The Spirituality of Underemployment

The last few months have seen a different dynamic in my household.

For years, we've had a pattern.  I've been the part-timer, the one with flexibility.  Laundry and bills and taxes and kid-shuttling are the tents I make as a part-time pastor.  Which, if you didn't get that reference, was me talking about Paul of Tarsus, who kept himself employed as a tentmaker as he spread the word through the Greco-Roman world.  It's not always been easy, and it's meant some "pastor-career" tradeoffs.  But it was necessary to keep our lives sane.

My wife was the full-timer.  She put in the 70 hour weeks, and worked late into the night to insure that what needed to get done got done.  It was lucrative but stressful, rewarding but sometimes overwhelming.  She was good at what she did.  She had my support in it, in all that she did, although I would occasionally suggest that slowing down might be good.

Ma'am, I'm going to ask you to step away from the smartphone.  Put it down.  Nice and easy.

And slow down she has now, thanks to the downsizing that was her reward for doing her job well.  There's been some consulting work, thanks be to the Maker, but we now find ourselves among the ranks of the underemployed.

For now, we're holding the line financially.  Our house is small, our cars are modest and paid off, and beyond our mortgage we have assiduously avoided debt.   In the fat years, we saved compulsively, driven by my inherently conservative view of financial well-being.  It's me Scots blood, laddie.  So the winter is upon us, but the granary is full.  But there are other impacts to underemployment, and they are, quite frankly, spiritual in nature.

Feeling like you have a sense of purpose is absolutely vital to the well-being of all human critters.  It gives us a story about ourselves.  It gives us a feeling of value.  It's vital.

Our culture has woven up our sense of purpose with our careers.  What makes us worthwhile human beings is our workiness, the degree to which we're out there getting it done and bringing home the bacon.  We work hard for the money, so you better treat us right.

Now, though, underemployment is everywhere.  Folks work jobs that don't even come close to tapping their abilities.  Either the hours aren't there or the work is simply mindless.  It is, among the generation that followed mine, almost inescapable.  How do we, creatures of purpose, survive those times without coming apart at the seams?

1)  Resist the chaos.  One of the most peculiar things about being underemployed is that it can involve a crazy amount of freedom.  Your day is yours.  You can do whatever you want.  Sleep late!  Eat waffles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!  Muck about on Pinterest until you're pinning things even when your eyes are closed.  Drop into a fifteen-hundred point Conquest server on Battlefield 3, and let those hours just vanish in a haze of FPS crazy.

You can do these things.  And people do.  But life is short, and flies on by.  Freedom is great, but it can quickly become aimless sameness.  You aren't doing anything new, but have fallen into a churning nothing.   You are free, but your freedom is joyless.

Here, be attentive to both framing ritual and intentional newness.  Having intentional patterns to your day helps.  There's a time to wake, and a time to sleep.  There's a time to work, and a time to take a shower, 'cause Lord have mercy, you're getting a little rank.  Be mindful about these things.

But also keep yourself open to the potential for newness.   Leave space for intentionally encountering new things, and don't let the prison of aimless chaos be your only guide.

2)  Take time to be creative.   Freedom and creativity are not the same thing.  If you are underutilized and underhoured, then view that extra time as a gift.  And with that gift, do the thing that lights you up.  Paint or sketch.  Study those things that fascinate you.  Sing.  Write music.  Write that novel.  Crank out those short stories.  Explore.  Encounter.  Pray.  Read. Contemplate.

Use your time, and don't let your time use you.  And it will, if you aren't wary.  Ours is not a culture that values creativity.  The consumer ethic will take your every moment of freedom and turn it into aimless hunger.  Which is harder to feed, given that resources and underemployment don't go hand in hand.  That leads to frustration, which leads to bitterness and resentment, which leads to dark places.

We are meant to be beings that give form and shape to our reality.  Don't let that part of our essential human nature fade because vocation is harder to find.

3)  Maintain human connection.   Our radically individualized society promises us anything we want, but at a price.  That price is other human beings, and the sustaining connections of friendship and community.

When the natural interactions of the workplace vanish, when those friendships we develop from working side by side with colleagues wane, it becomes all the easier to fold into ourselves.  We can become closed off in a media bubble, separated from the world by our feeds and our channels and our gaming and our pinning.  That can sustain us for a while, but it is, of itself, not adequate.  You need to get out there.  Talk and schmooze and klatch and chill with friends.   Resist that tendency to wrap yourself up in resentments or depression or anger.  Those pesky demons will eat you alive.  Best not to let that happen.

