Work with Love by Rose Schwab
[powerpress]http://www.fuub.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Work-with-Love.m4a[/powerpress]
Kahlil Gibran says that work is the time when we become like a flute through whose heart the whispering of hours turns to music. I’d like you all to close your eyes, and think of something that you could just do all day, something that turns the whispering of hours to music. Think of something that you care a lot about, something that brings your world alive.
This thing you thought of is your work. Your work is whatever you love to do. And pursuing this is a sacred matter. Meaningful work gives a rhythm and a purpose to our lives. Meaningful work is just as important as having a healthy home life, as having a healthy body. For us to live balanced and healthy lives of longevity, we need to be doing the work that makes us feel like time melts away, like we are in pace with the seasons of the earth.
When we look back on our lives, we rarely tell our story of our work. Instead we tell the story of our romance lives, or our families, or, we might tell what work we’ve done, like a resume, but rarely do we look back and tell the story of our relationship to work. For example, when we were little, we had a different idea about what it meant to work. My first aspirations were to be a polarbearologist and live at the northpole in a den with my trusty polarbear friend who I would ride when we went out to give medical care to ailing polarbears. And polarbearology is really the only thing that I wanted to do until my dad became the director of a UU camp in northern Minnesota, and I was put to work. I did dishes, I painted cabins, I drove boats, I chopped vegetables, I swept the dining hall. Maybe some of our have worked for your dad, so you know, you really have to work. At this point, work was only a chore, something I had to do, without question. And then when I was about fifteen, I started thinking about the ministry. Back then, it was all for fun. I wasn’t going to have any real responsibilities when I was a minister, I was just going to do everything I did at youth conferences, on with adults!
But I have come to take this work very seriously. In fact, we ministers take our work so seriously that we have a whole class at seminary where we deal with our feelings about our work. In this regard, we are lucky, because when we fail, someone is there to contextualize it, when we freak out and decide to go to interior design school, someone is there to gently lead us back and help us think through that decision.
I think it’s okay to have complicated feelings about your work. When I was fifteen, I was talking with a minister, and I told her that I wanted to be a minister, too. And she looked me in the eye and told me to get out now, while I still had a chance. The things is, I actually appreciated her honesty. You see, I had only known ministers who seemed very happy. It’s like when you get into a serious relationship, and everyone around you seems happy in their relationships, and you think you’re doing something wrong because sometimes you hate your boyfriend, and seems to he hates you back, and you wonder if this mean you shouldn’t be together. But no! It just means that you’re in a real relationship where you have to learn how to move through stuff.
It’s the same with work, you have move through the hard times, you have to learn how to deal with emotional side of the work place. Just like in romantic relationships, you have to figure out how to be yourself and be in relationship to your work. It’s not easy to figure all this out. It’s not easy to figure out what your work even is. Heck, it’s not even easy to think about, because we are told what work looks like, and that limits our imagination. I once spent a summer with our Unitarian cousins in Transylvania, and I would go walking in the heat of the day and out in the fields I would see people working. Not just people of the “working age,” but the children as well. And the grand mothers, and the great grandmothers, and once a great-great grandmother was out there with a scarf on her head and her shirt rolled up on her tummy, shoveling hay with pitchforks. I remember thinking, wow, these people work really differently than my people. I tell you this story about Transylvania so that you remember that what we are taught about work is not the truth, but rather a social norm that is pressed onto us, sometimes in disastrous ways.
We are told that only some things count as work. And that only some people can do some work. Some of us are given the space to pursue the work of our hearts. But some of us are told that our sacred calling is outside the realm of “work.”
In all honestly, I think the weight of this falls heavily on the shoulders of men. All of the men I’m close to are struggling to do meaningful work. We all struggle with this, but men do this under the added pressure of being defined by their careers. You know those signs on the subway that say, “I’M A GIRL, I’m smart, funny, strong, and loving.” I’m just sayin: where are the signs for the little boys? Where are the signs that say, “I’M A BOY, I’m smart, funny, strong, and loving.” It just breaks my heart to think about all the men I know who feel like their whole selves aren’t seen, let alone seen at the workplace. So many men I know are carrying something extra. Something about worth. I wonder if it’s because men are not allowed to flounder without being labeled a failure.
Ah, failure. Failure is so often the demon of our work lives. It pierces so deeply, and we are so easily lost to it. In our society, failure is permanent. Once you have failed you are: a failure. But why? Why couldn’t it be a litmus test about what you’re naturally able to do? The thing about failure is, someone else told you you failed. And if you feel like you failed yourself, that’s just not true. Because you were doing the best you could, and if your best isn’t good enough, then maybe you were failed by a society or a company that didn’t value your best.
When it comes to work, you really have to pull apart your socialization and pull apart your psyche and be brave. Be brave to do what you love. I’d like you all to see me up here doing something that I have to be very brave to do, doing something that requires me to rally grapple with the prospect of failure. When I read this sermon over and over last week, when I got to the part, that goes “I’m a girl, I’m funny, and smart,“ I kept on accidentally saying, “I’m a girl, I’m fart.” And I just had to go ahead and march up these stairs and start talking, even if I thought I might have said fart. I wonder, what would you do if you were brave? We need to be brave when thinking about our own lives, but we also need to be brave when we think about work as a systemic issue. Unfortunately, our sacred work is tied to an economy. Our trouble with work is not just personal issue,.
Most people don’t even have the option to do work they love, most people don’t even do work that is lovable, because most people in this country are poor and the purpose of their work is survival, and automatically, that sacred desire to do their work is atrophied. Most people don’t get to experience their spirituality of work, because it has been stolen by a system that values product over humanity.
Let’s talk about value. I am a valuable person to this society. The work I do is dubbed valuable, so I get to work with dignity. I also have a lot of social capital, with my education and race. Others are totally worthless. Some people are so worthless that their very lives are dispensable. They will do work that is degrading, filthy, stinking, and, deadly. their work is not valuable, they will have to sacrifice everything they have in order to survive. First their possessions will be traded in exchange for survival, then their homes will given up, then their land, and finally, the last thing one has, people will give their bodies, and their very vessels will be damaged and crippled. All because the work they are slotted to do has little value. This is not the way to spiritual wellness.
I think that this is important to talk about because we are all part of this system. And dignified work is a human and spiritual right. I tell you this in case any of you are employers, in hopes that you will think about the lives of your employees, especially if they are vulnerable. I urge you to consider their dignity, give them agency in their work place, let them see their families and take paid sick leave. And, if you are an employee, please know that you don’t have to have a low-end job to be exploited, and that all low-end jobs are exploitive because you aren’t paid a living wage. Our system doesn’t encourage us to work with love, so let’s help each other out. Let’s encourage each other’s sacred call to work, and protect it as a human right. At least for the people in our lives.
For all of you out there who have had to a job that you hated, for all of you who are tied to your jobs for security or social standing, or for lack of a better idea, for all of you who can’t find meaningful work and have to face the shame of saying that you do nothing, I have something to say to you: you are sacred, and you have something sacred to do. Please, be brave! Because you are worth it! Often, situations are too dire to just quit your job, or you are just too old to start again, but there is space for alternative ways of being. There is space to imagine what you want to do, and to make that possible. There is something endlessly brave and beautiful inside of you that will never die, because that thing inside of you is your little sacred you, and it burns at all times, whether or not your know it.
Let’s just give ourselves some space this week. To imagine, some possibilities. To imagine a world where everyone’s work was valued. To be gentle with ourselves, to ease up on ourselves about our failures. And let us hold this question in our hearts: what is your work? What would make you like a flute through which your spirit would blow? What could you do that you would do with love?
Blessed be
