A work saturated season

A Work Saturated Season

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            This will be a different sort of blog for me. I won’t discuss any issues. It’s mostly about my life at present. I work at a job where we get seasons of 72 hour work weeks about every fifteen months or so. I am in one of those seasons, which lasts four to six weeks now.

I generally hate these seasons of long work hours. A co-worker once described his perspective about a job. He inherited his viewpoint from his father who told him to view a job like one would a tool. You use it, you take care of it, but when it’s time you put it up for later. A job is never one’s whole life. A career may be closer to one’s life, but even a career should never be the reason for our existence. It is certainly wonderful if we obtain satisfaction and feel a purpose for our work, but our work is always simply a portion of life. So I often feel as if I am deprived of life when I get into these seasons of long work hours.

But this time working long hours hasn’t been a season that I have hated like I have others like it in the past. I’ve learned to accept that this is part of the work I do. Others know seasons of long work weeks as well. I come from a farm background and there are farmers in my extended family. When planting, cultivating, and harvest seasons come around they work long hours. During other times of the year they have some times when their hours are not quite as long. But in those special seasons they know the extras in life get cut way back. So this time around as I went into a season with long hours I realized that I wouldn’t have a lot of free time. So I decided this time to try to prioritize that small amount of free time instead of feeling upset that I didn’t have time to do all the things I imagine need done.

For me I made my priority to have devotionals and do a little bit of reading each day. To be honest my attempts at having daily devotionals and regular prayer time has been sporadic. I tend to waste a lot of time to be honest. Strange as it may seem now that I have so little free time when I am not working, eating, or sleeping – I have actually had consistent devotionals especially in the morning. I have gotten my older copy of the Book of Common Prayer out, have prayed the Morning Prayers and followed the readings. I have managed to work through readings in three books, by simply making sure I read a few pages each day.

I say this to encourage others of you that sometimes when you feel like you have failed umpteen times to establish a regular prayer and devotional life, that sometimes when you would least expect it you obtain a desired breakthrough. I can only think of Jacob wrestling with the angel, desiring a blessing. The moment comes in the fight when it seems like you have completely lost. You are limping, but with the limp there is the long desired blessing. For me that is what this season is like. I wake up in the morning, knowing the day will be busy and I turn to at least a few moments in prayer, a little bit of reading and after breakfast I make it to work hoping to treat others with respect, and hoping to be compassionate in carrying out my work duties. For the most part my attitude hasn’t been nearly as sour as in the past. That doesn’t mean tomorrow when I go to work I won’t be tempted to lose my cool, to get upset with life, etc. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I am realizing that now.

The three books I have been written all can be broken up into small sections, ideal for the type of reading I am doing in this season of long hours. I am reading a Lenten devotional book of daily meditations a few pages long. I am going through Maggi Dawn’s book Giving it Up. Maggi Dawn was at one time a Christian singer, and moved on to obtaining a Cambridge degree and is now a Yale professor. Her meditations have the wonderful ability of speaking to Christians across the divided world of the Christian faith. I can imagine either a progressive Christian or a conservative Christian reading her meditations and coming away satisfied with fresh thoughts with which to worship and serve God. A second book, I have been reading is Roots and Sky by Christie Purifoy. As she has described it, she traded a professorship in literature for a farmhouse in Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and children. The house they called “Maplehurst” is an old farm house built in the nineteenth century. They have envisioned turning the house into a place where they can provide hospitality to friends, family, and visitors. I have never met the Purifoy family, but Christie Purifoy’s blog site and her book are examples of an outreach of hospitality. She provides a place for serenity and rest in this often times wearying world. The third book I have been reading in this time is Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness. Dorothy Day, will likely one day be canonized as a Catholic saint for the work she did among the weary workers of Depression era America. When people mentioned her as a saint she found the suggestion humorous. So perhaps if she is canonized on earth there will be a bit of laughter in heaven. The beauty of the work is that you realize there is a creative work to be done in our modern and postmodern times, a work of discovering a place for authentic genuine humanity. That is what you realize in reading The Long Loneliness was the work that Dorothy Day sought to do unto the Lord among the marginalized lost souls of America’s working class in hard times. Overall this has been a season with only a little free time, but it has been blessed by God and I am hopeful that what I have learned to do with only a little free time might be built upon when more free time comes this way. I feel like a farmer who knows that though the planting time is busy it will prove fruitful.

