The Seven Dwrafs may have whistled; there should be a song about groaning while we work

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 3 more and more-

As an observer of the ways in which people put together their faith in God, I have to say that most of us tend to overstate our importance to God’s kingdom.

Once we realize that we belong with God and with His people, we will naturally want to find out what our role is as a new creature in Christ. This is referred to as our calling, our ministry or our apostolate. As we are wont to do, we will figure that our place among the saints is very close to the axis of everything.

For some reason there is immense pressure on the new believer to find some way to immediately start becoming a career Christian. The search begins by listing the kinds of jobs that are fostered by the faith. For example: Pastor, Pastor’s Wife, Missionary, Christian College Professor, Religious Education Specialist, Christian School Administrator, Teacher, Christian Author, Christian Recording Artist, Evangelist, Monk, Nun, Music Minister, Missionary Pilot, Military Chaplain, Christian Entertainer, Christian Bookstore Manager, etc.

In my experience, this pressure retains its felt presence throughout life. This pressure, not the faith careers themselves, has created a great deal of distortion about our theology of work, our notions about God’s will, and it makes harmful inroads into our ideas about a meaningful, purposeful life. When we allow misshapen views about work, about God’s will and about our sense of purpose, we have really messed up a massive portion of our lives.

We have a mindset problem when it comes to work and vocation. If we do not find some clarity and some simplicity here, we will soon find ourselves Christians adrift – living perhaps comfortably, but inaccurately.

As I write this, Apple founder Steve Jobs has just died of pancreatic cancer (technically, respiratory failure) on October 5, 2011. He was a beloved world-changer, innovator and, for a time, America’s Decent Guy.

Among the many televised tributes to Steve, there were included several of his statements made in his commencement address at Stanford University in June of 2005. I am going to disagree with some of the things Steve said about work – not to attack Steve, and certainly not to parse his words, but to demonstrate how favorable an erroneous view of work has become in our culture.

Steve: “I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

My dad, for one, would not have dared look in the mirror and say such a thing. On the majority of his days, he went to work at a job he didn’t particularly care for. He didn’t go because he loved his work, or because the work he did was especially meaningful to him or to others. He had a sense of duty and responsibility to earn money to help support his family. His job was not personally fulfilling, but it met his duty and responsibility.

Day in and day out my father, and my grandfathers, and my great-grandfathers went to work, earned some money, and left absolutely no identifiable dent on their workplace.

Many are the guys my age who will remember their dads “going to work every day to a job they hated.”

Steve: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

It was my generation that first brought a noticeable change in work to the table. We wanted our actual jobs to be important, significant and meaningful. We were not the generation that would do anything for a good paycheck. We were looking for jobs that would make an impact. Work itself wasn’t good enough. The kind of work suddenly made a difference too.

I can’t help but imagine how quiet the world would be on the day that everyone who did not love what they did for a living elected to stay home. Job satisfaction polls are difficult to collate, but one poll suggests that 1 in 5 Americans “feels passionately about their job.” I would surmise that 4 in 5 would look in Steve’s mirror and stay home. In another survey, a full 60 percent of the American workforce said they “plan to change jobs as soon as the economy gets better.”

I have always enjoyed this comment from comedian George Carlin: “Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar.”

Somehow, we are forced to conclude that if we do not absolutely adore our jobs, we have failed significantly. We certainly didn’t lose our way because of Steve. We lost our way when the Christian world view lost its inertia in culture.

Work, from a Christian perspective, is intrinsically honorable and valuable. It is not made more so by how much we love it, how much we earn, or its impact on society. Our work is a manifestation of what Caussade has repeatedly referred to as our “state of life.” In this particular section, he refers to our role or status with regard to work and vocation as “His design” (Page 60.)

Over the years I have had jobs that were invigorating and challenging, and jobs that made my stomach hurt each morning. I have been made to feel like my contribution at work was significant and appreciated, and I have been poorly treated, threatened, degraded and demoralized. Once I even had a nervous breakdown and couldn’t bring myself to leave the house to go to my job. I got halfway to the front door at home and was suddenly stricken with an attack of anxiety. Such has been my stormy romance with work. Sometimes it is a dance, sometimes a dirge.

