The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [163]
When I was starting out in the corporate world, I worked with one man who was notable for his loathing of his job. After decades in the accounting department, he was laid off. During his last week he lamented his layoff but admitted that he never once enjoyed his work. As a recent college graduate with starry-eyed ideals about the company, I was horrified. Though I knew assembly-line workers who hated their jobs, this was corporate America—where I expected people would be happier, more fulfilled. “So how did you make it?” I asked him.
He pulled out his wallet and flipped it open. “With this,” he said quietly, and showed me a picture of his family, a wife and children. With that gesture, he showed me the reason for his labors.
This doesn’t make a job itself any more pleasant. There is a New Yorker cartoon that shows Egyptian slaves hauling massive stone blocks to build a pyramid. One says to the man beside him, “Oh, stop complaining! It’s an honor to be associated with an enterprise of this magnitude.” Some jobs are just awful. And sometimes it’s necessary to leave the job. But sometimes it’s impossible to do so.
Even in the midst of unpleasant jobs, however, it may help to focus on larger goals. This is not to minimize how rotten some jobs are, but, for some people, the uniting of one’s work to a larger goal can invest their labor with meaning. The believer can also unite his work with a larger good that God has in mind, for example, caring for his children or providing for his family.
Even for Walter Ciszek, the Jesuit sentenced to work in a Soviet concentration camp, being forced to build worker housing was more tolerable when he imagined the end results. Though he wasn’t helping his family, he told his friends in the labor camp that he was doing something important:
I tried to explain that the pride I took in my work differed from the pride a communist might take in building up the new society. The difference lay in the motivation. As a Christian, I could share in their concern for building a better world. I could work as hard as they for the common good. The people who would benefit from my labors would be just that: people. Human beings. Families in need of shelter against the arctic weather.
The third way to find God may be to act as a leaven in unhealthy work situations. In the Gospel of Matthew (13:33), Jesus reminds his disciples that they are to be like “leaven” in the world, the tiny bit of yeast that helps the bread to rise. A small agent of change can alter situations dramatically. Though trapped in a job that paid terrible wages, the women on that factory line nonetheless helped one another meet the day with some happiness.
If you find yourself in a dehumanizing situation, you may find some sense of purpose knowing that you are acting against these tendencies and helping to better the environment, even if in a small way.
During the time of the Protestant Reformation, Peter Favre regularly found himself confronted with Catholics who said virulent things about the Reformers (and vice versa). “If we want to be of help to them,” he wrote of the Reformers, “we must be careful to regard them with love, to love them in deed and in truth, and to banish from our soul any thought that might lessen our love or esteem for them.” His journals show that every day Peter prayed for a long list of those on the opposite side of his theological divide. Peter was able to act as a leaven in the midst of a difficult “job.”
Finding Time for Solitude
Whether commuting during rush hour, relaxing at home in the evenings or weekends, or even traveling on vacations, growing numbers of working men and women are never far from e-mail or without their cell phones. The sight of someone nervously pressing a phone against her ear