Putting Our Hearts into It
Rev. Lilli Nye
October 8, 2006
Yesterday, four of us from Theodore Parker Church attended a conference hosted by the Massachusetts Bay District called “Bringing Spirituality to the Work We Do,” led by Margaret Benefiel. Benefiel, a Quaker, offers a very simple, if somewhat circular, definition of what she means by spirituality, which is “the human spirit fully engaged.”
It seems appropriate that she does not attempt to define the undefinable by trying to nail down once and for all what spirit itself is. We can each bring our own instinctive understanding of what we feel it to be—our spirit—that essential vitality within us that is connected to feeling keenly alive, feeling alive from scalp to fingertips to toes, feeling alive from our bones to our brains to our beating hearts to our breathing. Feeling united within, connected to others and aligned with something greater than ourselves.
We know when we feel the lack or weakening of our spirit, when we feel numb or mechanical, closed down or depressed, disconnected or empty. We know when we feel our spirit’s strength and fullness, when we are stimulated, joyful, alert, engaged and embodied, sensitive, in the flow, attuned.
We know instinctively what “the human spirit, fully engaged” feels like. And I would imagine that many of us, perhaps all of us, desire and even long for that experience more often or more continuously in our lives.
A crucial understanding for us regarding spirituality is to get past the notion that it is a self-absorbed, navel-gazing indulgence, or that it is a naive idealism, disconnected from the activity and challenges of our earthly existence.
And now, having said that, I’m going to argue with myself: There can be an aspect of spiritual experience for some people that is truly transcendent and non-ordinary, that lifts one out of all ego-based identifications. Perhaps this is something that Robin Colgrove explored last week in his service on faith and madness. But this kind of shattering of self is not what I’m talking about when I say “the human spirit fully engaged.”
I will also admit that, even though the true spiritual life is not self-indulgent navel-gazing, it is indeed helped by having both a time and a place set apart from our daily busyness in order to become reacquainted with our spirit’s vitality. This is especially true if we have felt estranged from our deeper self for a long time. A periodic retreat, even a very mini retreat of an hour or a few minutes, does really help.
But a retreat always must end, and where does that leave us?
I once led a retreat for a group of women from a congregation I did not know. This was a few months after the start of the war in Iraq and I had been informed that they wanted a retreat focused on “being peaceful in an anxious world.” I asked them to bring the memory of an experience or situation in which they felt inner peace, along with some physical token of that experience—a stone, a photograph, something that they could hold that anchored the experience.
What took me quite by surprise was the consistency with which their experiences of peace had taken place in situations completely removed from their daily lives—a yoga retreat in Hawaii, a vacation cottage on a lake, a hike to a mountain top. One person mentioned her morning jog with her dog, but other than that, it seemed as if the rest knew peace only when they managed to escape from their lives.
Much more practical and powerful is learning to recover that same inward spaciousness and sensitivity with a few mindful breaths taken while waiting for the T or sitting down to work at our desks or cleaning the house. We are capable of maintaining a clear blue sky of stillness within us, like the eye of a hurricane, no matter what is going on. The true intention of spirituality is not to drift away from real life but to enter more completely into it, not to become disembodied but to get more embodied. Whatever life is asking or presenting, if we can enter into it, give ourselves to it, with our whole hearts, we will become life’s lover, and life will become ours—and that is “the human spirit fully engaged.”
There are so many ways to approach the connection between spirituality and work. Ultimately today, I’m going to focus more on mindfulness in action and the idea of simple activity as a path to inward and outward harmony, because this service was conceived to offer a theological foundation for our community work day following the service.
But before turning to that, I do want to lift up some of the other ways that we could explore this issue in future conversation and services:
Work, the need to labor, is such an enormous and consuming dimension of human life. For many or most of us, work is what defines us within our social fabric, whether we want it to or not. What we do for our living can be a matter of pride or discouragement. Whether we are working or out of work, whether we are our own boss or not, whether we are financially free to work only in the ways that give us the most satisfaction, whether we are successful or struggling, whether we experience our work as meaningful or deadening, whether the environment we labor in is exhilarating or oppressive—all these matters profoundly affect us and those close to us.
Sigmund Freud said that the most essential ingredients of happiness were the ability to work and the ability to love. And the poet Marge Piercy, in her poem “To Be of Use,” writes in the last line: “The pitcher cries for water to carry, and the person for work that is real.” The person cries for work that is real.
Given that most human beings spend most of their lives working, what a loss, what a squandering of vitality and opportunity it is if we divorce everything that we call work from everything that we call spirit. It should not be so. Our spirit is within us, whether engaged or not. And how much more alive we are when it is engaged.
And so, in the whole vast subject of integrating spirituality and work, there are so many ways of approach:
We can approach it through the angle of corporate soul, the idea that an entire institution or business collective can be vitalized when all or its members and all of its processes are grounded in a shared spiritual or moral mission.
