Tag Archives: work

September 19, 2011 · 5:58 am

The Unmerited Grace of the Work

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace.  It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.  You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then–and only then–it is handed to you.”  –Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Odd isn’t it, that there is work in receiving grace?  It was Dallas Willard who said that grace is opposed to earning, not effort.  How strange it is that grace and effort are symbiotically linked in a relationship designed to throw the lazy off the track.  Couple the word “grace” with “free” and spend a few hundred years railing against meritorious work and life lived knocking on the Christian door can get pretty out of kilter.   The conundrum of the loving Jesus offering grace set against the Jesus of Revelation 2 and 3 who says unless you turn around and change what you’re doing I’m going to take your lampstand away, spit you out of my mouth, and (perhaps, if you’re Thyatira’s Jezebel), kill your children…well, this is hard stuff.

It seems strange to have to work at receiving a gift.  But there is work to be done in receiving a thing, especially if you think you’re above the gift…or the giver.   Perhaps this is why pride is the worst of sins–it keeps you from receiving the grace being poured out.

Dillard writes about this so eloquently in the fifth chapter of The Writing Life.   She describes that sensation follows the hard work of probing, researching, hunting, structuring, and alligator-wrestling sentences.   When the work actually appears, even as you stand there with sweat dripping off your nose, you know that the arrival of the solution, the form, the final expression of what you had in mind all along has very little, if anything, to do with you.    The chapter, the novel, the play, the poem…they arrive by grace, as you are faithful.

Grace grows crops, but only if we seed, plow, and harvest.

God embeds his ways in ours, inviting us to join in shouldering the world even as He carries the whole thing.

Be faithful, show up, apply muscle, and open your hands and arms as wide as you can.   And grab some friends.  There is way more grace pouring out than we can handle by ourselves.

Grace works…

 

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September 16, 2011 · 7:52 am

The Feral Work in the Next Room

Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.  I should have read it back in February, when I first began approaching my current project.   Funny thing is, the image she describes in the following paragraph is one I have kept in the back of my mind for years.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral.  It reverts to a wild state overnight.  It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch.   It is a lion you cage in your study.   As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength.  You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it.  If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.   You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, “Simba!”

–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Chapter Three, the chapter for my morning, is all about how you rev up to get the work going for the day.   It fits nicely with Pressfield’s idea (The War of Art) of warring to get the work done.   Dillard’s more visceral metaphors–tea kettle’s whistling, heavy-bodied moths panting furiously toward lift-off, dreams delivering pragmatic advice about splitting wood–strike me as truth, as in true to my experience.  She recounts telling a neighbor that she hates writing, and mostly fools around all day and calls it work.  (Oh, man…how I get that.)  And in answer to someone who asks her “Who will teach me to write?”, Dillard’s answer strikes me as pure and true as any I’ve ever read.  It’s why I sit in front of the blank page, or screen, as the case may be.

If you are a creative, here’s your encouragement to take on the lion in the next room.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nonetheless, because acting is better that being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.

–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I can hear the roaring, but I’m going in, chair in hand…

SIMBA!  

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July 1, 2011 · 9:06 am

Work

Odd that “work” is on my mind at the beginning of the July 4th weekend.  You can’t study the Civil War without being constantly reminded of slavery, and henceforth, “work.”  Slavery was about labor that must be performed by someone if crops are to be harvested.   As I think about my next writing project, it is going to be anchored again in a social context where work is demanded, and how that work is distributed says something about how we think about various people groups. Issues of social and economic class, education, skin color, and culture are all tied to this notion of work: how we work, what we work for, what we value in work practices, and how work is related not only to leisure, but recreation (those two are not the same.)   And of course, work is at the heart of justice and injustice, being tied to practices that define the relationship between ownership, labor, and compensation for work done.

In physics, work is the transfer of energy from an agent to an object.  A baseball pitcher works on the ball by transferring energy from his body to the ball.   A golfer works on the golf club by transferring energy from his body to the club, which then works on the ball.   I think of all work just like this; human energy dispersed onto the world in ways that are creative, practical, necessary, helpful, and healthy.  Of course, there is also energy dispersed in destructive ways; tearing down is work as well.

Economies revolve around “goods” and “work.”   There is great despair over the inability to work, be it because of disability, injustice, or laziness.  Work is at the core of what it means to be alive, to stay alive, to make living worth while. There is an “ethic” to work, and different cultures define it differently.   According to a 2008 Forbes article, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development came up with rankings that placed South Korea at the top of the list of hard-workers in the sense that they work the longest hours, and the Dutch are at the bottom of the list because they work the fewest–about 27 per week.   Attitudes concerning vacation and rest are all over the map.

Here’s the thing.   How we relate ourselves to the concept of work is at the core of our thinking about what life is and what it means.

But when was the last time you heard anyone talking about how great work is?   About how much fun they have when they were working?   About how thrilled they are to get up and go at it everyday?

I’ve said all this to ask one simple question, and I’ll leave you to ponder this over your long July 4th holiday weekend.

If someone were to ask you to explain or define your work ethic, the one you actually live and work by, what would you tell them?

What is your work ethic, and how do you go about demonstrating it?

