Essays
The Work of Being Human (2004) Barbara Brown Taylor
A couple of years ago I consciously gave up asking the one question that most working people ask within the first five minutes of meeting someone new. "And what do you do?" I gave it up not only because I was tired of what happened when I answered it myself, but also because I had become aware of my own motives for asking it. Nine times out of ten, I was looking for a shortcut to the truth about the person in front of me. I was trying to decide whether to pursue a conversation, and I was doing so by using a tool that operated on bald stereotypes about human worth.
If someone said, "I am a lawyer," then I assumed I had gained significant insight into that person's character. But if anyone had ever said, "I operate heavy machinery," then I might have realized how limited my insights really were. My question was designed for middle- to upper-class, educated professionals like myself who were employed for pay at jobs we had chosen, people so identified with our work that we responded to questions about our doing with answers about our being. "I am a lawyer." So of course I could not hear how the same question exposed those who did not fit into my categories. Asking them what they did for a living was like asking them what caste they were.
Yet even within my own caste I sensed the intimidation in my question. People between jobs dropped their eyes as they answered it, speaking with practiced confidence about what the future might hold without ever using the word "unemployed." Retired people pedaled in the opposite direction, giving me a much clearer picture of what they had done in the past than what occupied them in the present. Most touching of all were the stay-at-home mothers and fathers who described what they did each day in terms of what their busy, accomplished children did, although a few felt compelled to tell me what they planned to do once their children were grown. Watching them struggle to prove their worth, I decided that I did not want to fuel that effort any more.
No one ever objected to my question, which seems strange to me now. No one ever said, "Thanks for asking, but my work is not the most important thing about me," or "What do I do? Well, I give a lot of time to the Humane Society. What do you do?" Everyone felt obliged to answer the question in one straightforward way or another, as I myself did, which tells me how few of us doubt the premise that we are what we do. Our work, or lack of work, is the most public marker of our identity. What we do announces who we are to the vast majority of people who will never know us well. While this will always be better news for those who enjoy their work than for those who endure it, no one escapes the pinch of the identification process.
When I was a full-time parish minister, I sometimes misrepresented what I did — mainly on airplanes and on vacation — in order to get a little rest. I had learned the hard way that almost no one is neutral on the subject of organized religion, and that whether they were pro or con, most people assumed that an ordained person like myself needed to hear what they had to say. When someone asked me what I did, I tried to approach the truth without actually telling it. "I'm a social worker," I would say when I really needed a nap, or "I'm in public relations."
While such answers generally cut down on conversation time, they also caused me severe attacks of vocational dysphoria. I felt like a bigamist, like a nun in a business suit. Part of the dissonance was because being a minister really is who I am and not only what I do, but another part of it was because I am attached to the idea of doing work that others recognize as meaningful. I noticed that I never said, "I stay home with small children" on an airplane, or "I am a sanitation worker for the City of Atlanta," even though both of those occupations are essential to the ongoing life of the planet. Instead, my answers stayed within the range of white-collar professions requiring a college degree, none of which rang the bell of meaningfulness for me as well as what I actually did.
Like many people my age, I was raised to believe that I could, and in all likelihood would, do great things. I would do well in school. I would go to a good college. I would not just "find work" after graduation. I would find myself in my work by entering a profession that made full use of my gifts. I would excel at whatever I chose to do, and I would be highly prized for doing it. In my family's value system, high pay was optional. The point was to realize my potential by doing work that mattered, because I mattered and because I could.
That was the household gospel, preached chiefly by my father and embodied by him as well. The first in his family to earn a college degree, he went on to become a college professor of psychology and then a psychotherapist in private practice. He loved his work as much as anyone I have ever known. When he came home after dark just in time for supper, his face shone. He buzzed with more energy than he had possessed at breakfast, and while he never dwelled on the details of what he did, I could see for myself how it gave him life.