I could go on with bad example after bad example of how the current mindset about work and vocation is unrealistic and uncharacteristic of the Christian world view.

Instead, let me state that the proper Christian view perceives work as a natural and vital extension of our walk with God. As Creator, God worked. As Redeemer, He revitalizes. As Guide, He directs and illumines. Work – any work – is as much a part of our spiritual life as is prayer. In fact, The Rule of St. Benedict, which has been used in Western monasticism for more than 1,500 years, refers to daily prayer, seven times per day, as “the work of God.”

Up to this point I may have only demonstrated how cloudy the issue of work and vocation can be according to Modern Man with his secularized and striated perception. Next we will try to right the ship on the subject.

Pursuing God's will without tripping over our own illusion

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 3 continued yet more-

It is always a risky thing to tell a believer that part of their life with God will involve responding to impressions and directions that are less concrete or objective, but are understood as suggestions and nudges from God.

Caussade brings up two avenues of submission upon which the believer may travel with relative safety. He states that “God makes use of our being in two ways: He either obliges us to perform certain actions, or he simply acts himself in us” (Page 59).

Saying the same in another way, he says, “There are therefore duties of precept that must be accomplished, and duties of necessity that must be accepted” (Page 60).

These two categories of “duties” certainly involve the will of the submissive soul in obedience and in acquiescence. A believer is quite far along when he or she has lived and loved in the light of these two undertakings. The guidelines for such responses are found in the precepts (and acting upon them in obedience) or the necessities (being acted upon by God) according to which the clear-minded believer can rightly discern a life in accord with the will of God.

It still takes some doing, but the mature believer who has trained himself to walk with God will be able to fathom out his required obedience and his requisite acquiescence while he is firmly present to God in his every step.

It is a bold step for any teacher of spiritual things to move from here to what Caussade would consider a Class 3 Duty: “The duties of inspiration to which the spirit of God inclines hearts that are submissive to him” (Page 60).

He goes on to say, “This third class of duties is quite beyond and outside any law, form or determined matter” (Page 60).

This kind of talk has a fascinating appeal to people who want a deep spiritual acumen but a minimal amount of guidance and a low tolerance for boundaries. In each of us there is a craving to express ourselves freely and push back limits. Any high school or college student who has served on the school newspaper will be able to recall the administration banning a story or stopping the presses or ceasing a publication altogether because “the students went too far.”

The universal pleasure that we all take in swearing bears out this craving as well. We push the boundaries of language and force it to go beyond its norms. Something in us enjoys this.

When God told Adam and Eve that they could eat anything in the garden except the fruit of one tree, it didn’t take long for the two, with the help of the Serpent, to force that boundary.

While there is a great deal of freedom to celebrate as spiritual beings made alive and restored by God, a little lack of structures is all we need to get crazy.

“One merely lets oneself go, and freely and simply obeys one’s impressions,” says Caussade (Page 60).

As you must know by now, one can get very weird very quickly when one removes spirituality from its context of sound theology and places it in the context of imagination. If this is the way in which someone is going to “let oneself go,” then there will be no end to the troubles ahead. Many times throughout history and to the present day, someone with charm or talent or gumption has veered away from orthodoxy and has developed theories that are radically off course from the truth. Such veering can result in a “new” religion, although most of those smack of regurgitated heresies which the church has condemned in the past, or they can result in just one person carrying around a very distorted, unsound and unreliable grasp of Christian spirituality.

So, if we are going to “obey our impressions” and call this the will of God, we are in a wilderness with no landmarks. It is certainly adventurous and sounds quite spiritual, but, as Caussade says, we are at risk of falling “under the influence of our own will and be exposed to illusion” (Page 60).

Without guidelines or limits, our chances of enfolding ourselves into a self-made illusion are very good. The chances that we have embarked on a path God has chosen, not so good.

To rightly involve oneself in a Class 3 Duty, Caussade gives us two forms of advice. 1. Receive clear guidance from a spiritual director. 2. Do not make a big deal out of hunting down the Class 3 Duties.

As to Point 1, Caussade says: “That souls may not be deceived in this way,” [self-made illusion] “God never fails to give them wise directors who point out the degree of liberty or reserve with which these inspirations should be utilized” (Page 60).

