Good Work/Bad Work

For some months I've been reflecting on work.  I am, to some degree anyway, like those people that Baz Luhrmann speaks about in his song "Sunscreen"

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life...

the most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives

some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't

One thing I am sure of is the following:  while "consulting" has paid the bills to date, I'm becoming increasingly dissatisfied with it.  There seems to be so little about it that is concrete.  By this, I mean that I battle to see whether anything I work on is actually useful to society, whether it helps my fellow man to flourish.  Sure, there are one or two exceptions but as my builder friend, Tim once said: "So really your job is just hocus pocus".

I've been reading "Let my people go Surfing" by Yves Chouinard, founder of Patagonia.  I am fascinated by the company's uncompromising commitment to design, product excellence and sustainability.  Everything is designed to last.  Everything is built single-mindedly around the needs and lifestyle of the outdoor "dirtbag", the sort of person who's more likely to spend his remaining 5 dollars on transport to his favourite climbing area than on clothes.  When he buys an item it HAS to last.  Patagonia is "responsible for the total" i.e. sourcing, design, quality, wearability, washability, durability, repairability and, ultimately, disposability.  

I see much of Patagonia's ethos in a fascinating article written by Dorothy Sayers just after the outbreak of World War 2.  Here are a few gems that stood out for me:

• "A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on Trash and Waste, and such a society is a house built on sand"

• "In all the world there are only 2 sources of real wealth:  the fruit of the earth and the labour of men.  You estimate work not by the money it brings to the producer, but by the worth of the thing that is made"

• “We should ask of our enterprise not ‘will it pay?’ but ‘is it good?’; of a man not ‘what does he make?’ but ‘what is his work worth?’;  of goods, not ‘can we induce people to buy them’ but ‘are they useful things well made?’; of employment, not ‘how much per week?’ but ‘will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?’  We should fight tooth and nail not for more employment but for the quality of the work we do.  We should clamour to be engaged in work that is worth doing and in which we should take pride”

• "Work is not the thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do.  It is, or should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual and bodily satisfaction and the medium in which he offers himself to God"

• "We should fight tooth and nail, not for mere employment, but for the quality of the work that we do"

• "The greatest insult which the commercial age has offered the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making in the first place"

As I go into 2019, I have come up with 3 sets of criteria to help filter the work on offer.  I hope I can live by them:

1.  Is the work on offer a legitimate outlet in which to express my gifts, talents and emotional energy.  Will I grow in and through this work?  Will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?
2. Is the outcome going to be measurably useful for i) the end customer?  ii) the client or intermediary?
3. Will the outcome be ethical and moral?  Will it help society to thrive, flourish and prosper?

The Fast (Part 2)

Wednesday 16th 

This fast is different to other shorter ones I've done in that I've had no cravings.  At least not until now when I opened the fridge and saw a favourite snack sitting on the bottom shelf.  On any other day, I'd eat it without a thought or shred of appreciation.  But now it taunts me.  "Still two more days mate" - it seems to say, "I'll see you Friday"

What makes short(ish) fasts so difficult are the cravings, not the hunger.  Craving is the evil second cousin of Hunger.  It burns with the ferocity of meth-fed kindling.  Hunger, on the other hand, is more of a smoldering, moody thing.  In a good way.  Godly hunger slowly begins to shape you.  Suddenly you see things more clearly.  You are more discerning about what you spend your energy on.  You become more contented, weaned from the petty annoyances that used to unsettle you.  Wrote David in Psalm 131:  

"O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me"

That's the problem with cravings - they cause us to live too much of our lives in the future.  There is ever before us some finish line or destination beyond which we will be permitted to have something we don't have now.  Today often looks pretty grim and lifeless in light of what's waiting at the finish line.  We crave the finish line but then, when we reach it, every pleasure and indulgence we craved becomes just another everyday thing.  Like that tub of yogurt that's taunting me from the bottom shelf of the fridge.  By Saturday morning it will be just one refrigerator item amongst many.

A few years ago my brother was trying to come to grips with his wife's life-threatening illness.  He longed for a finish line that would see her whole and healed.  He wrote:

"... it occurred to me that today is our only reality. Tomorrow is not reality. Tomorrow may never come.  Further, my perception of tomorrow is an illusion.  Tomorrow does not exist as my mind imagines it, for tomorrow will always be different to what I expect. But today is today. I live in the present moment of today, not in the past or in the future.

Even though I'm starting to suffer,  “today” is no less a precious gift.  It's something that needs to be unwrapped with joy

The Fast (Part I)

6 a.m. Day 4 of a five day fast.  I'm on no sleep.  My heart is pounding, my stomach a frenzy of cartwheels.  Perhaps a shot of bicarb will settle it?  For a few minutes it does but then, a wave of nausea hits.  "I'm out," I call to Lisa, "I can't do another day".  We resolve to push on until just after midday, a day and a half short of the target.

Fasting is not a target.  Nor is it a stunt.  It's a journey, a vigil.   It's an invitation to come further up and further in. When Jesus embarked on his epic 40-day fast he was, according to Matthew's Gospel, led into the desert by the Holy Spirit.  Led, not pushed.  During that time he faced three tests all of which would prove decisive in the success of his ministry.  But what did I learn in the blur of those 4 days?