Church is a great place for that, as are community organizations, teams, and any group where you can share a genuine interest.  Do not neglect this.  We are, after all, not made to be alone.

4)  Care for your body.   The absence of business means an absence of busyness, and that can mean not just social inactivity, but physical inactivity.  This has lasting negative consequences, because the Ancient Hebrews had it right.  Our spirits and our bodies are not totally separate things, any more than the oak and the soil and the sky are totally separate things.  If we're neglecting our physical well being, then our spirituality suffers.  We become more easily listless, and more easily lost.  Anxieties and angers and woes come more easily, and stick around longer.

So walk.   Lift weights.  Run.  Hike.  If you've got an old bike, use it.  These things aren't expensive, and they aren't hugely demanding, but they do keep you fit.  In an enforced fallow time, that's a vital, vital part of staying centered and gracious.

5)  Enjoy what you find yourself doing.   I worked for years as a dishwasher in a university cafeteria.  It was fiercely active, demanding, and low paying.   That conveyor belt brought trays by the hundreds, and at first, it was a bit overwhelming.  But as I did my work, I focused on it, got good at it, and found that it became almost a form of meditation.   I would be flying, doing the work of three, and yet my mind would be my own.  It was calming.  Pleasurable, even.

After I got my college degree, I was unemployed for a good long while, having entered the marketplace smack in the middle of the post-Reagan recession.  When I did find almost-full-time work, it was as a stock clerk in a small family owned restaurant and store.  I focused on doing the job, and doing it well.  That was what mattered.  Sure, the pay was low.  Some of my co-workers spent more of the day complaining than they did working.  So it goes.  We can choose to live defined by resentment.   But I let myself find happiness in the simple ordering of stocking shelves and racking up drinks, and let myself take pleasure in a neatly swept floor at the end of the day.

6)   Understand your worth unconditionally.   This is the Jesus part, and being a teacher of His Way, I'd suggest it's the most important.  When you find yourself working less or not at all, and scrambling for a living, our success-and-attainment driven culture tells us that we're nothing.  We have failed.  We are pathetic.  Survival of the fittest, baby.  Them's the breaks, weakling.  You just didn't try hard enough.  It's your fault that you're so useless.

This isn't real.  Oh, it's the reality we've created for ourselves, sure.  But the entirety of our economic system is our doing.  We've chosen to make it this way.

Christian faith resists that worldview.  It asserts that our value as sentient beings stems from our unconditional value before our creator, whose love for us is unchanging and inescapable.  Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Jesus was his relentless insistence on loving people who - according to his culture - didn't deserve it.  He loved the sick.  He loved women.  He loved the tax-man.  He loved the soldier serving an occupying army.

When you're wrestling with your own worth as a person, that's a word of liberation.  But liberation for what?

7)   Pay that worth forward.   Being a disciple of Jesus in the desert place of underemployment means not just receiving grace.  It is not meant just for us.  It is meant to be shared.   Take time to positively contribute to those around you.  That can be in words of kindness, or in attending to grace in your every relationship.  But it also means finding places where your hands are needed, and apply your energies there.  Beyond writing and studying, I've taken my own half-time work as an opportunity to drive for the local Meals on Wheels program, which brings food to the homebound elderly and those living with disabilities.

Meals on Wheels has been struggling recently to accomplish its noble purpose, because the homemakers who once volunteered were drawn into the workforce or the berserk activity-storm of our children's overscheduled lives.

Knowing this, and knowing that from that Deep Reality we are all called to give of ourselves, I've made a point of making time to serve.  


It's not easy, being underutilized.  But you can get through it.  It can be a place of grace.

Gaming and Spirituality

For significant chunks of today, I've been prepping for a presentation on gaming, part of a first-Wednesday of the month series of evening seminars at my congregation.   As a pastor and a gamer, I've got a strong appreciation for both the joys and the ethical challenges in gaming.

There are some ethical sinkholes in the gaming world, to be sure, virtual La Brae tar pits for the soul.  But to be honest, none of them are any worse than handing Ayn Rand to an impressionable teen.  Grand Theft Auto might make them a bit more thuggish, but at least it doesn't make them prone to bombastic, overlong, compulsively self-absorbed right-wing prose.

