Preface
WhenSpirituality at Workwas first published in hardcover in 2001, the very idea of trying to find God in the midst of the hustle and bustle of daily life—and especially in a workplace that is being experienced as devoid of the holy, the sacred, the transcendent, the ultimately meaningful—seemed new and perhaps a bit odd, if not downright silly, to many people. But since then, the entire spirituality of work “movement” has burst upon the scene in no uncertain terms. A variety of good books have since been published on the subject, and even Fortune magazine ran a cover story subtitled “The Surprising Quest for Spiritual Renewal in the American Workplace.”
The positive reaction I have received to my book has convinced me that people are hungry for ways to balance their work lives with their personal, family, community, and church responsibilities. I have spoken with groups from all over the United States—from San Diego to Scranton, from Memphis to Cincinnati, from North Carolina to Spokane—and my e-mail list now has over 1,000 participants, all of whom are struggling (as I am) to figure out how we can really practice “spirituality at work.”
What I have learned from those with whom I have talked is that the spirituality of work is an authentic spirituality, not a second-class cousin to the real thing. There are many people who regularly experience God in their work, and the awareness of this presence transforms how they do their work. If these people were in the majority in most workplaces, this would be a very different world indeed.
I am now even more convinced that for any spirituality (including the spirituality of work) to be authentic, it must change the way we act. I see a lot of what is called “spirituality of work” or “marketplace ministry” being used as the latest management technique to make workers more productive or help them feel better about their jobs. The key to the spirituality of work, however, is that when we finally recognize that we are in the presence of God—whatever word or words we use for that presence—we simply cannot continue to operate in the same way we would if we were not in that presence. Ipso facto, as we used to say in my high school Latin class, we humans automatically act much differently when we are in touch with the true God—the Real One, the Ultimate Big Unit, the Original Sine Qua Non. We can’t help ourselves. If we don’t act any differently when we are aware of the divine presence than we do when we are oblivious to that presence, we’ve probably got the wrong god in the first place.
As Jesus might have put it, by our fruits we will know whether or not we are practicing an authentic and helpful spirituality. So let’s not fool ourselves. We cannot practice a spirituality of work unless we are willing to be better—more honest, creative, compassionate, competent—workers, no matter what profession or occupation or vocation we find ourselves in, and any spirituality that merely makes us feel good is bogus.
Finally, I would like to reemphasize that the spirituality of work is for everyone, not just managers or professionals or white-collar workers. I am nervous about all the books being written for CEOs and top managers in business; as if they are the only or most important ones who need to find God in their work. If the spirituality of work does not work for the secretary, the farmer, the police officer, the machinist, the sanitation worker, the grocer, the tailor, and the tollbooth operator, then it is not a fully matured spirituality.
If you’d like to join this ongoing conversation, just send me an e-mail atspiritualitywork@aol.com.
Thank you for all your good work.

Gregory F. Augustine Pierce
Chicago, Illinois

Introduction
A Spirituality for the
Piety Impaired
“Bidden or not bidden, God is present.” These words, carved in Latin over the door to the office of philosopher and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, are as true or false in the workplace as they are anywhere else. If we don’t believe them—really, functionally, in our gut—then the idea that work can be a source of spiritual insight, comfort, challenge, and growth is absurd and a folly. If we do believe them, then the workplace becomes just one more place, one more opportunity, where the divine reality can be encountered in a tangible way.
Why would we want to look for God in our work? The simplest answer is that most of us spend so much of our time working that it would be a shame if we couldn’t find God there. A more complex reason is that there is a creative energy in work that is somehow tied to God’s creative energy. If we can understand and enter into that connection, perhaps we can use it to transform the workplace into something quite remarkable. While I believe the spirituality of work has its roots in the best parts of at least the Christian tradition (I don’t feel qualified to discuss how this spirituality fits with other faiths), I also believe that the spirituality of work is different from—and in some ways antithetical to—the prevailing Christian spirituality, which I would call “contemplative” or even “monastic.”