Tuesday 14th - 2am

Since turning 40, the prospect of growing old has haunted me.  It comes and goes.  Lately, it mostly just comes.  At this early hour, I am awoken by the terror, the hopelessness of impending old age.  Regrets plague me, exaggerated by the sleep.  "I'm nearly 50.  I'm neither a spectacular success nor a miserable failure.  What could I have done differently?  Will I have anything to show for it when I die?  Will anyone notice when I'm gone?  If only I had the last 20 years back again".

I try to read a bit but am too distracted.  I turn out the light. Half asleep, an impression quietly begins to form:  "this fast is, amongst other things, about uprooting that fear once and for all.  You are not finished.  In fact, you are about to start living".

The thought gives way to a picture.  Perhaps it's because I've been reading a Michener epic but I'm suddenly enthralled by the sweep of history.  The vision is of God sitting outside of time but leaning sovereignly, attentively and tenderly over the timeline of his creation.  He is immeasurably bigger than any and all of us together, bigger than history, bigger than creation itself, bigger than thought or ingenuity.  Reason buckles beneath the arithmetic.  "Where were you when...?" - God assails me with questions stopping short, as he did with Job, of crushing me.

In a motion that is simultaneously decisive yet perpetual, He sweeps his seamless royal robe over it all.  His eye is especially focussed on his followers - all stitches in his garment.  I am but one stitch.  I sense Him saying:  "You have this life - it's no more or less important than any other I have created redeemed and taken.  But it's every bit as precious.  Every bit as destined.  Every bit as wired to have more of me.  How deep will you go?  How much will you give?  How closely will you listen?"

I sleep.

My security is, as Piper once wrote, "not based on my grip on Him but on His grip on me".  Yet it is His grip on me that produces my pursuit of him.  

Leaf by Niggle - my tribute to a great allegory

In the autumn of 1988, I passed up an opportunity to watch Pink Floyd live at Denver’s Mile High Stadium.  It was, so far as I know, one of the band’s last world tours and it headlined their most recent album “A momentary lapse of reason”.  The next day, after hearing the excited chatter of classmates who’d been there, I knew I’d made a mistake.  By all accounts, the iconic song “Learning to fly” had brought the house down.  It wasn’t just the jaw-dropping light and laser show for which Pink Floyd was famous – it was the song itself: 

A soul in tension that's learning to fly

Condition grounded but determined to try

Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies

Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit

Looking back I can imagine the spectacle.  A stadium full of young people – just barely out of life’s starting blocks, drunk with dreams and thrusting ambitions yet, at least for now, straining against the gravity of circumstance.  The words ring true of our condition regardless of age: our dreams are limitless but the years are few.  We embark on life’s journey with such high hopes only to be beaten back repeatedly by the waves of reality.  We are like Gatsby’s “boat’s against the current”, caught in the undertow of a future that year by year recedes before us and eludes us. 

About 45 years earlier, JRR Tolkien, though well on in years, was beset by a similar dilemma.  For almost a decade, he’d been meticulously crafting the epic that would one day be ranked amongst the greatest novels of the 20th Century.  Torn between his academic commitments and his great vision for “The Lord of the Rings”, Tolkien had nonetheless succeeded in breathing life into an ensemble cast of captivating characters and people groups.   He had also developed an elaborate tapestry consisting of 5 major storylines and at least 6 mythical language systems of the various peoples of Middle Earth.  Though the story was unfinished, it was technically a masterpiece already.  But then two things happened that threatened its completion.  The first was a bout of severe writer’s block.  How was he to resolve this welter of characters and storylines in a way that was both convincing and satisfying for the reader?  The second was the onset of World War II.  Would he, and for that matter his work, survive what was to become the greatest conflict of the 20th Century?  It was enough to send him into a deep depression.

Sometime later, Tolkien had a dream that would flourish into the now famous allegory.  Leaf by Niggle tells the story of a fastidious but only modestly talented painter who has realised he will not live to complete his artistic vision.  Though he dreams of a great tree on a majestic landscape, Niggle is permanently distracted by the needs of those around him.  He also knows that a great journey is imminent and that there will be no return ticket.  As the hour of his death approaches, Niggle works harder and harder to complete his work.  Despite many late hours and much painstaking work, death comes before the canvas can be completed.  The fabric ends up being used to repair a leak in his neighbour’s roof and only a small corner of it – a picture-perfect rendition of a leaf - finds its way into the dusty corner of a local museum (which later burns down). 

What, if anything, is Niggle’s legacy?  What discoveries await the little artist as he journeys into the afterlife?  From the vantage point of eternity, what does he learn about those many frustrating years as an artist in the old country?

In one of the most majestic portions of the New Testament, the writer of Hebrews reflects on a similar theme.  The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is a tribute to the faith and perseverance of many Old Testament stalwarts who died long before they could see God’s promises come true in their lives:

“All of these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth…”

And then in a verse that would not be out of place in the conclusion to Tolkien’s stunning allegory, the writer adds

“…for those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own. And indeed if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return.  But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them”

Pastor Tim Keller – whose book “Every Good Endeavour” is, at least in part, inspired by Tolkien’s allegory, has shared “Leaf by Niggle” with many frustrated creatives and entrepreneurs.  Some are believers in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and some are not.  All are moved and comforted by its message.  I hope you will be too.  (Tolkien himself acknowledged that the interlude was one of the main contributing factors to the completion of “The Lord of the Rings”).

The consoling truth for any Christian is that our pursuit of beauty, order and transcendence on this side of eternity is but a shadow of the real thing that resides on the other side.  And so to echo F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby”, though this beauty might partly elude us here “that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning….

So we beat on, boats against the current…”