My other major revelation concerns my personal definition of work.

When I thought of work as a material idea, I associated work exclusively with my secular career.  I started working in the construction industry as a laborer when I was in college.  By the time I was in my mid thirties, I was the Vice President of a $40M a year construction company.  I pursued the American dream just like I was supposed to, achieving significance career advancement and financial security at a young age.

But I could not escape the sense that something was missing.  My perfunctory spiritual life left me unsatisfied despite my successful career.  Unable to shake my unease, I started looking for spiritual answers.

As my spiritual life grew, I left my job, forming a one person consulting company.  My career was still in the construction business.  I still provided for my family.  I had changed venues, but I still chased that same American dream.  And still I felt unease.  In response,  I sought more spiritual progress.  The more gains I made, the more uncomfortable my career became, until I reached the conflict I am now writing about.

The current gain is the notion that work is essentially a spiritual idea.  No longer do I associate work solely with my career.  My work definition broadens to include any task associated with my vocation as Christ follower, and my sub-vocations as husband and father.

Instead of work being primarily about building construction projects, my definition of work now hinges on my vocation as Kingdom builder.  My career is just one subset of work within the greater work that I am called to.

This list is just a hint at all the things associated with my family and my faith that now fall under the heading of work.

• Writing this Blog
• Teaching Franciscan formation
• Coaching youth athletic teams
• Grocery shopping, washing dishes, doing laundry, preparing meals
• Taking care of the family finances
• Exercising

I am extremely fortunate that my career is flexible.  The move I made from employee to consultant allows me to work regularly from home, and to work odd hours.  I am also extremely fortunate to have a wife who is willing to take on her own career.  Without her support and sacrifice, I could never have the freedom to delve into the ramifications of this expanded view of work.

This good fortune, when combined with this expanded view of work, gives me a much better shot at happiness.  I can address the demands of this stressful life, understanding that the vocational demands carry at least as much weight as the career demands, without feeling guilty that I am avoiding work when I choose a vocational activity over a career activity at 10 AM on a Tuesday morning.

Some components of living in this American culture simply can’t be eliminated.  In order to fulfill my vocational responsibilities to my family I do need the money that my career provides.  But being a father with three active boys means the stress of my vocation doesn’t fit real well with the typical 8-5 job.

Embracing everything associated with that stress as the spiritual work I was created to do is freeing and rewarding all at once.

Receiving the grace to understand this is, once again, a gift I don’t know how to say thank you for.

“Those brothers whom the Lord favors with the gift of working….”

As I did so, I immediately recognized that I have never before thought of work as a gift from God.

If these words had read “Those brothers whom the Lord favors with the gift of a loving wife…,” or “Those brothers whom the Lord favors with the gift of children…,” they would not have caused me to hesitate for a moment.

But defining work as a gift from God not only caused me to hesitate, it stopped me pretty much cold.  This is because the word work has always been an essentially secular term for me.  Work is something I do from 8-5, Monday through Friday, in order to provide material support for my family.  It references my secular career, not my spiritual life.  Its a burden to bear, a cross to be born.  When its all said and done, its about money, the root of all evil.

Let me repeat myself for emphasis.  I always thought of work as a material idea, not a spiritual idea.  Therefore I wanted as little to do with it as possible because I find the material so much less important than the spiritual.

Francis turns that on its head.  If work is a gift from God, then it is essentially spiritual at its core and nothing the secular world does, nothing that the culture I live in dictates, can change that.

As long as I remain mindful that work is a gift from God, then my attitude about work changes completely.

For the last couple weeks, I have used my smart phone as a tool to maintain this mindfulness.  In the mornings I set my alarm for 8:55, then 9:55, then 10:55, then 11:55.  When it goes off, I stop what I am doing and spend five minutes praying over the words above.

Doing so keeps me mindful and reinforces this idea that work is a gift from God.  As I pray over the phrase, I experience no doubt about its truthfulness.  Old habits die hard.  I still have to fight the tendency to procrastinate.  But the more I pray over the phrase, the more wondrous I find it.

My attitude is changing.  My pessimism and lethargy are receding.  For the first time in some time, I am starting to put tasks behind me.  It even seems possible I might get caught up to my insanely busy life in the not too distant future.

God is doing this for me.  Francis is doing this for me.

Really, its overwhelming.  Words can not express the gratitude I feel for the change in outlook I have experienced.  For a long time, I have feared such a change was not possible.  I feared that thinking of the burden as cross was the best outlook I could hope for.

But God has proved that wrong.  I just wish I would have sought His help earlier.

A simple “Thank you, God” and “Thank you, Francis” is all I can muster in response.