While my mother freed him to do this by staying home with three small children, she supported the same gospel. Her own mother had dearly wished for her to become a doctor or a lawyer, and although she did not fulfill this wish herself, she passed it on to her daughters as stealthily as the vitamins in her breast milk. Leaving the overt coaching to my father, she stood where we could see her when we lined up for races we did not think we could run. "You can do it," her face said. "Go ahead and try." Sometimes we excelled and sometimes we did not, but either way she was there at the end, offering a warm bath and a nice supper.
I drove away from all of this one hot August day with my car packed to the roof for my first year at Yale Divinity School. I started crying the moment I saw my brown dog in my rear view mirror, wagging his tail more and more slowly as I pulled out of the driveway in Atlanta. I did not stop crying until somewhere north of Baltimore, but as soon as I saw the Gothic spires and stone gargoyles of downtown New Haven, I perked right up. Clearly, my life was about to begin. I was about to embark on meaningful work, or at least the prelude to meaningful work, and I could not wait to get started.
As is often the case, the journey had more turns in it than I had planned. After seminary I worked as a camp counselor, a cocktail waitress, a secretary, a fund-raiser and a hospital chaplain while I worked out my relationship with the Episcopal Church. That took years longer than I expected, but when I was finally ordained there was not one cloud in my sky. After seven years of higher education and several more of supervised ministry I had found work that mattered, work that made full use of my gifts. I was ready to find myself a priest in Christ's Church.
Anyone who has ever attended an ordination in the Episcopal Church knows how much such occasions can resemble royal coronations, so I was somewhat disappointed to find myself sitting in a spare office the following week facing the recruitment of Sunday school teachers for the fall. That, and studying for a chauffeur's license so that I could drive the rental van on the youth group's summer mission trip to Navajoland, plus working up the monthly rota for clergy visits to local nursing homes. I did not doubt that these were all important ministries. They simply did not involve sitting in a fragrant leather chair reading theology, or preaching from a high brass pulpit, or meeting with troubled parishioners grateful for my counsel, all of which had figured prominently in my fantasies of life as a clergy person.
I know enough high-achievers in other professions to accept that there was nothing unique about my initial letdown. Like me, they all had visions of what life would finally be like when they arrived at their vocational destinations, especially if their jobs promised them some degree of self-fulfillment. Those whose work involved serving high ideals such as justice, truth, love or health often had the farthest to fall. Like me, they set out to find themselves in their work and ended up losing themselves instead. They successfully found rewarding work that called them to give themselves away.
I suppose that this could be seen as a problem, particularly in a culture that promotes work as the main avenue to getting what you want, whether that cashes out as salary, status or power. But in other times and places, work has been regarded as a spiritual discipline, as the most available path to self-transcendence for ordinary people, no matter what they happen to do for a living. Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century monk who found his vocation in the monastery kitchen, discovered that he could flip pancakes for the love of God. Thich Nhat Hanh, a twenty-first-century monk of a different order, travels the world teaching people how close they are to peace every moment of their lives. All we are missing is the ability to wash a dish, eat an orange, take a breath, or meet another human being without thinking that we should be doing something else instead, he says. All we are missing is the presence of mind that opens the heart.
Work is good for all sorts of things. Work brings us into community with other human beings. Work gives us the opportunity to do one thing well. Work offers us a role to play in the grand drama of life. Work enables us to provide for ourselves and for our families. With presence of mind, work may also become the means of finding ourselves by giving ourselves away, which can happen whether we are stacking cans of Del Monte green beans at the grocery store or preparing to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
If you want to experiment with this path, then all you have to do is to focus on the task at hand without worrying about the results. All you have to do is to see whoever happens to be standing right in front of you as the reason you got up this morning — not because she may buy something from you, or sell you something, or otherwise serve as a partner in some transaction that is beneficial to you, but because she is a human being and so are you. All you have to do is care enough for what you are doing that you stop caring for a moment what time it is, or how good you look, or whether you are getting what you meant to get out of it in the first place. Experiment with this long enough and you too may find yourself in the place of self-forgetfulness that saints throughout the ages have called divine bliss.