You will not find here a pious approach to the spirituality of work. I like to joke that I consider myself “piety impaired,” but I also admit that I am not comfortable with displays of religiousity, especially in the workplace. I do not think that the spirituality of work is about organizing prayer groups or Bible study programs in the office, factory, or farmhouse. If people want to do that, it is fine with me—but don’t ask me to join. Nor am I terribly eager to discuss my religious beliefs with others in the workplace. If someone wants to ask me about what I believe or why I act a certain way, I am certainly willing to talk with them. But you won’t find me walking around the office saying “Thank God” or “Praise the Lord.”
The spirituality of work that interests me is one that comes out of the work itself, one that allows us to get in touch with the God who is always present in our workplaces, whether “bidden or not bidden.” This kind of spirituality has little to do with piety and much more to do with our becoming aware of the intrinsically spiritual nature of the work we are doing and then acting on that awareness. Authentic spiri- tuality—at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition—is as much about making hard choices in our daily lives, about working with others to make the world a better place, and about loving our neighbor and even our enemy as it is about worship and prayer. For this reason, I believe that the spirituality of work can be explained and described primarily in secular language, a language much more easily understood by the average person, who is often not a religious professional or even particularly devout. This language also has the added advantage of being accessible to those of other faiths and traditions and even to those of no particular religious background or belief.
This book is an exploration of the spirituality of work. It is an attempt to investigate whether and how the reality that we call God can be accessed in the midst of the hustle and bustle of our daily work lives. This is by no means a comprehensive or definitive exercise. I have only been aware of the possibility of getting in tune with the divine presence through my work for the last decade or so, and—as anyone who works with me will attest—I fail in my attempts much more often than I succeed. So I offer these reflections more out of an attempt to begin a dialogue with others than to claim that I have figured out what the spirituality of work is or how it can be practiced.
I have been conducting this dialogue on the Internet for the past few years with more than three hundred people in a group called “Faith and Work in Cyberspace.” Every couple of weeks, I have sent out an e-mail on one of the ideas found in this book and have invited the group to send me their thoughts, experiences, and examples. More than anything else, their provocative responses have helped shape my thinking on practicing the disciplines of the spirituality of work. You will find their comments sprinkled throughout this book, and there is an invitation in the conclusion for you to join our ongoing dialogue.
So you see, this is not your typical book on spirituality. It is focused on an area of our lives that is often viewed as inconsequential—if not outright hostile—to our spiritual lives, and it tries to use the language of the workplace rather than the language of religion to talk about spiritual matters. Despite these caveats, I invite you to join me on
this search for the God who, bidden or unbidden, is always present
in our work.

Gregory F. Augustine Pierce
Chicago, Illinois

Chapter 1
What Does It Mean
to Be Spiritual at Work?

Every act leaves the world with a deeper
or a fainter impress of God.
Alfred North Whitehead

For many people—well, probably for most—spirituality means getting away from the busy world in one way or another. We get away to pray, to meditate or reflect, or to worship. If someone suggests that spirituality can be practiced just as well in the midst of our daily lives—on our jobs, with our families, in our community—the very definition of what we mean by spirituality is called into question.
Is “Spirituality of Work” an Oxymoron?
It seems that “spirituality of work” is an oxymoron: two ideas that at first do not seem to go together, like “jumbo shrimp” or “tough love.”
But what if spirituality really doesn’t exist (or at least cannot be discovered) in the hustle and bustle of daily life, and especially in the workplace? For Christians at least, this must be a heresy of some sort. Isn’t God everywhere? Doesn’t the doctrine of the Incarnation mean that the entire material world has been infused with divine life?
And if spirituality cannot be discovered in the primary, ordinary activities of ordinary people, then hasn’t spirituality itself been appropriated by a special interest group—the “You must get away from the world to find God” lobby, the “I’m holy and you’re not” school of religion? The rest of us—the busy office workers or factory workers or farmworkers; the parents with small children; the hospice volunteers; the local precinct captains or civic leaders—are all relegated to a part-time spirituality that is snatched in the minutes and hours we can get away from our myriad responsibilities. We become amateurs in the spirituality game. And if we are merely standing on the outside of the spiritual life and looking in, no wonder we become envious of the monk on the mountaintop.