By the end of last year, I could no longer avoid the conclusion that my work ethic had deteriorated.  I find my developing understanding of the Franciscan ideals of simplicity and poverty in direct conflict with the emphasis on money that is unavoidably inherent in my culture’s understanding of work.  This tie between a gluttonous approach to money and work made my opinion of everyday work so distasteful that I dreaded getting out of bed in the morning.

In acknowledging this paralysis, I also realized I was procrastinating, not just about work, but about everything in my life that needed doing.  When I think about that procrastination, I find it every bit as distasteful as the gluttonous approach to money that contributed to my original problem.

I need something more, a source of work motivation that will allow me to re-embrace a proper work ethic.  I need to find a way to bring the ideals of my secular Franciscan profession and my responsibilities to my family into better harmony.  I understand that according to the SFO Rule there should not be a conflict between the two.  Nonetheless, my reality contains a conflict, so I need a better understanding of those ideals if I am to gain the harmony that this unwarranted conflict is obstructing.

My first approach, of course, is prayer.  My first subject for that prayer is contained in the previous post More from Francis on Work, but I will repeat it here:

“Those brothers whom the Lord favors with the gift of working should do so faithfully and devotedly, so that idleness, the enemy of the soul, is excluded yet the spirit of holy prayer and devotion, which all other temporal things should serve, is not extinguished.”

I have spent a couple weeks on this already.  I know the next post will be on the idea of work as gift.  And I know there is a post coming on a definition of work that is different and much broader than the current cultural connotation I would associate with that word.

I am sure there will be more than that before I am through considering these words.  I know I am fascinated by the idea of work being subservient and contributing to a spirit of holy prayer and devotion, but I have not gotten that far yet.

But I think just this post is a good sign.

I hope it means I am no longer procrastinating about keeping this journal alive and vibrant.

It fits my purpose here well, in terms of my belief that the purpose of existence is the expansion of love.

And it also fits well with my Franciscan vocation if you assume that quiet is synonymous with simple.

1 Thessalonians 4:9-12 

“Now about your love for one another we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other.  And in fact, you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more, and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.”

Our path skirted the edge of a deciduous wood.  A variety of trees abounded, enveloping us in glorious shades of gold, yellow, orange, and red.  A breeze blew, more than gentle, but less than stiff.  It provided just enough chill to counteract the warm sunshine, making the day perfect for my favorite wardrobe combination, shorts and a sweatshirt.

As we walked, leaves blew from the trees with regularity.  Whenever they came close enough, I reached out in an attempt to grasp them, but they remained elusive.  I failed to grab a single one.

I said to my friend, “These leaves represent my search for spiritual knowledge.  So often I seem so close to grasping what it is I seek to learn, but at the last moment, it eludes me, leaving me just out of touch with the certainty I so desperately desire.”

He replied, “Today is the first day you have ever walked this path and tried to catch a falling leaf from one of these trees.  Keep trying, and as you gain experience, you will begin to succeed in grasping them.  The more experience you gain, the more leaves you will catch.”

Then he pointed out the many leaves that lay on the forest floor that had fallen from trees well away from the particular path we were walking and said, “But try as you might, you will only ever catch a fraction of the leaves that fall.  No one could ever catch them all.”

As he finished speaking, he caught a single golden leaf floating in his direction.  A mischievous smile even brighter than the autumn sun illuminated his face as he handed it to me.

“After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.”

On first blush, given all the profound verses in the last chapter of Matthew, this hardly seems the most likely candidate for a post.  But the anniversary of my mother’s death and her birthday both fall in early October, so when I read this chapter for the first time a week ago, those memories drew me here.

The truth is, I have never gone to visit my mother’s grave.  I often wonder, if I admit this to people, will they think me odd or strange?  Will they think that I didn’t love her as much as I should have, or that I don’t care about preserving her memory?

I don’t feel that’s the case at all, and I think this chapter confirms my sentiments.  This is because I am certain that just like Jesus wasn’t in his tomb, my mother is not in her grave.

As her son I am surely biased.  But if my mother isn’t in heaven, then no one is.  Just putting up with me as a teenager had to guarantee her admittance.

While I might miss her on occasion, I don’t mourn her.  I honestly think that to mourn her would be selfish on my part.  If I sincerely believe that Jesus died to make salvation possible, then how can I mourn when death is not death, but simply a transition to a place where the ultimate promise is fulfilled?

When I think of my mother, I am filled with happiness to know that she is with Jesus, rewarded for all the love and kindness that she engendered in this world.  How could I put any personal feeling of loss or emptiness or angst or woe in front of the perfect love that she must now bask in?  How could I wish for her to be anywhere else?