I needn’t point out that once we become endeared to an illusion, which we believe bears out our advanced spiritual condition, we will not be prone to ask someone of spiritual authority to check out our vision. Anyone who would dare point out our error would be considered an obstacle to the “truth” we have found. When we think ourselves visionaries, everyone else is considered blind.

Father C’s explanation of Point 2 is important enough that I want to give it a separate reflection.

Entire arsenal of spiritual life is needed to overcome pride's destructive force

Book 2, Chapter 2

-Part 3 continued more-

When we fail to perceive the merit or meaning that is ours at the hand of God, we will devise our own. This is a very troublesome aspect of those of us who seek to follow Christ. We can be ill-at-ease with our own status within the household of God. Probably, we are not aware enough of the gracious work of Jesus by which we have been elevated from “enemy of God,” to “child of God.”

Selfishness never looks good on a person, but, among spiritual people, self-centeredness is just plain weird. Augustine said “Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues.” If that is so, then pride must certainly be the mortar and pestle by which all other virtues are ground to powder.

The best disguise for spiritual pride is zeal. In the very name of seeking God with all our hearts we can jeopardize our true calling by making one up out of our own idea about what we think our service unto God should look like. It is perilously easy to become jealous of another person’s ministry. If he builds a vast network of buildings and people and equipment (and cash) in his work for the kingdom of God, then why shouldn’t I try to get a piece of that?

When I was 9 years old I sat by myself with the small congregation, while my mother sat with the choir, and I was perturbed at the minister, sitting in what appeared to be a throne padded in burgundy velvet, and him doing all the talking. It was a 9-year-old’s version of pride making itself known by spawning the spiteful question, “Who does he think he is?”

It doesn’t have to be strictly ministry that makes us envy others. It could just be their state of life, to use Caussade’s words. I notice, for example, that money comes very easily to some people. They are in situations where their earnings are very good. Myself, I have never been a grand earner of money. I have known men and women who could turn an idea into cash in ways that simply mystify me. My mother is a natural bookkeeper, but I neither inherited nor absorbed any of her monetary acumen. Possibly I am no more financially refined than I was when I was sitting in that church on that Sunday at age 9.

In some spiritual ways I am also no more refined than I was back in 1966, sitting in that red-brick small-town church with the floor tilted toward the front, and the windows stained with greens and blues.

At the root of many of our spiritual immaturities is the lifelong struggle with humility.

Science is prone to tell us, for example, that our bodies are always coming down with pneumonia. In healthy people, the body is strong enough and equipped enough to ward off the pending ailment. A weaker, less-equipped body might put up less of a fight, and pneumonia gets the best of it.

I was a fairly strong young man when I had a bout with walking pneumonia. Other than general exhaustion and my lungs feeling like they were filled with sand, the worst symptom was that of pleurisy. The lung lining is inflamed and hurts. Coughing or sneezing felt like someone was spearing me in the back with a rusty blade, then twisting. I remember running to walls and door jams to press my back against some external support so I could sneeze with less pain. I also remember wishing that something could be removed from my body to make walking pneumonia go away. Alas, there is no such procedure.

It is the same with pride. It cannot be removed. It has to be overcome. With what? In the same way that the overall health of the body wards off pneumonia, the life that God gives us and renews us to includes the gifts, the fruit and the character of spiritual life that will hold pride at bay.

In order to answer the problem of pride we have to engage the entire arsenal of our spiritual life.

It is possible that over the course of time we have fallen prey to the idea that we have to balance a certain amount of pride with anything spiritual in our lives. Purity of heart will not allow a percentage of pollution. Pride killed us in the garden, while humility made resurrection possible through the work of Christ on the cross. We cannot see the cross clearly and conclude that a little bit of pride will give us the balance that we suppose we need.

Having become Christians, we are not now immune to pride, but are rather more vulnerable to it in its most horrific form: Spiritual pride.

The presence of pride and the absence of humility are two sides of the same coin, but we must realize that the presence of pride undoes far more than humility. It contaminates every other aspect of the spiritual life. I can trace everything I have ever done wrong, and every right thing that I have avoided to a proud “me-first” spirit.

Pride won’t stop any of us from reading about self-abandonment to God’s providence, but it will most certainly stop us from actually abandoning ourselves to God’s providence.