Therefore, I am going to assume that spirituality can be practiced in our work. I’m going to assume that there is a spirituality of work that can be every bit as rich, satisfying, challenging, and compelling as the most traditional monastic or mystical spirituality.
In the Buddhist tradition there is a story of a woman who finally became enlightened. When she was asked what the difference was, she described it this way: “Before I was enlightened, I chopped wood and I hauled water. After I was enlightened, I chopped wood and I hauled water.” I think that the spirituality of work is much like this. We can be doing exactly the same work before we begin practicing the spirituality of work as we do afterward. But both our spirituality and our work are changed by the very act of making the connection.
If, as I assume, there is such a thing as a “spirituality of work,” how do we find it? Does this spirituality exist as a serious, long-term, disciplined, spiritual path? Certainly not in the way that some of the more traditional spiritualities do. There are very few good books on the
spirituality of work. It is not a spirituality that is preached from the pulpit very often. There are few saints who espoused or practiced spiri- tuality that was based on their work in the world. There are no schools for this spirituality, and few retreat centers specialize in it. There is no international organization or movement, no headquarters, and no bible (unless you count the Bible—but that’s another discussion).
Recently, however, spirituality has become the latest fad in corporate culture. The many books, seminars, articles, and gurus now pushing “spirituality” in the workplace should serve as warnings to us. “Spirituality of work” could easily become a soft, individualistic, emotional “fix” used merely to make people feel better about the status quo or work harder for less money.
A true spirituality of work is not about quick fixes. As theologian John Shea says, “People who think they can control spirit are making a fundamental mistake. We do not control the spirit. That spirit challenges us to go places and do things we would otherwise avoid.” “Genuine spirituality,” as writer Eugene Kennedy has pointed out, “makes demands on us, challenges us to overcome selfishness, to love from the depths of ourselves so that we may establish community with others despite our sinful human condition.”
Is Work a Punishment for Our Sins?
For most people, work can seem to be the opposite of spirituality. “If work is so great,” said columnist Mike Royko, “why do they have to pay us to do it?” “I never did like to work, and I don’t deny it,” said Abraham Lincoln. “I’d rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh—anything but work.”
In the late fifties and early sixties, there was a popular television program called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. One of the characters on the show (played by actor Bob Denver, who went on to become Gilligan of Gilligan’s Island) was Maynard G. Krebs. Maynard was a beatnik. A few years later he would have been called a hippie. He always wore the same ratty old sweatshirt, never went to class, and whenever anyone would suggest that he get a job, he would scream in a high-pitched tone of utter contempt and terror, “WORK!” That one word, delivered perfectly every time, summed up popular culture’s view of work: at best a necessary evil, something we do because we have to, something to be avoided if at all possible, and certainly not the locus of our spiritual lives.
But if you don’t have work to do, you are viewed with great suspicion in our society. It is almost as if work defines who we are. Those without “gainful employment”—welfare recipients, stay-at-home parents, even retired people—are often considered less worthy, less productive members of society than those with jobs, no matter how little those jobs contribute to the betterment of society.
It is not just secular society that shapes our view of work, how-ever. In many corners of religion, work is often viewed as negative or, at best, is ignored as irrelevant to the search for God.
Let’s start with one of the most foundational stories of the Judeo-Christian tradition: the story of the original sin. Adam and Eve are living in the Garden of Eden, perfectly happy and presumably with plenty of time for spiritual pursuits. They tend the garden, but it is pleasant, fulfilling work. From the start, then, work is a spiritually enriching endeavor. Then the pair do something wrong. Whatever it is, the punishment is clear: They are banished from the Garden forever, and from then on their work will be by the sweat of their brow. Thus tending the garden transformed into WORK! (Maynard G. Krebs would understand this story.)
This negative religious attitude toward work is not an isolated example. Many years ago, Harper & Row published a book titled Christian Spirituality: The Essential Guide to the Most Influential Spiritual Writings of the Christian Tradition. This is a 690-page, $34.95 hardcover book that promises “Nearly 2000 years of Christian spiri- tual writing presented, examined, and summarized . . . by more than twenty esteemed professors and religious scholars. . . . A detailed overview of the broad spectrum of Christian history from its inception to the present day.”
