The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (42 page)

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:

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 as she races to catch a cab is a common one in many cities, as is the sight of a traveler desperately punching out another e-mail on his laptop as he waits for the next flight home in a crowded airport.

While these gadgets are terrific for keeping us in touch with our work and our families and friends, they pare away the few remaining moments of solitary time we have left—for reflection, silence, and inner quiet. Where is the time for “recollection,” as spiritual writers say?

So the second challenge: How can the working person balance the need to be “connected” with the need for solitude, a requirement of a healthy spiritual life?

Sometimes it seems as if we can no longer stand to be alone or “out of touch.” But without some inner silence, it becomes harder to listen to those desires that we spoke of. It is difficult to listen to the “still small” sound, as the First Book of Kings (9:12) describes God’s voice. If your eyes are glued to your BlackBerry and your ears stopped up by your iPod, it’s hard to hear what might be going on inside you. Cutting back on these gadgets and not answering every single e-mail and phone call right away may lead to a measure of calm.

“Deep calls to deep,” says Psalm 42 (v. 7). But what if you can’t hear the deep?

Solitude and silence also enable us to connect on a deeper level with others, for we are put in touch with the deepest part of ourselves—God. And in coming to know God, we are better able to find God in others and are freed of our loneliness. So sometimes you have to disconnect to connect.

Likewise, if you’re completely absorbed in the electronic world, obsessively checking e-mail and constantly returning phone calls, it becomes impossible to experience the quirky surprises in the world around us. The examen allows us to not only grow more aware of God in the past, but also, as we practice this discipline, in the present. But if you’re
always
connecting with friends, you might miss out.

The other day I was walking through a park in New York City. Racing across Union Square to an appointment, I stumbled on a pair of grungy young men; one was playing an accordion, the other a violin. Their music was a sprightly, lively, intricate, intoxicating type of Eastern European folk music. Mesmerized, I stopped to listen to the furious melodies and rising and falling rhythms. A little crowd gathered around, and I noticed that we were in the middle of the weekly open-air farmers’ market, with vendors carefully laying out fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowering plants for all to see.

As I listened to these two skinny guys, one with long dreadlocks, the other with a scraggly beard, I smelled something unusual—fresh peaches—from behind me. What a glorious moment: the music, the sunshine, the crowd, the shoppers at the market, and the smell of ripe peaches.

Just then someone cut through the rest of the crowd: a woman punching her BlackBerry and listening to her iPod. She knifed through us and rushed away. She had missed the entire experience, since she was entirely absorbed in her own world.

Solitude also includes caring for one’s physical health. Giving yourself the gift of solitude may mean allowing yourself time for rest and exercise, necessary ingredients for a healthy life. This may include, as we mentioned in our discussion of “poverty of spirit,” saying
no
to things that you cannot do. Saying
no
to some nonessentials and avoiding the constant rush that sometimes characterizes our lives (including my own) is a way of saying
yes
to a more balanced way of living.

In his
Constitutions,
Ignatius places a surprising emphasis on the need to attend to a “proper concern with the preservation of one’s health.” In a section called The Preservation of the Body, he shows an understanding of the need for a balance among work, prayer, and rest, based on his own early experience, when he favored extreme penances that damaged his health. Ultimately, he recognized the need for moderation. “With a healthy body, you will be able to do much,” he wrote to his friend Teresa Rejadell.

For Ignatius, the requirements for a healthy life for Jesuits include maintaining a “regular” schedule, and caring for “food, clothing, living quarters, and other bodily needs.” He recognized the need for exercise, even for sedentary Jesuits:

These ways of self-care are to be “exercised by all.” It is a warning against overwork.

In his perfectly named book
CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap,
the psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell notes that pathological overwork may not simply reflect the real demands on our time, but may mask underlying problems. Overbusyness, he suggests, acts as a kind of high and also serves as a status symbol. We may also fear being left out if we slow down; and we avoid dealing with some of the realities of life—poverty, death, global warming—by frantically running from task to task. And, he suggests, we may not know how
not
to be busy.

