"After Work" by Jane Hirshfield

Recently, I read the first poem in a book that's been sitting on my shelf, unopened, for a long time. "After Work" by Jane Hirshfield in her book Of Gravity and Angels. Of course the title intrigued me. “After Work.” Work isn’t a common word in the titles of poems.

I invite you to pause now and read the poem for yourself. Here’s a link to where the poem is printed. Please do click the link and read it. But don’t forget to come back. Or, if you’d prefer, click the link below and listen to me read the poem (with Over the Rhine, "May God Love You" in the background).

This poem is anchored in the the after-work space. Work is over, and it has likely consumed the mind and the physical energy of the poem's narrator. She has sat at a desk or stood at a work station or bounced here and there around other people's needs all day. Consumers, patients, customers, colleagues. Probably inside 4 walls, probably in indirect lighting, probably following a script of some sort, probably channeling from her experience and education only what is applicable to the task at hand. Eight hours later, more or less, and the work is done. Punch the time card, close down the machines, hang up the white coat, the apron, the lanyard with her name tag.

And the narrator enters the space of the rest of her life.

She enters full and whole and living space. Beauty is present. She calls to an animal, a horse, obviously known and loved. She offers a treat, corncobs. They look at each other eye-to-eye. And the universe is reflected in the horses’ eyes.
 

and in the night, their mares' eyes shine, reflecting stars,
the entire, outer light of the world here.

When I first read those last lines I nearly gasped.

During work, however you define work, our efforts are one teeny tiny piece of the whole, and here now, when work is done, is the remembrance of the whole. Here now is the need to reorient. The need to shake ourselves and remember, with each leaving of work, the immensity of the universe of which the work was a part. Shake yourself and expand. Relax your eyes and reorient to more than what you see at your desk, your work station, your register, your waiting room, your conference table. See the whole.

The reflection in these horses’s eyes is reminding the narrator and you and me to emerge from the tunnel of our days and newly re-imagine the universe in which we work and breathe and live.

~~~

[photo: early morning rabbit prints]

Public Joy

The current issue of Comment magazine is on the theme of "gift logic." Drawing on the teaching of Jesus, wisdom from St. Basil, the book The Gift by Lewis Hyde, and others, the essays in this issue invite us to consider gift "as a way to engage with the world."

In the essay, "Subverting Two-Pocket Thinking with Public Joy," Tim Soerens introduces the concept of "public joy."

Public joy gets at the pulsing, hopeful, brimming-with-possibility kind of energy that by its very nature requires equity and justice, and celebrates both individual and collective agency. So what is the economy for? If we view our economic life through the lens of grace, then perhaps we could say the purpose is to maximize public joy.

If we remember that we are the creatures (not the Creator) and that all is gift, then of course we all need to orient ourselves toward this grand project of public joy, which necessarily includes everyone. To love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself means that all our many gifts should be oriented toward the mission of creating as much public joy as conceivably possible.

This essay offers much to think about. How does my life/my work contribute to public joy? Of course, the use of joy here doesn't mean temporary laughter or an hour or two of enjoyment but joy of the deep and abiding variety, peace, "a visceral pairing of words that taps deep into the biblical idea of shalom."

This month at my work, the team I'm part of has been given the assignment of coming up with our individual goals for the year ahead. I'm a medical writer and so am thinking about how my skills best serve the needs of medical providers and their patients, the needs of the company for whom I work, as well as my own personal needs and interests. This essay introduces the question, How does my work increase public joy, or the potential for public joy? It's an interesting and important question and one I hadn't thought about before. How does the manner in which any and all of us spend our days increase—or offer the potential for increasing—public joy?

~~~

This post was first published in my monthly newsletter, “Dear Reader.” Subscribe here.

Work and Burnout: A New Book by Jonathan Malesic

There’s a new book out about work burnout and it's high on my list of books to read, The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives by Jonathan Malesic. Last September I’d read an opinion piece Malesic had written in the New York Times and found it resonated with some of my thoughts in Finding Livelihood. Here are a couple paragraphs from Malesic’s piece:

“As it is, work sits at the heart of Americans’ vision of human flourishing. It’s much more than how we earn a living. It’s how we earn dignity: the right to count in society and enjoy its benefits. It’s how we prove our moral character. And it’s where we seek meaning and purpose, which many of us interpret in spiritual terms….

But work often doesn’t live up to these ideals. In our dissent from this vision and our creation of a better one, we ought to begin with the idea that each one of us has dignity whether we work or not. Your job, or lack of one, doesn’t define your human worth.”

Does that resonate with you in your work and life experience?

Malesic went on to write that our work should be subordinated to our life, not the other way around. He suggests we need each other for that:

"That means we need one more pillar: solidarity, a recognition that your good and mine are linked. Each of us, when we interact with people doing their jobs, has the power to make their lives miserable. If I’m overworked, I’m likely to overburden you. But the reverse is also true: Your compassion can evoke mine."

~

This post was first published in my monthly newsletter, “Dear Reader.” Subscribe here.

Participating Faithfully in a World Being Remade

Given all that’s going on in our communities and in the world, it's a good time to think about—but then, it's always a good time to think about—the value of putting a body of work out into the world that aims for a common good beyond yourself, no matter your job title (including retired), industry, or the size and grandiosity or lack thereof of that body of work, as long as it's what you have to give.