There is brutal work too, of course, work that robs workers of their humanity right along with those of us who benefit from their labor, and part of our work on this earth is to balance the economic scales. Doing that may even help us recognize that the meaning of work is far more than the pay any of us receives for doing it. While a few of us are lucky enough to find meaning in the work we are paid for, a far greater number of people find meaning in the work they do after their paid work is done. They lose themselves digging in the vegetable garden, coaching the little league team, building houses with Habitat for Humanity or playing in a bluegrass band. Other workers receive no pay at all for the work they do, unless you count the often-insufficient gratitude of the extended families and communities who could not survive without them.
Speaking confessionally, it seems to me that there is room for North Americans like myself to embrace more of this variety in the concept of meaningful work, even as we experiment with the notion that we might have more to gain by giving more of ourselves away. What any of us does for a living is not nearly as important as the way we do it, including the way we treat those who labor along with us. The true meaning of work is not in the "what" but in the "who" and the "how." If we could learn to believe this, then we might enlarge the circle of those whose work we deem valuable. We might even ease up on ourselves, discovering how many kinds of jobs are worth doing once we change our reasons for doing them. While we may never have as many choices as we would like, the meaning of our work remains ours to decide.
Meanwhile, I have stopped lying on airplanes. When someone asks me what I do, I answer the question directly. "I teach religion," I say. While this answer draws almost as much fire as "I am a minister" once did, I no longer participate in the illusion that my work is any more or less meaningful than that of anyone else in coach class. "And you?" I ask back, at least when I am willing to forego a nap. "What feeds you? How do you spend your days?"
Some people hear what I am asking and others do not, but the important thing is to care enough for the conversation that I lose myself in it for a while, forgetting everything but the neighbor who has been given to me in this moment between where we came from and where we are going. For this is the work of being human.
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The Work of Being Human (2004) Barbara Brown Taylor
A couple of years ago I consciously gave up asking the one question that most working people ask within the first five minutes of meeting someone new. "And what do you do?" I gave it up not only because I was tired of what happened when I answered it myself, but also because I had become aware of my own motives for asking it. Nine times out of ten, I was looking for a shortcut to the truth about the person in front of me. I was trying to decide whether to pursue a conversation, and I was doing so by using a tool that operated on bald stereotypes about human worth.
If someone said, "I am a lawyer," then I assumed I had gained significant insight into that person's character. But if anyone had ever said, "I operate heavy machinery," then I might have realized how limited my insights really were. My question was designed for middle- to upper-class, educated professionals like myself who were employed for pay at jobs we had chosen, people so identified with our work that we responded to questions about our doing with answers about our being. "I am a lawyer." So of course I could not hear how the same question exposed those who did not fit into my categories. Asking them what they did for a living was like asking them what caste they were.
Yet even within my own caste I sensed the intimidation in my question. People between jobs dropped their eyes as they answered it, speaking with practiced confidence about what the future might hold without ever using the word "unemployed." Retired people pedaled in the opposite direction, giving me a much clearer picture of what they had done in the past than what occupied them in the present. Most touching of all were the stay-at-home mothers and fathers who described what they did each day in terms of what their busy, accomplished children did, although a few felt compelled to tell me what they planned to do once their children were grown. Watching them struggle to prove their worth, I decided that I did not want to fuel that effort any more.
No one ever objected to my question, which seems strange to me now. No one ever said, "Thanks for asking, but my work is not the most important thing about me," or "What do I do? Well, I give a lot of time to the Humane Society. What do you do?" Everyone felt obliged to answer the question in one straightforward way or another, as I myself did, which tells me how few of us doubt the premise that we are what we do. Our work, or lack of work, is the most public marker of our identity. What we do announces who we are to the vast majority of people who will never know us well. While this will always be better news for those who enjoy their work than for those who endure it, no one escapes the pinch of the identification process.