One of the features of the book is an extensive index. There are citations listed for asceticism, contemplation, meditation, prayer, and so forth. When I checked for those things that I spend 90 percent of my waking time on, however, this is what I found: under “work,” no listing; “job,” no listing; “labor,” no listing. I then looked under “commu-
nity,” “politics,” and “social justice.” Still no listings. I went to “family,” sure that I would find something. There was nothing. Finally, under “marriage,” I found one citation for two separate entries; it read “marriage, renunciation of.” When I looked under
“children” and found only “children, as evil,” I knew that I would never actually read the book.
It’s not that in two thousand years nothing has been written about work or community or family life in the Christian spiritual tradition. But that a major publisher could bring out an important book—one that I am sure found its way into seminary libraries and onto the bookshelves of clergy and of laypeople—that purported to summarize Christian spirituality without mentioning these basic realities of people’s lives shows that daily, ordinary work is either ignored or held suspect by much of organized religion.
Are There Disciplines for the Spirituality of Work?
Why is so little good material on the spirituality of work coming out of the Christian tradition?
One reason is simply that practitioners of the contemplative tradition have convinced just about everyone that if we want to align ourselves and our environment with God then we must get away from the world, at least for a time. “Silence, solitude, and simplicity” is the motto of traditional, contemplative spirituality, while “noise, crowds, and complexity” would describe the “spiritual” view of the normal workday.
Another reason that the spirituality of work has not become a familiar and accepted concept is that, unlike many other spiritualities, it has no distinctive set of disciplines that have been developed by those who practice spirituality in the workplace. There are no established practices that people can follow to make such spirituality a reality. If God can be found in the hustle and bustle of daily life, in noisy homes or factories, in crowded subways and full classrooms, in complex business deals or political decisions, how exactly does it happen?
In his influential book A Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster identifies several regular practices that he felt were essential to the
spiritual life. He calls them the “classical disciplines” and includes meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance, and celebration. Certainly Foster would argue that these traditional spiritual disciplines are just what busy people need. “In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds,” he writes. “If we hope to move beyond the superficialities of our culture, including our religious culture, we must be willing to go down into the re-creating silences, into the inner world of contemplation.”
There is a problem, however, with trying to adapt the contemplative spiritual disciplines to the workplace: it doesn’t seem to work for the great majority of people. I think that it doesn’t work precisely because the contemplative disciplines rely on our getting away from the world. Parker Palmer put his finger on this problem in his book The Active Life:
People who try to live by monastic norms sometimes fall so short (“I just can’t find an hour a day to meditate”) that they end up feeling guilty about leading “unspiritual” lives. People caught in the gap between monastic values and the de- mands of active life sometimes simply abandon the spiritual quest. And people who follow a spirituality that does not always re- spect the energies of action are sometimes led into
passivity and withdrawal, into a diminishment of their own spirits.
In the spiritual literature of our time, it is not difficult to find the world of action portrayed as an arena of ego and power, while the world of contemplation is pictured as a realm of light and grace. I have often read, for example, that the treasure of “true self” can be found as we draw back from active life and enter into contemplative prayer. Less often have I read that this treasure can be found in our struggles to work, create, and care in the world of action.
If a spirituality of work is going to be successful, it cannot be based on practices that take us away from the daily grind. Instead, we must develop practices that allow us to transform that “grind” into “grist” for our spiritual mills. The disciplines of the spirituality of work must arise from and be compatible with our work, rather than attempt to overlay the workplace with practices drawn from another place, time, and life situation.
How Spiritual Was Jesus?
Spirituality is a word that evokes all kinds of warm, fuzzy feelings. We think of sitting on a mountaintop or seashore, watching the sun rise or set while we contemplate the eternal verities of life. Or we remember times of peace and quiet—perhaps on a retreat or day of recollection—when we were able to pray, or read, or meditate for hours. Or we jealously guard the few moments in each day or week when we practice our spirituality. But what, exactly, is spirituality? One wag has said that trying to define spirituality is like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. Yet spirituality is one of those things for which “we know it when we see it” applies.
