Working my Way to Heaven

I want to pick up the thread from yesterday and spin it in another direction. The saving grace for me, in the matter of work, besides not having to depend on money arriving for my own efforts, has been working in the atrium, with young children, and having my own feelings about work shaped so much by Sofia Cavalletti’s Religious Potential of the Child. I could say all kinds of things about the work of the child, but the work of the adult is surely helped along by understanding what it is that the child is doing. This is one of the great tragedies of all the panicky results driven testing. Not that results aren’t important, they surely are. But when all the attention is on the end, and none on the process, which is where most children live–in the muck of the process–then everything will always feel off kilter and strange.

The fact is, the child is supposed to work. Not in a factory, nor in realms beyond himself. He is supposed to work hard at the business of being a child and learning the realm into which he will eventually have to work. His playing is work. His speaking is work. His chattering to you and to others is work. None of the things that he’s doing are random and unhelpful, to him anyway, however unhelpful they feel to you.

In a similar way, the striving of the adult–fumbling around with tasks that seem futile, repetitive, difficult–is training for the heavenly realm, where humility and meekness are all the rage. This is one of the exasperating things to me about Donald Trump. He has actually not succeeded in many of his enterprises. He has had to file for bankruptcy a lot. He has lost loads of money here and there. And while that is not particularly unusual, nor inherently evil, depending on how he bankrupted each venture–Failure isn’t evil–bragging about failure, and not learning anything from it, and brashly insisting that we are all going to be great anyway, seems to me the opposite of what should happen. If you have worked very hard, and failed, that failure isn’t a total loss. If you do the same task a trillion times, but each time you do it completely, you aren’t a failure. In both cases, if you gain humility and meekness, you are being made more comfortable and ready for heaven. Just as the child is being made more comfortable and ready for adulthood.

I always like to hum the hymn, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, to myself, on Sunday mornings, when I’m doing the same set of things I do every week, without variation or change or honor or success. I just do them, and I feel differently about them every time, depending on the level of my own rebellion, or my discouragement, or cheerful countenance. The work is just work. But how you do the work, and what you think the work is for make an immense amount of difference.

Whittier, who, apparently, didn’t believe in singing in church (and yet wrote one of England’s favorite hymns) was reacting to a frenzied, emotionally driven Vedic ritual which appeared to him to be exactly the opposite of what any of those people ought to have been doing. The religious experience, the frenzied seeking for the divine, wasn’t going to get them anywhere. Which is awfully prescient, because here we are, two hundred years later, still all about what we can derive from heady, self indulgent experience, and not so much about the calm, ordered out working of an obedient and selfless life.

The hymn is a prayer. He asks for forgiveness for all of humanity for being out of their minds. And then he asks for some things that nobody wants any more. He asks for reverence, for quiet, for silence, for eternity, for love, for order, for calm, and for beauty–all the things lacking in the ordinary person’s daily grind. I like to walk into my atrium and stand, still and quiet, and just look at the few number of things, and how beautiful they are. The children come in and have time to work with the Good Shepherd, the circle of the liturgical calendar, to paste stickers on a page to completion. There isn’t any shouting, any running from one thing to the next. The work that they do has been prepared in advance for then to walk in.

A right mind will be so helpful in the heavenly realm. If we don’t know how to think and be and listen and be still, we won’t be happy and comfortable there. The heat of desire, the strivings of this world are going to have to melt away in the catastrophic calm of heaven. It is foolishness itself for me to ignore that and rush around in a whirl of anxiety and frustration. Thank goodness Jesus prepares the work for me, and does the reclothing and the forgiving, so that even my failures can contribute to that celestial joy.