I’ve realized that the three books I have been reading have all been by women. I have pretty much tried to avoid the battlegrounds of gender issues. I have too many friends in the varied groups of complementarians, egalitarians, Christian feminists and whatever identity one wishes to apply to themselves. But of this much I am certain. Quite often God has used women to give birth to the divine life in this world. He has named Deborah and Huldah among the prophets of old. For me, I have felt as though Maggi Dawn, Christie Purifoy, and Dorothy Day have helped stir divine life into my soul. So it has been a season of blessing, which is something I didn’t expect when I began this season of 72 hour work weeks.

A movie, dreams, and inter-faith dialogue

Thoughts, dreams,

A Movie, And

Inter-Faith Discussions

Written By Dan McDonald

 

A scene from Oscar Nominated short “Ave Maria”

 

            My work, most of the time is a standard five day week, eight hours a day job. But for generally a few weeks in a year, we go on twelve hour shifts with only about one day a week for resting. I have begun a six-twelve hour day work week that will last around six weeks. While I can’t say that like such a schedule, it is going better this year mostly because by grace I believe, I have made some progress in pursuing my 2016 keyword to “organize.” I have met the long hours work schedule with a prioritized plan of first, making sure I get enough sleep, and that I have simple but daily morning and evening prayer times. There will be time for other things later when this schedule is over. In the midst of this schedule this week, I had what I felt like was an interesting experience one day.

            I woke up thinking of one of this year’s short movies nominated for a possible academy award. The movie was an Israeli offering named “Ave Maria”. I saw the movie last weekend before my twelve-hour work days began. It was shown with the four other movies nominated for the short movies in the live action category. I loved all five movies and wish more people could see how these short films prove that shorter is not lesser when it comes to movies. I kept remembering one scene from “Ave Maria” that seemed to me to highlight the difficulty of religious people in differing faiths to reach a basic agreement to treat one another with the respect.

            In the movie “Ave Maria” an Orthodox Jewish man takes a shortcut to try to get to his home before the sun sets because the Sabbath is approaching. He takes an Arab road to cut off some time but has an accident next to a Catholic convent, where Palestinian Catholic nuns are living in a household where for the most part, they are under vows of silence. The movie develops this meeting between Arab Catholic nuns and an Orthodox Jewish family in a light hearted manner, touched with humor. The meeting is hindered by how each faith culture has adopted practices making it difficult for the two faith cultures to communicate with one another. The nuns are under a vow of silence. The Orthodox Jewish man needs to call a tow truck. The nuns lead him to a room with an old rotary dial telephone. The Orthodox Jewish man explains it is improper for him to dial the telephone because it is the Sabbath. The youngest nun, I believe a novice as her habit differed from the older nuns, bristles at having to dial the phone for the Orthodox Jewish man. Earlier she had to get up from her dinner to answer his ringing of the doorbell. After she had dialed the number, the Orthodox Jewish man tries to explain he cannot lift the receiver to his ear, because of the Sabbath. The young nun’s patience is kaput. She demonstrably places the receiver on the table as if to say without words, “What’s it going to be your telephone call or your Sabbath keeping rituals?