The first mistake in trying to define or understand spirituality is to confuse it with religion or piety. We think that because we go to church or pray or meditate or do any of a myriad of religious practices we are being spiritual. Not necessarily. There is a story of an abbot and a young monk who are invited to supper at the home of a family. The family is honored to have these holy guests and go out of their way (and probably way beyond their budget) to put on a magnificent meal. The young monk, however, has taken a vow to fast, and so he declines all but a single stalk of celery, which he carves up nicely and eats. On the way back to the monastery, the abbot says to the young monk, “The next time, fast from your virtue.”
The young monk had mistaken the religious practice of fasting for true spirituality. He would have been closer to the mark had he eschewed his fast and entered into the hospitality and generosity of his hosts.
Christians, of course, have the abbot’s understanding of spiritu-
ality firmly in our tradition, thanks primarily to Jesus himself. While Jesus prayed and fasted and went to synagogue, he always made clear that religious practices were a means to an end, not an end in
themselves.
If the Sabbath ban against activity got in the way of the disciples’ helping others (or even, in one story, of the disciples’ satisfying their hunger), then Jesus told them to drop it. He was always “eating and drinking” with sinners, not insisting that they join him in prayer. He taught his disciples to pray in private and to always put the law of love above the law of Moses. (Notice that when he forgave the woman caught in adultery he did not recommend that she become a nun. He simply told her to sin no more.)
Jesus was not a monk, and he did not recommend that his disciples become monks. In fact, the Christian monastic tradition started centuries after the beginning of the church. Jesus was no doubt aware of the get-away-from-the-world tradition, since it is fairly well established that the Essene community—a group of Jews organized somewhat like today’s monastics—was operating at the time of Jesus and that he almost surely would have known about it. Perhaps he visited the Essenes, learned from them, even stayed with them for a time. But he did not become one of them, nor did he encourage his disciples to emulate them.
The spirituality of Jesus was clearly much more oriented to staying in the world than to getting away from it. How have we come to think otherwise?
What Do Monks Have to Do with It?
There’s a little book that remains on the list of spiritual best-sellers five hundred years after it was written: The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. New translations and editions of this book come out every year, proving that many people find relevant what an obscure monk wrote in the late Middle Ages.
Because it is such a classic (and because I thought getting away from the world was what spirituality was all about), I used to read
The Imitation of Christ when I was younger as part of a daily discipline of “spiritual reading.” Now, many years later, I go back and reread some of the things that Thomas à Kempis wrote, and I cringe. “This is the highest wisdom, by contempt of the world to tend toward the kingdom of heaven,” or “Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth,” or, approvingly quoting the Roman poet Seneca, “Every time I walk among men, I come back less a man.”
I use poor Brother Kempis as a whipping boy not because I have anything against him. I am merely using his writings as an archetype of what many of us think of when we think about spirituality: that it is ascetic, suspicious of the world, based on monastic lifestyles and disciplines, and pretty much ignorant or even contemptuous of the experience of everyday life—work, family, and civic affairs.
It is true that there are traditions within Christianity that have emphasized a spirituality of daily life that includes work. Thérèse of Lisieux, “the Little Flower,” talked about the “little way” of spirituality in her daily life. Ignatius of Loyola, Francis of Assisi, Francis de Sales, Mother Teresa, and many others had a clear sense that God can be found in the ordinary lives of
people. Even Benedict, the founder of monasticism himself, taught that work and prayer were both essential to the spiritual life. And Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant Reformation, had a very complete theology of what he called “the priesthood of all believers” that put people’s daily work at the center of their Christian vocations.
On the other hand, in the story of Mary and Martha, Jesus affirmed Mary because she took time away from work to listen to him teach, and he mildly reprimanded Martha for being worried about too many things (at that moment, getting dinner on the table). Jesus said that Mary had chosen “the better part.” And that better part has been almost universally understood to mean that leaving the cooking and dishes to someone else and sitting in contemplation at the feet of the Lord is the right choice for those who would follow Jesus.