Having regular times for prayer and solitude, and a mixture of work and rest, even in the midst of a busy life, is an important step on the way to becoming a contemplative in action. This does not mean that you have to be lazy. Far from it. But the possibility for contemplation grows slimmer if you are always stressed out, frazzled, or ready to collapse from fatigue.

Working (and Living) Ethically

When I studied business ethics as an undergraduate at the Wharton School, most of the textbook cases were of the black-and-white variety, with simple answers. Would you give a bribe to someone who demanded one? (No.) Would you pollute the environment with nasty chemicals? (No.) Would you discriminate on the basis of race or sex? (No.)

When I entered the business world, I was surprised to learn how much subtler most ethical dilemmas are and how rarely they are framed in black-and-white terms.

This is not to say that the black-and-white dilemmas never arise. A good friend of mine, an accountant, was once asked by a manager to falsify some figures on a report. He refused politely, and the manager saw that he was wrong and apologized.

Subtler problems are more common. How, for example, do you respond when you discover that you work in a corporation where moral values are not always paramount? During my time in human resources, I was asked to confront a manager who was planning to fire a longtime employee. That employee had just received an incentive award for outstanding performance. Finding it bizarre that we would suddenly fire one of our top-performing employees, I told the manager it was a bad idea.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I want him out. I don’t like him.”

I reminded him that this middle-aged employee had been with the company for twenty years and had always done a good job and, also, that disliking someone was not a valid reason for dismissal. None of that mattered, I was told. Finally, I said in desperation, “Have some compassion. The guy’s got a family.” The executive’s answer was short and memorable. “To hell with compassion!” he said. (He used even stronger language.) Fortunately, his boss overruled him, and the employee stayed, but the episode left me with a sour taste for the company.

So the third challenge for the working person is: how can you stay true to your moral, ethical, or religious values?

For many people, this means consciously searching for a company whose values are congruent with their values. A friend who manages investments for a multinational corporation told me that he was glad the values he prized—integrity, honesty, rectitude— were precisely what was valued in his world of long-term investing. “If you’re dishonest, your reputation and therefore effectiveness will suffer,” he explained.

But what happens when you work in an environment where, say, compassion is not valued or, worse, is ignored? Finding work in a new company or a different position in your current workplace may not be feasible or even possible.

Part of the solution may lie in maintaining Ignatian detachment from the unhealthy values of the workplace. If you work in an environment that prizes aggressive or downright mean behavior, you need not be aggressive or mean. (Religious institutions are not entirely immune to these sorts of behaviors.) Often a superior level of work can overcome the perceived need to participate in activities that go against your moral grain. Talent can sometimes trump aggression and meanness.

You might also act, as mentioned above, as a leaven of change in an unethical environment, doing your part and hoping that your leaven may help to encourage change. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,“ wrote the anthropologist Margaret Mead. ”Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”

Likewise, you might be entirely unable to change anything yet still able to help others in their struggles. To take an extreme example, St. Peter Claver, the Jesuit who ministered to the slaves in seventeenth-century Cartagena, did not end the slave trade. But he was able to care for those who were trapped in that sinful system by distributing food and counseling to slaves on board the ships that had arrived in the center of the African slave trade in the New World.

In other words, one of the simplest ways we can find meaning in work is by being kind to those who are struggling—the mother working two minimum-wage jobs; the secretary beleaguered by her tyrannical boss; the underappreciated janitor. To put it in Ignatian language, can you see yourself as someone who could “help souls” at work?

Or you might consider it your duty to act prophetically by standing up against the injustice around you. Are there times when you need to gather up your courage to do the right thing? Here the believer remembers the duty to care for all of God’s creatures, no matter where they are on the corporate ladder. The Christian remembers the call of Jesus to care for the “least of these” our brothers and sisters. The Catholic remembers the social encyclicals of the church that ask us to stand for the rights of the poor and marginalized. And the follower of the way of Ignatius remembers Third Degree of Humility, where you choose to stand with those who are persecuted.