Work Without Spirit is Just a Job Is doing your job your soul’s mission in life? According to most polls, few of us can say that our spiritual values and innermost desires find reflection in our daily vocation. What is the remedy for this situation? Must we sacrifice our true self for a job? No. Instead by may sanctify our job through authetic "soul work." So says Mathew Fox in his latest book, The Reinvention of Work (Harper San Francisco). This influential priest of "creations spirituality" draws upon the writings of the great mystics to examine the work crisis and bridge true inner work with its outer manifestations on the job. Work is a destructive addiction when its primary value in life is defined by the things bought with the money earned by the job. "The price community pays for consumerism is very steep", warns Fox. Career success and the acquisition of material goods prevents a deeper searching of vocational choices and the purpose for living. The consequent violence to the humanity of the workforce reduces us to robots and induces spiritual starvation. At the soul leve workers become homeless. Fox questions America's work ethic: "Does business have a value beyond maximizing profits?" "Our business is only about making money," said one executive to Fox, "and the only way we can do that in our industry is by keeping everybody uncertain and mean - inside the company and outside it." This attitude, Fox says, reflects the popular GNP (gross national product) doctrine, where the quantitative output of society is justified as meaningful even though meanwhile we plunder the Earth's resources and disrupt the basic functioning of the life systems of the planet: "We have defined work as industrial work... solely dependent on rugged individualism and dualism." As long as we operate within a mechanistic view of humanity--seeing our minds and our bodies, not creative organisms but as machines--we will perpetually fight, humiliate, deteriorate in dis-ease, and struggle amidst the walking wounded. Like Thomas Aquinas, and other mystics, Fox believes that "to live well is to work well." He advocates, therefore, that the most important work of our time is to work on the human species itself. Fox suggests that we reconsider the importance of ritual. He calls ritual the 'work of works,' and believes it would help us live more authentically. "To live ritually is to tap into the collective memory of our anscestors... to build up, maintain and inherit their habits." Rather than living rituals we now have dead habits. Among the habits of the industrial era we need to stop is the one that makes citizens aquiesce to become cogs in a machine. If the universe and its creatures are regarded as inanimate and soulless, for example, it follows that we will be satisfied with mechanized habits that are themselves inanimate, without purpose, soulless and boring. On the other hand, if the cosmos is a single, developing and expanding organism, we will want instead rituals, which are alive with infinite potential. The Earth can be honored as a living organism instead of regarded as inert matter. The spirit is reanimated by mystery and darkness that is otherwise repressed by mental sanctions against chaos and spontaneity. When we practice ritual in a sacred manner, we can appreciate human freedom, justice, and equality. "Ritual will be the growth industry of the 1990's," Fox claims. "It will allow us to join the work of our daily lives with the Great Work of the Universe." (Digest by Clayton Montez, Atlantic University.) |