And who are the Christian saints? For the most part, they are men and women in religious orders who are holy not for what they have done in the world but for what they have done in or for the church. And almost all of them share a strong strain of contemplative spirituality. The Little Flower may have believed in the “little way,” but she did so from inside a Carmelite convent from the age of fifteen. And Francis of Assisi may have taught love of the common person, but he sure didn’t have much use for his father’s textile business. One of the earliest saints, Simeon Stylites, spent most of his religious life praying on a pillar in the desert, not working for a living. Meanwhile, the Vatican has announced that it is looking for a married couple to canonize but is having trouble finding even one set of saintly spouses in two thousand years of Christianity!
It’s easy to see why the prevailing spirituality in mainline Christianity is based on the idea of getting away from the world, at least for a time. This type of spirituality is kept alive and promoted by a very strong network of institutions, including monasteries, retreat centers, local parishes, publishing houses, and so forth. We are taught that if we want to find God we have to adopt a more contemplative spirituality. There is a resurgence of interest in monastic life as seen by the popularity of writers such as Thomas Keating, Kathleen Norris, Henri Nouwen, James Behrens, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Merton. In his book Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life, Paul Wilkes describes the attraction he feels as a layperson for the monastic tradition:
The desire to live life on some higher plain, with some greater goal—more spiritually, more monastic—would not leave me. It was strange: monasticism had spoken to my life in so many ways, although I had never been a monk. I continually referred to the practices and values of the monastic community as practices and values that made sense in the outside world.
Artist Sr. Mary Southard uses the image of swimming in a deep pool of water. She says that she needs to “dive deep” into the water of contemplation on a regular basis to get away from the distractions of daily life. Only then is she able to function on the “surface” of action.
These are all attractive images to me, as they may well be to you. My life is full of
hustle and bustle. I am married and have three school-age children, I run my own book-publishing business, I coach kids at baseball, and I am involved in several neighborhood, civic, and political organizations. My parish is constantly encouraging me to get involved in one or more of its lay ministries. Rather than silence, solitude, and sim-
plicity, my life is one of noise, crowds, and complexity. So the idea of getting away from the world—at least for a time—is tempting.
But is getting away from the world the only or even the best way to encounter God? If it is, then there’s nothing much to talk about. Spirituality is, then, primarily an activity for an elite—that is, for those who are able and willing to practice the traditional contemplative disciplines. For most laypeople—unless we are willing to abandon our families, quit our jobs, and resign from our volunteer activities—our spirituality will be relegated to a very small part of our lives. We might snatch an hour here or there. We might even get away on an annual weekend retreat. We could get up an hour earlier to pray or meditate or sneak off to church. We might spend our lunchtime studying the Bible or communing with God through nature. But in the end, for 90 to 95 percent of our waking time, we will continue to be surrounded by noise, crowds, and complexity, and there’s not much—spiritually speaking—that we can do about it.
Contemplative practices may help us cope better with our daily lives. They might make us calmer, more at peace, and more aware of the needs of others and the presence of God. But unless we can learn to find God in the midst of the hustle and bustle of daily life, we will always have that nagging feeling that we should be doing more or finding more time for our spirituality. In a way, we would have every right to be jealous of that monk on a mountaintop who has virtually unlimited time to devote to spiritual pursuits.
I value what those who practice contemplative spirituality provide for the rest of us. By their radical lifestyle they constantly call into question our assumptions about what we value and how we live. Their thoughts and insights into the nature of human and divine life are the bedrock of Christian thought. But I am raising a much more basic question: Is spirituality, by definition, getting away from the world? I’d like to propose that this is but one spiritual strategy, albeit the dominant one. There is another perhaps more difficult and dangerous strategy that involves getting into the world rather than away from it. It is a spirituality of noise, crowds, and complexity, a spirituality that can be found right at the surface of the pool, not in its depths; it is a spirituality of work.
What Is the Definition of Spirituality?
If spirituality is not synonymous with getting away from the world, then we had better define what we are talking about. How’s this for an attempt to nail Jell-O to a tree:
Spirituality is a disciplined attempt to align ourselves and our environment with God and to incarnate (enflesh, make real, materialize) God’s spirit in the world.