Its not easy to lose a loved one.  But as usual, the Gospels give us the recourse we need to deal with whatever troubles us.

One of the basic tenets of successful prayer is the ability to place yourself in the scene.  I have never understood myself to inadvertently do this before, but after praying over this chapter its clear that I’ve already found my way into this scene, assuming the role of the Marys.  They approached the tomb on the first morning of the week deep in mourning.  But before that morning was over, their mourning had turned to jubilation.

They saw and understood the mystery of the life of Christ.  They knew death had been conquered by Jesus not just for Jesus, but for all.

And I find myself privileged to share some small part of that jubilation when I think about my Mom.  I just don’t feel the need to be at her graveside to do it.

I had been thinking during the week about the post, especially about how distant I found myself from holiness and the lack of direction I felt about starting to work on the challenge in front of me.

I knew as soon as I read the Intro that this book had the potential to help.  Not only did the Intro talk about holiness, but it couched the subject with references to grace, the active life, and how they relate to work.  If you check past posts, you’ll find that work vexes me, so the linking of these subjects immediately captivated me.  I have been looking for helpful resources on work for some time and this book promises to be just what I’ve searched for.

In all honesty, I haven’t made it past the Intro yet.  Every time I read it, I find the need to slow down to make sure I understand just what it contains.

So I am now writing posts to help me sort it out.

I’ll start with a condensed outtake on holiness from the end of the Intro:

“The Christian striving for holiness (and the striving for holiness remains an essential of the Christian life) must then be placed today within the context of the Church’s action on the threshold of a new age.  It is not permissible to delude ourselves with a retreat into a vanished past.  Holiness is not and never has been a mere escape from responsibility and from participation in the fundamental task of man to live justly and productively in community with his fellow man……….

Christian holiness in our age means more than ever the awareness of our common responsibility to cooperate with the mysterious designs of God for the human race.  This awareness will be illusory unless it is enlightened by divine grace, strengthened by generous effort, and sought in collaboration not only with the authorities of the Church but with all men of good will who are sincerely working for the temporal and spiritual good of the human race.”

“So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.”

If my assertion about Jesus’ silence is correct, if He is indeed silent because He is preoccupied with praying for His antagonists, how does that translate into the story of Judas, His betrayer?

Matthew 26:24 contains these words:

“But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.”

This is a strong condemnation.  But if Jesus was willing to pray on behalf of his antagonists throughout the passion, would he not have also been willing to pray on behalf of Judas?  In fact, would it not be more likely that Jesus would pray for a seemingly repentant Judas than for those who are either ambivalent or openly hostile to Him?

What woe does Jesus speak of?

Is the woe the act of betrayal?

Or is the woe perhaps the inability of Judas to understand and accept that forgiveness is possible if he is willing to seek it?

And would Judas have had to specifically seek it, or would the act of returning the money been enough if he had not proceeded on to suicide?

Sometimes the hardest thing is to have enough courage to accept and acknowledge my failings and to be willing to seek the forgiveness I need.  The tendency is to believe that I am unworthy of forgiveness, or to be so afraid of judgment as to be unwilling to risk an encounter that could end in forgiveness.

Why can the Sacrament of Penance fill me with trepidation as I approach it?

My worthiness is not mine to decide.  I have to be courageous enough to hopefully place myself in God’s hands, faithful enough that I am able to trust in His love, humble enough to let Him decide my fate.

I have to bring my trepidation to Him, and ask that He take it from me.

What would have happened if Judas, instead of going out and hanging himself, had followed Christ to Golgotha?

What would have happened if Judas had laid his guilt and repentance at the foot of the Cross and asked Jesus for forgiveness in those last moments?

Would he have wished he had never been born?

Or would he have been blessed beyond any reasonable expectations?

“And what about Jesus?  Even though He was silent, it doesn’t seem likely He was idle. What was He doing behind that veil of silence while the passion was unfolding around Him?”

Its out of character from my intentions to skip ahead to another Gospel, but an exception is in order here because Luke 23:34 gives more insight into Jesus’ silence than any words I’ve been able to come up with so far.

Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

During the passion, Jesus is menaced by antagonists in ways that I barely comprehend.  Anyone who has seen The Passion of the Christ can empathize with the difficulty of describing what that day was like.  The violence and brutality that Jesus endures leaves me feeling so desolate and disheartened that there is nothing in my previous life that I can draw on in order to provide a description.

The royalty of the Jewish faith arrange to put Him to death because His life is a condemnation of theirs.  The crowd joins in the arrangement, hoping to be rewarded by that royalty for their loyalty.  The politics facing Pilate are somehow too inconvenient for him to do what he otherwise knows to be right.  The soldiers revel in power over another so deeply that their actions are barbaric and even incoherent.

