Take This Job and…: How to Overcome our Limited Ideas of Work
There was a thought-provoking article in the Sunday New York Times recently called, A Life Beyond “Do What You Love.” In the article, Gordon Marino, offers a critique of a mantra of our age, “Do what you love, love what you do.” This principle, found on t-shirts, bumper stickers, and coffee mugs everywhere, was articulated in Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford, and also by popular author Raymond Bradbury in a 2008 interview.
Marino, drawing on a recent article in Jacobin, observes that very few people in the course of history, and in the world today, have a choice in what they “do,” assuming that “doing” means “working.” This view leads to narcissism, divorcing one’s work from the needs of the world around you, and it also divides work into “loveable” and “unloveable.” The article also points out that, unwittingly, this idea leads both to being overworked and underpaid. If you really love what you do, why set boundaries? If you love what you do, why require fair payment?
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Photo by Jaime Fearer on Flickr and licensed by http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode[/caption]
Marino goes on, though, to ask whether doing the thing that you love is always right. That, of course, brings the discussion to a moral level. He observes that Immanuel Kant, using his construct of the categorical imperative, argues that, if someone has talent and training, say, in medicine, it would be morally wrong not to use those talents, because if everyone decided to use their skills for personal pleasure rather than a higher, moral purpose, society would cease to function.
Marino cites the recent example of a doctor in San Diego who decided that he really wanted to spend his life skating up and down the beach, thus he closed his practice and laced up his skates. The decision certainly enabled the erstwhile doctor to “do what he loves and love what he does.” However was it–in any moral sense–good and right?
I’m concerned that many Christians have begun to embrace the “Love what you do, do what you love” philosophy as well. I grew up with an unhealthy view of work. I believed that real work was done by pastors and missionaries, and that Christians who worked in “secular” jobs did so in order to make enough money to give to churches and missionaries, as well as look for opportunities to share the gospel with unbelievers.
There was an interesting movie made several years ago called “The Big Kahuna.” It was based on a popular play called “Hospitality Suite,” and featured three businessmen working together to land a client for their business. One character works simply to make money and gain power, while another works in order to talk to his clients about Jesus. Both attitudes, the movie suggests, are unhealthy. Today, I agree.
I’ve moved from a model of salvation that emphasizes saving souls for the purpose of one day going to heaven to an understanding that, ultimately, salvation involves the rescue of all of God’s creation from the damaging effects of sin and death. Heaven, rather than a disembodied worship service, will be creation restored to its original intent — God’s image bearing creatures (that’s us!) living in harmony with God, with each other, and with the physical creation for the sake human flourishing.
Thus, whatever work one has been called to can be seen as a good, somehow declaring God’s good intention for creation. Harvesting crops, teaching a child, caring for a sick patient, passing a just law, or creating opportunities for honorable and dignified labor are all good things–ends in themselves rather than means toward giving money to the church or sharing the gospel with a co-worker. Sharing the gospel with a co-work is a very good and important thing. Earning financial resources to give to the church and Christian ministries is also excellent. However the purpose of our work is more than that, and every bit as important. Before sin entered this world, the work of developing creation–or having dominion–existed and it was good.
The question, then, is how we know what “work” we are called to do. Some Christians, I believe, border on the “do what you love, love what you do.” For example, Quaker teacher and writer Parker Palmer writes in his book Let Your Life Speak, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” In other words, find out who you are, then you’ll know what to do.
Similarly, Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABCs, writes, “Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Now, Buechner at least seeks to connect our vocation with the needs of the world, but, whether intentionally or not, this quote encourages first finding our “deep gladness.” Again, the focus is on the the individual rather than the communal, much less the transcendent.
It seems to me that Jesus, in calling his disciples, first called them to let go of their lives. Jesus taught them that it is only in losing one’s life that life is found. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9.24). This seems to go against the idea that in “finding ourselves”–who we are, what we love–we’ll discover what we ought to do with our lives. In order truly to find our lives, we’re called to “lose” them, to let them go.
Several summers ago David Brooks gave a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival in which he spoke to this very issue. In the talk, titled “The Modesty Manifesto,” he uses Viktor Frankl, a Jewish man who survived life in a concentration camp, as an example. In the camp, Frankl concluded that the best way to determine one’s purpose was not by asking, “Who am I?” or “What makes me happy?”, but rather, “What is it that life is asking of me?” Frankl’s answer, which he expands on in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, was, as Brooks observes, “to study human psychology and moments of extreme suffering.” This was most likely not what Frankl dreamed about doing as a child, but, based on his circumstances, was what he believed life was asking, even requiring, of him. Interestingly enough, Brooks ends the talk by saying, “the purpose of life is not to find yourself; it’s to lose yourself.”
As Christians, then, we’re called to offer our lives to Jesus and then allow him to form us and shape us into people who are able to participate in God’s work in the world, wherever that might be. This is one way that we live out the “greatest commandments” to love God and to love our neighbor (Luke 10.27). This paradigm also allows us to live out Paul’s exhortation, “Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord” (Colossians 3.23). So, whether you’re an immigrant working menial jobs so your children can go to college, a visiting professor feeling called to return home to stand against a brutal, totalitarian leader, or a member of Parliament interested in becoming a pastor but is instead called to use influence to fight to end the slave trade, we can do these things with love for God, love for our neighbor, and, importantly, “as done for the Lord.”
It’s unlikely that many would choose the lives of any of the examples above, but in each case the individual gives him or herself over to something bigger, and is willing to sacrifice and suffer for it. As we consider the nature of our “calling,” then, instead of trying to find the thing that we most love and experience the pleasure of doing it, let’s hear Jesus, the one through whom God is remaking the world, invite us to offer our lives to him and, as we do, trust that he will give us something to do that, while unlikely to mirror what we’d like life to look like, can become an expression of both love and gladness. It starts, though, by letting go.