We can approach it with the idea that we, as individuals, may consider what we are doing to be a personal act of love and service. We may understand our work to be a ministry or sorts, a way to embody our moral values, our sense of spiritual call, a way to give the unique gift of ourselves to the greater good.
Margaret Benefiel wrote a very inspiring book on these and many other approaches to spirituality in the workplace called “Soul at Work.”
Another approach we could take toward the integration of spirituality and work is the one the Benefiel took in our workshop yesterday, dedicated to deepening spiritual presence and practice in the midst of our church work. I went to the conference not knowing quite how she would address this, and in the small amount of time we had, she focused first on personal spiritual grounding in our work and leadership, and then dedicated much of the time to the processes of discernment or decision making. Again, this is fodder for another day.
Today, we are here in our jeans and work boots, with our work gloves stuffed in our pockets and our shovels and trowels and toolboxes stashed near at hand for the truly hands-on work that we are going to do today. Today we are going to tend to body of our church, the physical structure and ground of our temple. We will be tending to the body of our church with the full engagement of our own bodies, and so this is another and particular venue of spiritual practice.
As I have explored the idea of the spirituality of work in various religious traditions, I have noticed that there is a special place given to simple labor. Karlfried Graf von Durckheim, in his article “Everyday Life as Spiritual Practice,” spends a lot of time talking about the great opportunity provided by labor that is repetitive and that no longer requires active effort to master. Once our concentration is freed from having to learn how to do it, we can enter into the task from a deeper, more meditative level. We can become inwardly united—our movements, our breath, our attention, our heart, our senses, our sinews becoming whole and harmonized. A lovely grace and ease can enter into the work when that happens.
Thich Nhat Hanh describes this when he talks about using the scythe to cut the grass. When he is not inwardly harmonized, he becomes exhausted very quickly. When he is inwardly harmonized, there is more energy flowing through him. This is the Zen approach to work.
When I was in my early twenties I worked in a very busy restaurant. There was a dishwasher on the crew, an older man, who had a very philosophic and good-humored way of observing all things and who seemed quite content with his humble work. This dishwasher came to dub one particular waiter on the staff the “Zen waiter” because he went about his work with such strange ease and efficiency. No matter how many customers we had, no matter how frenzied the scene was behind the swinging door on a Saturday night, “Ken the Zen waiter” moved through it all as if he were doing tai chi, never getting flustered, never missing a beat, never even seeming to rush! And yet he raked in the tips and could handle as many or more tables as the other wait staff, who would hustle and sweat their way through an evening rush. He was a master of his humble art. He demonstrated this idea of presence and inner harmony in the midst of labor that does not expend energy uselessly.
We can then bring to that a further dimension of spirituality in work, which other traditions describe as awakened service, or work that is dedicated, as a prayer or a ritual, to our highest ideal.
In Judaism, we find the idea of avodah, a word that means both worship and work, and which has comes to express the idea of service—to toil, to exert oneself, to labor for the refinement of our selves and the world around us. In mystical Judaism, it means to transform the matters and labors of our daily lives, through a kind of alchemy, into spiritual energy for the enlightenment of the world. This would be the essential purpose of our existence.
In the Hindu tradition, we have the idea of Karma Yoga, the discipline of service and selfless action. It can refer to menial tasks and labors that are dedicated to higher being. A beautiful expression of this comes from the reflections of Sri Anandamayi Ma, a 20th century Indian saint. Although she had only two years of formal schooling, and referred to herself as “a little unlettered child,” her spiritual teachings were profound and her students included philosophers, statesmen and scholars. She described her relationship with her family in this way:
This body has lived with father, mother, husband and all. This body has served the husband, so you may call it a wife. It has prepared dishes for all, so you may call it a cook. It has done all sorts of scrubbing and menial work, so you may call it a servant. But if you look at the thing from another standpoint you will realize that this body has served none but God. For when I served my mother, father, husband and others, I simply considered them as different manifestations of the Almighty and served them as such. When I sat down to prepare food, I did so as if it were a ritual, for the food cooked was after all meant for God. Whatever I did, I did it in a spirit of divine service. Hence I was not quite worldly though always engaged in household affairs. I had but one ideal. To serve all as God, to do everything for the sake of God.
This idea appears again in the work of the Shakers, who are known for their extraordinary industriousness and exquisite sense of craft. They had a theology of work as prayer that permeated all their living, summed up in the saying, “Hands to work, hearts to God.” You see this clarity of focus manifested in their architecture, carpentry, tools, and crafts as a clean beauty and an economy of form and function, devoid of personal ego or unnecessary adornment. If it was worth doing, it was worth doing with excellence and wholehearted dedication of self to God. Their living was a vivid expression of “the human spirit fully engaged.”
The tasks we will undertake today in our shared workday may be small, earthly, menial labors, but when they are dedicated, with love, to the spirit of this place and to the spirit of this community, they can become a form of prayer in motion, and a demonstration of human spirit fully engaged.
May it be so!