If you're in need of inspiration or camaraderie, let me suggest you peruse the writings from Breaking Ground, a year-long, online, publishing project led by Cardus that started in May of last year, when tensions of multiple varieties were escalating: viral, racial, socioeconomic, political. The project, which started as "first and foremost an act of hope,” had the goal of "galvanizing the Christian imagination from a wide array of voices to equip tomorrow’s leaders, thinkers and caring citizens to participate faithfully in a world being remade."

Although the project recently ended, per its original plan, rather than simply stopping the work the editors have passed the baton to their readers. The goal, now individualized, becomes how can each of us, from a base of Christian imagination, participate faithfully in a world being remade? I think that's quite a good question to ask ourselves, regardless of whether you've read any of the Breaking Ground writings. How can I—how can you—from a base of Christian imagination, participate faithfully in a world being remade?

~~~

[Photo: Eric Carle, children's book author and illustrator whose great body work brought much good into the world, died last month. Many of Carle's books have been on our bookshelves over the years. This picture of two pelicans is from Animals Animals. A number of pages in this book are falling out, it's been read so many times.]

The Trajectory of a Subtle Pivot

I’ve been reading The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson (2021). My father gave it to me, and he and I have been talking about it in the evenings on the phone as we go through the book. One small scene towards the beginning of the book has continued to hum in my brain, although it has nothing to do with the work of mapping the structure of RNA, the theme of the book. In reality, however, this small scene has everything to do with that work, which means it has everything to do with the fact that we now have a Covid vaccine.

Jennifer Doudna, PhD, the subject of the book, and her colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their invention of an RNA-guided gene-editing tool, which played a key role in the development of the Covid vaccine. The scene I’m thinking of was when Doudna was in sixth grade, and her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix by James Watson, a book that detailed the discovery of the structure of DNA. Reading that book was a pivot point for Doudna. While it didn’t give an immediate 180-degree shift in whatever her sixth-grade self was doing or aiming at, the shift carried her somewhere.

The trajectory of any subtle pivot, carried over many years, changes everything. Take a piece of paper and draw a dot on the left side of the paper and another dot on the right side. Now draw a line between the dots. Next, draw a third dot just a tiny bit above the dot on the right side. Finally, draw a line between the original left dot and the new right dot. Imagine that the lines go on and on beyond the page, and think about how those two lines would travel out across time with the distance between them growing. It makes for an interesting assignment: think back to childhood, or later, and consider what was the toy, the book, the conversation, the game, the film, the scene that nudged you ever so slightly or is nudging you even now.

The Slow Work of God

Last week I was on a vacation/writing retreat. Sitting on a bookshelf where I stayed was the book, To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation by Laura Kelly Fanucci. This wonderful poem by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin jumped off a page for me, and I want to share it with you. It speaks to the challenge of finding our way in life, the challenge of being patient when things take ever so long, and the challenge of understanding the apparent slow timing of God.

Read it and see if it doesn’t resonate with something in your life, if it doesn’t give you some hope for being on the way.

“Patient Trust”

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We would like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.

And yet, it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(In: To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation, Laura Kelly Fanucci, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017. In: Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, edited by Michael Harter, 58. Chestnut Hill, MA: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1993.)

~

[Photo: taken of gray-headed coneflowers that I passed on a recent prairie walk]

Handwringing versus joy and expectation; talking versus serving

The most recent issue of Comment (fall 2019) carries an editorial by the journal's editor, Anne Snyder, which I've been thinking about since first reading it a couple weeks ago. You can read it here at this link, and I encourage you to do so.

Snyder contrasts two approaches to societal concerns based on and expanding from her observations of two groups within a single weekend. One approach was full of handwringing, while the other was full of joy and expectation. The first emerged primarily from the elite while the second primarily from those who were "indigenous, immigrant, Asian, Latin, and African American." The first featured panels and debates while the second featured actual service in churches, social agencies, schools, and counselling centers within home neighborhoods."

She suggests the first group has much to learn from the second group. The churches associated with the first group tend to focus on preaching and teaching, whereas the churches associated with the second group often tend to function as the "field hospitals Pope Francis speaks about—welcoming everyone, regardless of sin or circumstance, and caring for the needs of the whole person, not just the soul." They often offer job banks and homeless shelters to their community in addition to the preaching and teaching.

"This realism," writes Snyder, "grants these local churches moral authority—not only in their home community, but in the world at large. And they offer an important lesson: If you want entrée to a hurting if skeptical world, care for it, don’t try to rule it."

And here’s one more thing she wrote in this editorial, "There’s a growing awareness that love can never be abstracted—we’re touched by incarnational living and doing, less prescription from on high."

So much is abstract these days with our social media tweets and Instagram shots, our disagreements about the evening news; I write this as a challenge to myself as much as to anyone. I do hope you’ll read her full editorial and consider what she wrote.

~~~

Interesting coincidence: when writing this post I found that the link in the above editorial by Anne Synder went to the same article featuring Pope Francis, which I had first read 6 years ago, that I had linked to in the prior post. Of all the pieces that have been written about Pope Francis what are the odds that my two little posts, whose origins are years apart, link to the same one? I believe there is something significant in coincidence, that a message of "pay attention" is being given even if I don't understand why. Maybe it is saying something to you? I wrote a bit more about this in my newsletter.

~~~

[Photo: taken of stars in the windows of the American Swedish Institute.]