Reflections
THE CALL TO WORK
By Doug Wysockey-Johnson
St. Benedict referred to work as a friend to the soul. Pope John Paul II (who held many jobs before he became a priest) said that his earlier work helped him to experience the “gospel anew.” Martin Luther encouraged the people of his day to milk their cows to the glory of God. Work starts to sound pretty good.
And then there was my day yesterday. I felt frustrated, bored, anxious, and out of control. I spent too much time doing things that felt tedious. But that was only because I was avoiding the projects that had me feeling totally overwhelmed and unqualified. (This is all in on day mind you.) There are days I resonate less with St. Benedict, and more with Studs Terkel, who wrote:
Work is, by its very nature, about violence— to the spirit as well as the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fist-fights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.
For most of us, there is some of both. Work can be glorious, energizing and meaningful, something that helps us experience ourselves and the gospel anew. And it can be violence to the spirit and body.
Our magazine [Faith@Work] theme for the year and vision for the future is about call. Faith At Work exists to help people explore, discern, and act on their many calls in the complexity of their lives. This issue we take up in particular our call to the workplace. As always, we define work inclusively, including paid and unpaid, in the home and outside of it. What we do in our daily lives constitutes our work.
Undergirding this issue on the call to work you will find an assumption. The assumption is that most work can be a valid and good place for ministry. Those of us in the church tend to operate with a subtle or not-so-subtle bias— that certain work is considered more sacred, holy and nearer to the heart of God.
Closest to God are clergy, missionaries and other “full-time ministers.” Next would be people who are doing good things in the helping professions: teachers, social workers and healers of various kinds. Way at the other end of the spectrum would be… who? When I ask this question in groups, I usually hear responses like: corporate executives, lawyers, and Wall Street types.
My belief is that anyone in any profession can be in ministry if they are attempting to be God’s person in that place. Would anyone argue that there isn’t the need for kingdom values like justice, mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation in the corporate world? Or to state it by way of the via negativa, would anyone say that you don’t find greed, envy, sloth, lust and misuse of power within the institutional church? All of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All of us are called to speak for justice, reconciliation and peace in the places we work. The question is simply (but certainly not a simple question) “Where is God calling me to be in ministry?”
In his book, Answering Your Call, John Schuster describes what a person with a sense of call might look like:
Calls draw us to the depth level of whatever roles we may already have… [it] turns insurance policy peddlers into advisors of needed financial security, grocery store employees into health and nutrition suppliers, doctors into healers, secretaries into stewards, business people into entrepreneurs, bureaucrats into civil servants, writers into dream weavers, parents into co-creators of life.
I might be tempted to dismiss Schuster’s words as mere semantics. Except that I have been impacted by insurance people who do what they do out of a desire to help. And I have met and been graced by grocery store employees, and secretaries, and business people who I know are making a difference. And I am flailing around these days trying to be a parent with a sense of meaning and purpose.
Our work represents a huge percentage of our waking time. It matters to us, but not just to us. It also matters to the people impacted by our work. And it matters to God, who is at work in the world in and through our work.
Doug Wysockey-Johnson is the Executive Director of Faith At Work. He lives in Arlington, VA with his wife and 2 young children. Visit the Faith At Work website at: www.FaithatWork.com
This piece originally appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Faith@Work and permission to reprint it has been granted.
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