Under this definition, there can be all kinds of spirituality—including a spirituality of work—and spirituality does not necessarily equal contemplation.
I think that the best of the contemplative tradition agrees with me. Many of the monks and mystics teach that the essence of spirituality is not about getting away from the world but about getting deeper into it. For example, Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century monk, wrote this about spirituality and work in his classic little book, The Practice of the Presence of God: “People delude themselves when they think that prayer time ought to be different from the rest of their lives. God asks us to be united with him just as much by our actions when we are busy as by our prayer during our devotions.” In fact, Brother Lawrence said that he was more united with God when he was busy with ordinary activities than when he left them for prayer time.
Trappist Fr. James Behrens, in his book Grace Is Everywhere: Reflections of an Aspiring Monk, says, “It may be tempting to say that a ‘religious’ experience like the Mass is a more refined one than sitting on a porch or walking a dog, but I think it is best to say that God finds us where we are.” And as Paul Wilkes points out in his book, “Monks seek their Pure Land within the confines of a monastery. For the rest of us, our Pure Land can be our homes, our workplace, our trips to the supermarket, and our sitting in town-council meetings.”
If it is possible to find God in the hustle and bustle of daily life, rather than only by getting away from it, then that would—almost by definition—require different spiritual practices from the ones most
of us are used to. This book is an attempt to explore that different
spirituality.
What Is the Definition of Work?
The definition of work is almost as problematic as the definition
of spirituality. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the noun work
thirty-four different meanings and the verb thirty-nine. Do we mean only paid employment? What about all the volunteer work people
do for free? What if someone is involuntarily unemployed or has retired? The economists often want to equate work with paid em-
ployment, but most people’s experience is that much of their daily work is unpaid, unrecognized, and often performed far away from the “marketplace.”
Popular culture presents work as, at best, a tedious distraction and, at worst, a “rat race” in which—in the words of comedian Lily Tomlin—“even if you win, you’re still a rat.” (If you don’t agree, try thinking of ten movies or television shows that portray work in a
positive way—then eliminate those that are about teachers, medical personnel, parents, or a very few other service jobs.)
The prevailing view is that some work may be meaningful and fulfilling but most is not. While it is acknowledged that some people may love their work and feel they are helping others, it is thought that these people are few and far between and that most of them are either highly paid white-collar workers or in the helping professions. The perception is that for most people work is alienating, oppressive, exhausting—anything but spiritual.
But I think it is precisely because the workplace is often not spiritual by nature that what work needs more than anything else is an authentic spirituality. So let’s try this definition of work:
Work is all the effort (paid or unpaid) we exert to make
the world a better place, a little closer to the way God would have things.
Under this definition all work—our jobs; fixing and cleaning up our homes; our church and community involvement; caring for parents, children, relatives, friends, and strangers; even some of our hobbies—can be seen in a spiritual light. Likewise, the toll collector on the expressway or the sanitation worker picking up the garbage has as much opportunity to discover the presence of God in the workplace as the lawyer or the nurse or the businessperson.
Whether we are overpaid, underpaid, unpaid, or correctly paid; whether we enjoy, hate, or tolerate our work; and whether or not our work has obvious social value—these might all be important issues in the spirituality of work, but they do not determine the spiritual value of our work.
What Is the Spirituality of Work?
If you buy my definitions of spirituality and of work, then we can define a spirituality of work.
The spirituality of work is a disciplined attempt to align ourselves and our environment with God and to incarnate God’s spirit in the world through all the effort (paid and unpaid) we exert to make the world a better place, a little closer to the way God would have things.
But in order for the spirituality of work to become a reality in our lives, we have to develop a way of practicing it, a set of disciplines that we can follow right in our workplaces without people even recognizing what we are doing. These disciplines must help us discover the meaning of our work, deal with others, balance our responsibilities, decide right and wrong, and maintain and change the institutions in which we work. I call these the disciplines of the spirituality of work.

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Spirituality at Work : 10 Ways to Balance Your Life on the Job

9780829421163

0829421165

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