As I've been prepping for what will be a general survey of the ethics of gaming, I find myself wondering if this new medium can be a spiritual thing.   Games can tell wonderful stories, to be sure, filled with deeply real characters that genuinely move us.   Those of you disappearing into Mass Effect 3 this week know what I mean.  Games can make us laugh.  Games can be filled with wit and humor and grace.  Games can genuinely stimulate us mentally, forcing us to think as deeply as any brain twisting puzzle.  Games can be as creatively open and playful as a box of LEGOs in the hands of a child.  Games can be art.

But can they be spiritual?  Sure, an eight hour nonstop gaming session can put us into a pretty altered state of consciousness, but that's not quite the type of spirituality I mean.

Can a game give us that sense of wonder and mystery that comes with the most evocative music, or the most beautiful paintings?  Can it give a sense of being connected not just to the creative intent of the human being who made it, but the deeper reality of the Creator who formed that human being?   There is certainly art that does this, cinema and music that causes deep stirrings of the Spirit within us.   Ron Fricke's Baraka stirs that in me, as does the early work of Kurosawa and Bergman.  The music of Arvo Part also speaks it.

But games?

Some have come close.   The spare, subtle games produced by thatgamecompany seem closest to that for me.  Next week, I'm looking forward to the release of Journey, the latest in their series of remarkably elegant and haunting releases.  Like prior games flOw and Flower, each delightful in their own way, Journey seems less like a traditional game, and more like a powerfully primal meditation.   It's only three hours long, but the reviews so far have affirmed that those three hours are deeply memorable and affecting.

As with any unusually grace-filled thing, I'm eager to experience it.

The Woo

As part of my daily blog feedage, I make a point of reading a mix of like-thinking progressives and mystics, but also spend time perusing the thoughts of the godless and the Pharisee. One of the more intriguing recent posts I've read recently was, again, at the friendlyatheist.com. In it, an atheist was struggling with whether or not to attend a local Unitarian Universalist congregation as a way of providing community for his family. UUs, from my own personal experience, are radically inclusive and tolerant of difference. Inclusiveness and tolerance are, in fact, the governing ethos of that community. That, coupled with a desire for social justice, is pretty much the only thing that UUs require for entry into their herd of friendly, purring cats.

Most remarkably, nearly all of the atheists who responded to this issue were incredibly supportive. There was a strong consensus that Unitarian congregations were atheist/agnostic friendly, and a great place to go to encounter other freethinking and open folks...so long as you didn't have a huge chip on your shoulder about folks who believe in God/Jesus/Goddess/Vishnu/Allah/The Force/Thingummy.

That pattern of thought took things to an interesting place. Nearly all of the respondents identified the one element of a Unitarian community to beware of as "the woo." A congregation might be to "woo-ey." Or have too much "woo." The word "woo" tends to evoke in me an image of a man down on his knee with a rose in his teeth. He's outside the window of a Victorian home in a small town, while a barbershop quartet sings Sweet Adeline in the background. This is not what they mean by "woo."

Or at least, I don't think so. I haven't been to a UU worship recently, and with them, you never know.

Instead, the Woo appears to be used to describe spirituality in any of its forms. Prayer. Candles. Dreams. Visions. Meaning, those things that tend to make we Presbyterians uneasy. As the Frozen Chosen, we're quite comfortable with process and structure and polity. We're also at home engaging in exegetical analysis of texts, preferably while providing citations from our favorite subset of scholars and referencing the Greek and Hebrew in ways that Show Our Superior Intellect. We're fine talking about social issues, be they from a liberal or conservative bent. We're practical people. We get things done.

But when it comes to experiential faith, to articulating those moments of trembling ecstasy, well, we clam right up. As someone who can officially declare himself a cradle Presbyterian, I heard talk of personal spiritual experience exactly zero times from the pulpit growing up. Not once. It was not spoken of in Sunday School, at any level. It just wasn't.

It's too disorderly. Too irrational. Too emotional. It lacks clear foundation in Scripture and tradition and process. It makes us seem...ugh...Baptist.

And we can't have that.

For those coming out of traditions that are all weeping and shouting and testifying and Feats of Spiritual Strength and weeping some more, that might seem a blessed relief. But for those coming up in our corner of the reformed tradition, I think it might be helpful for church to be...every once in a while...a place where we talk about those dreams and moments of numinous intensity, where we can share and pray and wonder. If we Presbyterians find themselves as unable to do that as atheists, then perhaps we should ponder whether or not this might be a factor in our struggles to revitalize our fading fellowship.

