whether it is digging up roads, designing software, or caring for children. We take seriously statistics such as the decline in job satisfaction among Canadians, from 62% in 1991 to 45% in 2001, as related by Tom Harpur in Finding the Still Point: A Spiritual Response to Stress [2002, 11]. Canadian researcher Linda Duxbury reports that absenteeism in the Canadian workforce costs some $3 billion (Canadian) per year. [See her survey report Voices of Canadians, published in 2003.]
The workplace in our culture has become almost synonymous with stress, overwork, instability, and flux. Duxbury's research shows that 25% of Canadians are working more than fifty hours a week, compared to only 10% doing so ten years ago; 30% report depression; 40% cannot face going into work some days and take “mental health” days off, and an alarming 60% report feeling high levels of stress from work. Reginald Bibby's research has found that 48% of Canadians polled in 2000 said that their top personal concern was seeming never to have enough time [Bibby, 2002, 205]. People are feeling stretched to the limit, with very little downtime for recovery and few spiritual resources to sustain them.
We are writing as two people engaged in a modern workplace with all its problems. This is not an academic analysis or a theological work, but a book for all spiritual explorers, regardless of their religious background, who are trying to integrate spirit and soul with work and daily life. We are both Christians, and clearly our faith influences the way we think and write. If we were Jewish or Muslim, this book would be different, but we hope that all readers will find it useful.
The perspectives we bring are broadly sociological and theological. Between us we have expertise in teaching, working with organizations, preparing students for the work world, and addressing the spiritual needs of people at various life stages. As a sociologist and a priest we have different working lives, but a shared desire to find God, spirit, holiness in the ordinary world, and to live connected to that sustaining centre. We do not have the answers to all the challenges of the workplace. Life, as Scott Peck memorably wrote, is difficult. And work will always be challenging. But we do have some insights into the simple gifts and truths that lie at the heart of spirituality, and we are convinced that as these are engaged so our work will be leavened and sanctified.
The book is structured in a straightforward way. Part One: The Challenges of the Workplace deals with issues of work today on three levels — the personal, the corporate, and the societal. Chapter 1 focuses on individuals dealing with the fragmentation between public and spiritual life. We look at the way life became compartmentalized over the centuries, and spirituality became divorced from work. Where God and prayer were a central part of agrarian living, the impersonal factories were soulless and seemed far removed from what was sacred. The legacy for individuals today is a disconnection between the public persona at work in the world, and the private being whose beliefs, longings and joys are kept locked out of sight and out of play during working hours.
Chapter 2 deals with the workplace. It looks at the reasons we work, and the way that we tend to define ourselves by our work, and then fall prey to its destructive characteristics of overwork, conflict, anxiety, and burnout. Chapter 3 is oriented to issues at a cultural level, and considers how competition, consumerism, and materialism, the cornerstones of our economy, contribute to an unsustainable situation for both individuals and organizations, leading to collapse. Throughout these chapters and the three subsequent ones, which parallel them, we seed the text with stories of real and fictional people who are grappling with the issues we raise, and we pose questions for individual reflection or group discussion. We hope that this brings life and relevance to the topics we present.
Part Two: Simple Gifts presents ways to heal the fragmentation [chapter 4], humanize the workplace [chapter 5], and embrace virtues that run counter to the culture's norms [chapter 6], by engaging the spiritual truths that have always been known and taught, but so often forgotten or neglected. We look at the concept of vocation, for example, as an alternative to the worldly wisdom that a job is just a means of making money. The Sabbath tradition is discussed, with its gift of bringing balance and rest to the week. And the simple but radical gifts of community, simplicity, and freedom are reaffirmed as crucial, if our frantic work world is to be made saner and healthier.
Chapter 7 looks specifically at the Christian contribution to our understanding of spirituality in the workplace, through a selection of sayings of Jesus and writings of Christians. In chapter 8, acknowledging the reality that we live in a multi-faith world, and grateful for what