Have fun…

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June 27, 2011 · 7:49 am

An Artist’s Prayer

Dear God,

You make, I make.  You make me to make.  What am I to make today?  What are You making today, and what is the plan for how our making?   In every small corner of every large nation, human beings are setting out to take disparate materials and fashion them into a piece of work that has beauty, meaning, aesthetic unity, and the power to impact and change those who encounter that piece of work. (Though the specifics of the impact and the change hoped for vary wildly.)   Here I sit in my small corner of my large nation, setting out to do the same.

I assume You are intimately aware of the nuance of my thought-life and my feeling-life, of my history and proclivities, of my talents and hang-ups, and You have a perspective on who and what I am that is beyond anything I can grasp.  Yet I am stuck in my perspective; my neural circuitry is what it is, my capacities not unlimited, and it simply isn’t true that I can do anything I set my mind to.   The clock is ticking on this earth-side life of mine, and the sun is hurrying over my head even as I type.  I glance over my art-making, and decisions sit there, staring back at me, demanding (with a certain ferocity) to be made, and made now.  Writing is different than planning to write.   Acting is different that exploring acting.   Dancing is different than vowing to dance.

Lord, I control nothing.   ”The wind blows where it wills…”  My making today will not be enough to combat the enormity of things.   The streams of information, experience, and aspiration that feed a human’s creative work (and by “a human” I mean me) are overwhelming and vast, and to wrestle the elements into a form that contains coherence, beauty, and inspiration may not be as back-breaking as digging in coal mines, but it sure seems that way.   When I ask You to guide me, it seems I am asking You to help me find just what illusions I can live with, because the truth of the human condition seems more than any of us can bear.

And immediately from Your end of the conversation comes a simple, “Stop it.”  By that, I take it you mean the whining.   I can see in Your eyes that decisions must be made, action must be taken, and writing and dancing is to commence now, not later.   The word that seems to be hovering in the air between us is “trust.”    Just trust and move into action, do the work, obey.

It is a given that I will not grasp it all.  You remind me that that is the very nature of the finite.  Maybe I didn’t exactly sign up for it, but it’s the game, and I’ve got no real choice but to play.   So even as I sweat these words out here, I’m telling you again that I am indeed getting on with it, knowing that I’ve asked You a thousand thousand times to guide me already, and I can tell by the look you’re giving me that You agreed (read “promised”)  a long time ago to do just that.   It’s not that You’re tired of this conversation, but I can tell there are some other things You’d sort of like us to discuss.

Like the actual work You’re hoping I get around to.

Today.

Okay, I’m listening.

Oh…You’ll talk to me while I work?

Got it.

What’s that?  Don’t bother with the amen business?   Okay, I’d just as soon keep the conversation open myself.

Hey, sorry about all that over-intellectualizing at the front end of the prayer.  I was just–what?  You’re used to it.  Just how you made me?   Good to know.

Oh, yeah, sorry…the work.

Let me get my notes…

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June 17, 2011 · 8:12 am

“Do the Work” by Steven Pressfield

Cover for "Do the Work", by Stephen Pressfield

Van Gogh's "Man with Hoe" from the cover of Steven Pressfield's "Do the Work"

 

What is it about people who speak with “authority” that can be so inspirational?  (Who does that make you think of?)

Almost two years ago, I wrote a blog post about the metaphor of war as it related to prayer. Read it here.  I questioned whether war was the best frame through which to approach life.  I reasoned that if I approached the big relationships in my life as if I was constantly in a battle, the whole thing would be skewed in ways I wouldn’t like.

Enter Steven Pressfield.  A few weeks ago, I read his powerhouse book The War of Art.  (My previous blog posts about it here and here.) As I reported, it knocked me out of my chair, yelling at me to get to work.  Yesterday, my copy of another book of Pressfield’s, the follow-up to The War of Art, showed up on my doorstep.  Do The Work yelled at me again, and once again, I fell asleep with dreams of changing everything dancing in my head.

I keep thinking about that little off-hand prayer I tossed out a couple of months ago as I was standing in Barnes and Noble.  ”Bring me a book.”

Anyway, back to the metaphor of war.  Remembering that I’ve never been crazy about the war metaphor, Pressfield’s assertion that “Resistance” is out to destroy us is compelling.  In Do The Work Pressfield goes so far as to equate “Resistance” with “evil”.   His idea that “Resistance” is “an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential” means that every time an idea for a project appears, if it is a good and noble idea, one that will demand the best of who you are, “Resistance” will answer that call, and seek not only to derail you, but to put you down permanently.   Then these little quotes on pages 59 and 60.

“There is an enemy.  There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us.”  

“It will kill you.  It will kill you like cancer.”  

“It’s aim is not to obstruct or to hamper or to impede. It’s aim is to kill. 

The big a-ha for me, which I think I knew but had not accepted, is this:  the war does not stop.  Ever.   And I turn to Romans 7, and find that Paul agrees.  ”So I find it to be a law (rule of action of my being) that when I want to do what is right and good, evil is ever present with me and I am subject to its ever-present demands.”   (Amplified Bible) This sounds very much like Pressfield’s idea that “Resistance” is elicited by the urge to do any great work.   To vow to “do the work” is to issue a call to arms not just to your own creative energy and spirit, but also to those forces marshalled against you.

Every day?

Every day.

From now on.

No wonder the line that Pressfield cites as the one that defines his life is:

“It is one thing to study war, and another to live the warrior’s life.”

I’m rethinking war as a frame for prayer…

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