Fighting That Nasty Little Inner Pharisee

Following the successful launch of a great new service program by a member of the church, I trundled off to our local clothing closet this Saturday to grudgingly put in my monthly court-mandated community service hours. Though the lawyers for the Apple store did push for hard time. Hey, it's not my fault I thought that "open source" meant "feel free to take what you want."

Well, actually, no. I really enjoy charitable work and volunteering. It is work that clearly serves a purpose, that directly benefits those who are struggling and in need. In this case, putting clothes on their bodies. It is work utterly free of mammon's coercion, done for no other purpose than the love of it and of others. It is work that fulfills a really rather specific faith mandate to provide material care, and to be a part of the Gospel process of liberation from suffering. I'm not quite a Salvationist, like the folks over at the Salvation Army whose theology mandates volitional care for others. But I'm close. Church needs to proclaim the Gospel and transform people's lives through that gracious message. I'm down with that. But also and at the same time, it must express itself in practical care for others, in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and visiting the prisoner. If it doesn't do both, it isn't really church. If it does, it is rich and Spirit-filled.

My struggle yesterday was that I didn't bring that gracious Spirit with me when I went. For the first four years of my ministry, my congregation was so wrapped up in Korean psychodrama that it just couldn't seem to muster any service work at all. My outlaw fraternity did more community outreach than my congregation, which ain't sayin' much. Outside of giving cash from the endowment, we did jack-diddly-nothing. Finally, this last year, I started pressing for us to regularly run a food drive, which we've sort of done. I also started encouraging the church to volunteer at the local faith-based clothing closet.

There was some initial involvement. But for the past four months, a grand total of two folks have joined me in doing it. Once it was a kid doing it because he had to. The other time it was my Jewish son, who likes volunteering, and is eager to join me whenever he can.

I'm aware I'm not reaching out enough. Talking about it with lay congregational leaders, talking about it during bible studies, preaching sermons on the necessity of service, announcing it during services, highlighting it in email newsletters, and pitching it through Facebook event invites and notifications...these aren't enough. Only going from person to person, and asking each individual directly if they're going to volunteer every single time we're going to do it seems to work. After a wise soul told me early on that this was the only way people were going to come, I followed his advice. I did that for a while. I did that for a few months.

But there are limits to how far I'm willing to take pastoral suasion. If after over a year people have experienced it, and still aren't coming without arm-twisting, then the voluntary element of volunteering isn't real. If you don't serve with a free will, then it cannot possibly be what it needs to be. Yeah, I could keep noodging and hassling and guilting people into it. But I've never been interested in people faking it out of sense of obligation.

This leaves me with two troubling conundrums.

The first is having to admit to myself that I am the only person in the congregation who cares about this particular service opportunity. It's a bit vexing, because I really like it, I really enjoy it, and it's just a transparently good thing to do. It connects us with our community. It clothes the naked, which would seem like something we'd realize matters to Jesus. But I am self-evidently the only one who cares. Ah well. Egos are such irritating things, and try as I might, I can't always shut mine off. The church is, after all, finally doing other service work on site, through the calling of someone who has joined us in the last few months. So even if my efforts have proved fruitless, the Spirit is at work elsewhere in the church. I take some solace in that.

The second is not to allow my irritation to impede my own efforts. I personally need service ministry to be fed spiritually, but there is no point in doing it while ensconced in a dark cloud of pissiness or judgmentalism or smugness. And though I hate to admit it, it was getting to me this weekend. On the way to the clothing center, certain in the knowledge that it was, once again, just going to be me, I could feel that narsty little inner Pharisee embittering me. Judging others. Telling me that I, in my noble me-ness, should be Proud that I'm The Only One Who Gets It. But there is no Christ in such thinking. There are plenty of folks who live out their faith that way, governed by the demons of self and self-interest. It's a dark cloud of smug delusion.

So I resisted that pesky little demon. I challenged and centered myself. I reminded myself of the point of it all. I focused on the sorting and hanging of clothes the way you'd focus on a repeated prayer, losing myself completely in it. And the anger and bitterness and selfishness faded. And the clothes were sorted and set out for those in need.

It really is most effective.