When I was a full-time parish minister, I sometimes misrepresented what I did — mainly on airplanes and on vacation — in order to get a little rest. I had learned the hard way that almost no one is neutral on the subject of organized religion, and that whether they were pro or con, most people assumed that an ordained person like myself needed to hear what they had to say. When someone asked me what I did, I tried to approach the truth without actually telling it. "I'm a social worker," I would say when I really needed a nap, or "I'm in public relations."
While such answers generally cut down on conversation time, they also caused me severe attacks of vocational dysphoria. I felt like a bigamist, like a nun in a business suit. Part of the dissonance was because being a minister really is who I am and not only what I do, but another part of it was because I am attached to the idea of doing work that others recognize as meaningful. I noticed that I never said, "I stay home with small children" on an airplane, or "I am a sanitation worker for the City of Atlanta," even though both of those occupations are essential to the ongoing life of the planet. Instead, my answers stayed within the range of white-collar professions requiring a college degree, none of which rang the bell of meaningfulness for me as well as what I actually did.
Like many people my age, I was raised to believe that I could, and in all likelihood would, do great things. I would do well in school. I would go to a good college. I would not just "find work" after graduation. I would find myself in my work by entering a profession that made full use of my gifts. I would excel at whatever I chose to do, and I would be highly prized for doing it. In my family's value system, high pay was optional. The point was to realize my potential by doing work that mattered, because I mattered and because I could.
That was the household gospel, preached chiefly by my father and embodied by him as well. The first in his family to earn a college degree, he went on to become a college professor of psychology and then a psychotherapist in private practice. He loved his work as much as anyone I have ever known. When he came home after dark just in time for supper, his face shone. He buzzed with more energy than he had possessed at breakfast, and while he never dwelled on the details of what he did, I could see for myself how it gave him life.
While my mother freed him to do this by staying home with three small children, she supported the same gospel. Her own mother had dearly wished for her to become a doctor or a lawyer, and although she did not fulfill this wish herself, she passed it on to her daughters as stealthily as the vitamins in her breast milk. Leaving the overt coaching to my father, she stood where we could see her when we lined up for races we did not think we could run. "You can do it," her face said. "Go ahead and try." Sometimes we excelled and sometimes we did not, but either way she was there at the end, offering a warm bath and a nice supper.
I drove away from all of this one hot August day with my car packed to the roof for my first year at Yale Divinity School. I started crying the moment I saw my brown dog in my rear view mirror, wagging his tail more and more slowly as I pulled out of the driveway in Atlanta. I did not stop crying until somewhere north of Baltimore, but as soon as I saw the Gothic spires and stone gargoyles of downtown New Haven, I perked right up. Clearly, my life was about to begin. I was about to embark on meaningful work, or at least the prelude to meaningful work, and I could not wait to get started.
As is often the case, the journey had more turns in it than I had planned. After seminary I worked as a camp counselor, a cocktail waitress, a secretary, a fund-raiser and a hospital chaplain while I worked out my relationship with the Episcopal Church. That took years longer than I expected, but when I was finally ordained there was not one cloud in my sky. After seven years of higher education and several more of supervised ministry I had found work that mattered, work that made full use of my gifts. I was ready to find myself a priest in Christ's Church.
Anyone who has ever attended an ordination in the Episcopal Church knows how much such occasions can resemble royal coronations, so I was somewhat disappointed to find myself sitting in a spare office the following week facing the recruitment of Sunday school teachers for the fall. That, and studying for a chauffeur's license so that I could drive the rental van on the youth group's summer mission trip to Navajoland, plus working up the monthly rota for clergy visits to local nursing homes. I did not doubt that these were all important ministries. They simply did not involve sitting in a fragrant leather chair reading theology, or preaching from a high brass pulpit, or meeting with troubled parishioners grateful for my counsel, all of which had figured prominently in my fantasies of life as a clergy person.