Jesus’ silent endurance as portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew is gripping, but somehow incomplete.  His inner workings are too hidden for me to find the answers I seek solely by relying on Matthew.

But in Luke I find that His silence has purpose.  I recognize in Him a preoccupation so taxing, so intense, and so overwhelmingly urgent that I understand His need for silence.  That preoccupation is prayer, but not prayer on His own behalf.  He is not seeking respite or relief from the cup His Father has presented to Him.

Instead, unbelievably, He prays on behalf of His antagonists.  He seeks forgiveness for those who are literally torturing Him to death.

In that first post I wondered why Jesus isn’t teaching in the face of this antagonism.  But after further consideration, I find that He is teaching.  In fact, what He teaches via His prayerful silence is perhaps the most seminal teaching that He offers throughout His entire public ministry.

Because in that teaching I find out how I am expected to react to my own antagonists.  I find a message about peace and surrender to the Will of God so deep, so compelling, and so breathless that I am left speechless.

Really, I would like to write more about it.  But no matter how hard I try, I have no words to describe the intensity of feeling that arises when I contemplate a sacrifice so extreme that it encompasses even those whose unworthiness seems so clear to a human like me.

How can I ever hope to model that?

After the conclusion of the formation session and before Mass, the fraternity prays the Liturgy of the Hours as a group.  This one Saturday a month is the only time I engage in this type of prayer, so I struggle with the Liturgy, finding it cumbersome and hard to follow.  I’m typically so busy trying to follow format and figure out what page to be on that I don’t get much from the exercise.

This morning I decided not to attempt to say the prayers.  Instead, I listened silently to the words being spoken, hoping that I might gain something by simply being present as my brothers and sisters prayed.

The canticle (Ezekiel 36:24-28, page 990) included these words, which meshed nicely with the discussion on the Holy Spirit that had taken place in my formation group.

“I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts.”

“I will put my spirit within you and make you live by my statutes, careful to observe my decrees.”

Immediately after this, while I listened to the ongoing prayer with my eyes closed, I thought about what it would be like to levitate during prayer.  As soon as that thought was complete, I followed it with “not for my glory, Lord, but for yours.”

I have this thought regularly ever since reading an account of the levitation of St. Thomas Aquinas.  Hopefully it is not sinful to aspire to a level of holiness where a miracle of this sort might happen to me.

What was different today is that I immediately experienced a deep pang of recognition that revealed to me the dishonesty in my desire.  I knew beyond denying that I wanted this achievement not for His glory, but for mine.  I immediately understood this recognition as a revelation of the Holy Spirit.  And I immediately understood that I could never experience a miracle such as this as long as my motives were so selfish and lacking in humility.

I struggled to grasp and internalize this for the rest of the Liturgy of the Hours.  Then the Mass started and the Gospel was read, and I heard these words from Matthew 23:5 in reference to the teachers of the law and the Pharisees:

“All their works are performed to be seen.”

These words rang in my head as confirmation of the revelation I had just experienced.  I don’t know how else to describe what happened to me except to say that today, Jesus spoke directly to me through the Gospel and the Spirit.

I also don’t quite know what to do about it.  I don’t think I understand how to gain the degree of humility that this revelation of the Spirit is asking of me.

As much as I have considered conversion, I have little confidence that I know how to make this happen for myself.

As much as I desire holiness, I doubt my ability to achieve it at the depth that I had been fantasizing about.

In formation this morning, I emphasized to my group the radical nature of the change that comes when the Holy Spirit is active in your life.  I told them to be prepared for a level of change that will be uncomfortable.  They should expect the Spirit to lead them to a place so radically outside of current societal norms that functioning within society on a day to day basis can be a major challenge.

As many times as I have emphasized the ongoing nature of conversion to my group, I realized today that I have been mistaken about my own conversion, thinking that I had already achieved much when in fact I have so very far yet to go.

Today I found out that in truth I have hardly begun the process.  And other than to pray for guidance and help, I doubt my capacity for achieving what needs to be achieved.

I can’t help but wonder if Jack Minard had something to do with this.  This morning Dick reiterated Jack’s words the last time they spoke.  “I’ll put a good word in for all of you when I get there.”  And thirty minutes ago I got Sister’s email saying Jack had been called home this morning before my day had gotten started.

It’s not hard at all for me to see Jack’s hand in this.  Our questing was similar enough that he would understand more than most how this might impact me.  And he would have relished the chance to put this in front of me, thinking it was just what I needed to keep me moving along the path we shared.

So thanks Jack, for one last challenge, one last gift.

Now I need your help to see it through.  Pray for me, Jack, as I have been praying for you.