Work: Personal Disciplines II

I’ve been torn for some time, all along really, about work, both inside and outside the home. With all of the disciplines, drawn to theorizing as I am, I am not able to separate how I think the discipline should be thought of from how I actually experience it. My struggle is with how to get them to be one and the same.

With work this tension is the most obvious. On the one hand I believe one should perform gratefully, as God’s calling even, whatever work one finds oneself given to do. (I've found the clearest theological exposition of this view in the Benedictine and my own Reformed tradition.) So if I find myself working at an insurance company talking on the phone all day and chasing a toddler, rocking a screaming baby and washing dishes all night, then that’s what I should be happy doing. On the other hand maybe I have a real calling or gift in some other area that I should explore by going back to graduate school or seminary or at least by continually and intentionally developing whatever that gift might be in my 'free time'.

This might just be a tension I have to deal with but how I actually experience this does not feel healthy. I experience it by feeling resentful of the daily things I am given to do, the job that I should be more grateful for, the family that I should be more appreciative of and present to. This is obviously not a good situation, but how does one go beyond one's comfort zone and pursue a calling if it is not somehow away from one's normal, daily life. (Indeed, the very word calling seems to have the connotation of calling out of one life and to another life while the word gift seems to have the connotation of nearness and presence.)

Any possible way that I can imagine creating a life where my daily life and work involved my passion for education and the world of ideas, would necessarily involve years of sacrifice that I would ask of my family. How could I possibly do this just to satisfy my own selfish urges. Aren't I just ungrateful for all the comfort and ease I've been given and looking for even more by way of self-fulfillment? But then the other voice says: "Staying on the track you're on is just your allowing yourself to follow the path of the upwardly mobile, middle class. You're just justifying your trying to grasp the good life with the theology of everydayness." To which the other voice replies: "But really your describing your desire to pursue a career that involves your hobbies of thinking and reading and writing and calling it a vocation is just the theological justification of your own self-centeredness." Then the third voice comes in and says something to the effect of calling the whole interior monologue a sign of hyper-narcissism. The statement that "we should never have scruples about whether the state in life we have chosen is the most perfect or what sort of progress we are making. These are merely signs of excessive self-regard." [1] hits me like a punch in the gut.

It sounds trite but it really is anguishing to think about. I find it nearly impossible to compromise with myself. I feel like I either need to give up all desire for any change in my situation right now or I need to start changing it right now. The idea that I should be contented with my work for now with the possibility that another door will open down the road when the family situation allows it, doesn't satisfy any of the voices. It seems to validate the negative interpretations of all three.

How does one say that one way of life is right and another wrong when either judgement can be seen as self-serving? What does one do when one can't even discern one's own true motivations? How can the mind know the secret desires and motivations of the heart?

1. Prior Aelred, Singing God's Praises p. 304