            I have to admit when I was younger in life I figured only people willing to compromise their faith were interested in inter-faith dialogue. But as I grow older, and hopefully wiser, I have realized that we live in an ever shrinking world. Much of the violence we read about in the world is along the boundary lines between religious faith culture boundaries. While in America, we chiefly look at Islam as the root of terror I can recall a stunning morning on Meet the Press. Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked to respond to estimates that as many as 500,000 Iraqis had died due to the enforcement of sanctions against Iraq. The Secretary of State was asked if the enforcement of those sanctions were worth that cost. She quibbled slightly with the numbers but then affirmed that even with the loss of life the sanctions were doing a necessary work. Really? That quote was seen throughout the Middle East and conveyed a sense to Arab people and Muslims throughout the region that Americans viewed Muslims and Arabs as disposable. For the chief diplomatic officer in the United States to say that 500,000 people dying was worth the price of our sanctions surely encouraged resentment in those quarters against the United States. Since that time it has been Republicans who have been the hardliners in our battle with “terrorists.” It is difficult to be encouraged in trying to build peaceful relationships between differing faiths when a number of people on both sides of the cultural divide speak so quickly in favor of drones, bombs, and terrorist reprisals. I have become convinced that men and women on all sides of the faith issues need as much as we can to seek to build bridges for peaceful resolutions of cultural conflicts.

            In the movie “Ave Maria” it seemed to me that the film makers humorously captured how we use our faiths to avoid dialogue. Each and every faith has an internal life meant to further our faithfulness in seeking the will of God. But throughout history we have all been guilty in our different faiths of pursuing our understood means of receiving blessing in a way that all too easily downplay the normalcy of human relations. There was certainly nothing wrong with stressing silence or keeping the Sabbath, but both disciplines can be applied in a way that diminishes natural human relationships.

            One of the most popular New Testament passages is where Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. It is an interesting story in connection to inter-faith dialogues. Samaritans were not Jewish, but Jesus noticed a Samaritan man who understood who his neighbor was more than the religious establishment Jesus sought to address. St. Paul in the second chapter of Romans describes Gentiles who show by their actions of honoring and respecting men created in God’s image that they had God’s law inscribed on their hearts. St. Peter was told to go to Cornelius, because God had heard his prayers. It is fairly clear to me that Jesus and the Apostles had learned to look across the cultural faith divides to see human faces that were to be loved and respected.

            I had awakened from my sleep thinking about the movie I had seen and as I drifted back towards sleep I thought on these things. I thought of a young Muslim woman who had surprised me by “liking” on Twitter a tweet I had composed. When I had composed it, I had imagined it as a statement that would remind Christians of the implication of our belief in the incarnation. The last thing I expected was my statement to resonate with anyone outside of Christian circles. But a young Muslim woman was the only person who showed that she liked the tweet. I had to let that sink in. Our true human needs are universal. I know that every religion is different. I tend to believe what C.S. Lewis said somewhere that among the myths man believes about God there is the truth about God standing among the myths. But the truth for whichever one of us that has it, is something not to beat over another’s head, but to be shared with compassion to other human beings who are our equals before God.

            So as I was drifting off to sleep on this day, I thought of the young woman whom I have at times exchanged some simple direct messages. Especially after the San Bernardino incident I wanted to make sure she was doing alright, because it was a tense time for Muslims in their minority status wondering who might respond with violence for what most American Muslims felt was a horrible act. At that time I direct messaged her to encourage her and to let her know I was thinking of her at that moment. So that morning as I thought on the difficulty of inter-faith dialogues, I remembered her and asked God to bless her. Later that day she mentioned on line how she was cleaning her desk as she was leaving her job. I replied to her that I hoped it was for the better that she was leaving her job. She told me that it was, that she was going to another job with better salary and better benefits. I thought of my morning prayer. The new job probably had been lined up before I prayed for her. But her blessing seemed to confirm to me that we serve a God who wishes to bless people beyond our understood boundaries of faith and culture. Yes there are differences in the ways of worship, different concepts of God, and these differences are not to be viewed lightly or swept aside as if unimportant. But whether one prays to Mecca, to Jerusalem, or makes the sign of the cross, the one who prays rightly or wrongly has a human face and human concerns. We must not in remembering differences forget the human faces of those dwelling on the other side of our perceived faith and culture boundaries.