The Art of the Commonplace

June 21, 2015

In this summer of “the people’s lectionary,” our readings come from a variety of sources. This morning listen for a word from God from the work of Kentucky farmer and poet, Wendell Berry.

“It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.
If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of moral human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use...
If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious, and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer...
Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. (pg. 316, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)”

― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

The word of the Lord.

Perhaps it’s a bit odd to turn to a meditation on “work” in the middle of summer, when so many of us are on vacations, planning vacations, or just returning from vacations. On the other hand, what better time to consider work than when one has a chance to step away from one’s job for a while?

Moreover, in a summer during which we’re exploring “persistence,” work seems a fine point of focus.

What is our work? If you give it a moment’s thought, you’ll realize that we all have more than one answer to that question. My own work includes serving this community as teaching elder, but also includes husband, father, neighbor, volunteer, writer, activist, and a host of other titles I’m forgetting for the moment. Thus, work, as I’m thinking of it here, includes our jobs but is not reducible to them.

Work, understood broadly, is the common thread of our lives, but it is also the commonplace whose art we so often miss.

When Berry observes that he finds it “impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world signifies nothing,” I am confronted by an existential question: why do I do the work that I do?

To be sure, there are biological imperatives. At some level, we work in order to eat. On the farm – and, maybe, even in the garden – it’s pretty obvious that I work, therefore I eat. There’s an important truth in that axiom, which gets a bit less obvious the further we stray from the dirt.

But even at a distance as far removed from the dirt as the Wall St. corner office, it remains true that we work in order to eat.

Now even if it is only one part of the story and one aspect of the work, there is something holy about that perspective for when we get to that level we are also saying “we work, therefore we live.” Understanding, again, that our work is more than our jobs, more than what we do for money, and, ultimately also more than what we do for food, we work to give meaning to our time that we might truly be said to live rather than merely to exist.

There’s a chicken-egg question at work in this, though. Berry insists “it is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world signifies nothing.” To which I want to ask, is the conviction that life has meaning a necessary precondition to good work or is it a result of such work?

An unanswerable question and unresolvable tension in Barry’s observation rests here. The tension deepens Barry’s observation about religious traditions regarding work as a form of prayer, especially when we recall one of the great brief prayers in scripture, “Lord, I believe; help me in my unbelief.”

Which is to say, sometimes we don’t come to our work convinced that any of it matters, that any of it makes any difference in our own lives, much less in the life of the world. Sometimes, we have to work our way into the conviction that the work matters, or, failing that, that the world matters.

Which is further to say, sometimes we find ourselves engaged in work that hardly matters at all on the personal and local level, much less on a global or cosmic scale. At that point, when we’re engaged in a mundane task of an insignificant job, we recall – sometimes with a fierce urgency – that we’re working in order to live.

Most of us have been there. Think back for a moment: what’s been the least meaningful job you ever had? Now, think back to what else was going on in your life at the time: what were the most important relationships you had? What creative outlets did you pursue? What volunteer opportunities did you engage? What were you studying at the time?

You’ll notice that I avoided the word “work” in describing the “what else was going on in your life at the time” of your most meaningless job. But, if you think back to each of those engagements – relationships, creative endeavors, volunteering, studying – you know that each and every one of those is also work if, by work, we take the most basic definition: mental or physical exertion in order to achieve a purpose or result.

In my own experience, such work is rich and full of meaning, and, what’s more, makes the whole of my life point beyond its own narrow limits of time and space and ability. That is to say, these various good works underscore the significance of this one life I have been given.

The real question, as always, is simply this: what will I make of the time that I have been given?

No matter the form or remuneration of the work, what am I making of the time spent at the work? Am I making a good marriage? Am I making strong relationships with my children? Am I making meaningful contributions to my community? Am I building up the community of disciples?

That last phrase might well strike you as particularly “churchy,” and perhaps even as peculiar to my job as pastor. But I want to suggest to you this morning that all of our work – our jobs, our various family roles, our activities in our varied communities – all of our work is the work of disciples.

“How am I a disciple at my job?” you may well ask.

To begin with, if by disciple we mean simply a follower of the way of Jesus, then we must acknowledge that when Jesus said, “follow me,” he didn’t mean on a part-time basis and much less so did he mean for a single hour set aside on Sunday mornings. No, when Jesus said “follow me” he meant every step of the way.

I recently rediscovered a phrase from a book Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza published in the early 90s: “the discipleship of equality.”[1] Fiorenza reminds us that the earliest followers of Jesus created profoundly egalitarian communities within the constraints of their historical context.

That practice remains a prophetic calling to us in all of our work and each of its various contexts. That practice of equality presents a particular prophetic challenge in our own time given the continued reified hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality in so many of the institutions in which we work. Moreover, in a historical moment marked by an economic inequality that can only be described as sinful, the practice of a discipleship of equality in all of our work can be seen as for what it is: prayer – the cry of the people of God for a more just and loving world, thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.

Such a prayer is only possible when we believe that our work matters, that all of our acts have supreme significance. For when we engage our several callings, our various work from that perspective, then we begin to understand our work as prayer. Amen.

As a closing conversation, to be continued as you like over coffee in a few minutes, but kick-started now, let me pose two questions:

In what ways is your work a form of prayer?

How are you a disciple at work?

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[1] Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ecclesiology of Liberation (New York: Crossroads, 1993).