I know enough high-achievers in other professions to accept that there was nothing unique about my initial letdown. Like me, they all had visions of what life would finally be like when they arrived at their vocational destinations, especially if their jobs promised them some degree of self-fulfillment. Those whose work involved serving high ideals such as justice, truth, love or health often had the farthest to fall. Like me, they set out to find themselves in their work and ended up losing themselves instead. They successfully found rewarding work that called them to give themselves away.
I suppose that this could be seen as a problem, particularly in a culture that promotes work as the main avenue to getting what you want, whether that cashes out as salary, status or power. But in other times and places, work has been regarded as a spiritual discipline, as the most available path to self-transcendence for ordinary people, no matter what they happen to do for a living. Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century monk who found his vocation in the monastery kitchen, discovered that he could flip pancakes for the love of God. Thich Nhat Hanh, a twenty-first-century monk of a different order, travels the world teaching people how close they are to peace every moment of their lives. All we are missing is the ability to wash a dish, eat an orange, take a breath, or meet another human being without thinking that we should be doing something else instead, he says. All we are missing is the presence of mind that opens the heart.
Work is good for all sorts of things. Work brings us into community with other human beings. Work gives us the opportunity to do one thing well. Work offers us a role to play in the grand drama of life. Work enables us to provide for ourselves and for our families. With presence of mind, work may also become the means of finding ourselves by giving ourselves away, which can happen whether we are stacking cans of Del Monte green beans at the grocery store or preparing to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
If you want to experiment with this path, then all you have to do is to focus on the task at hand without worrying about the results. All you have to do is to see whoever happens to be standing right in front of you as the reason you got up this morning — not because she may buy something from you, or sell you something, or otherwise serve as a partner in some transaction that is beneficial to you, but because she is a human being and so are you. All you have to do is care enough for what you are doing that you stop caring for a moment what time it is, or how good you look, or whether you are getting what you meant to get out of it in the first place. Experiment with this long enough and you too may find yourself in the place of self-forgetfulness that saints throughout the ages have called divine bliss.
There is brutal work too, of course, work that robs workers of their humanity right along with those of us who benefit from their labor, and part of our work on this earth is to balance the economic scales. Doing that may even help us recognize that the meaning of work is far more than the pay any of us receives for doing it. While a few of us are lucky enough to find meaning in the work we are paid for, a far greater number of people find meaning in the work they do after their paid work is done. They lose themselves digging in the vegetable garden, coaching the little league team, building houses with Habitat for Humanity or playing in a bluegrass band. Other workers receive no pay at all for the work they do, unless you count the often-insufficient gratitude of the extended families and communities who could not survive without them.
Speaking confessionally, it seems to me that there is room for North Americans like myself to embrace more of this variety in the concept of meaningful work, even as we experiment with the notion that we might have more to gain by giving more of ourselves away. What any of us does for a living is not nearly as important as the way we do it, including the way we treat those who labor along with us. The true meaning of work is not in the "what" but in the "who" and the "how." If we could learn to believe this, then we might enlarge the circle of those whose work we deem valuable. We might even ease up on ourselves, discovering how many kinds of jobs are worth doing once we change our reasons for doing them. While we may never have as many choices as we would like, the meaning of our work remains ours to decide.
Meanwhile, I have stopped lying on airplanes. When someone asks me what I do, I answer the question directly. "I teach religion," I say. While this answer draws almost as much fire as "I am a minister" once did, I no longer participate in the illusion that my work is any more or less meaningful than that of anyone else in coach class. "And you?" I ask back, at least when I am willing to forego a nap. "What feeds you? How do you spend your days?"
Some people hear what I am asking and others do not, but the important thing is to care enough for the conversation that I lose myself in it for a while, forgetting everything but the neighbor who has been given to me in this moment between where we came from and where we are going. For this is the work of being human.
