Is Your Work Profane?

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Is your work profane?

Most of us yearn for a sense of fullness in our lives, a sense of flourishing in which two things are present. First, we’ve a sense that we’ve been delivered from those moments of confusion, melancholy, distance, and even isolation that sometimes make us feel utterly lost and alone in the wilderness. Second, in spite of the dailiness of life, we feel connected and moving towards a time in which all things are given eternal meaning, a destiny in which we rest in truth, beauty, justice, and joy.

Right now, we Christians only glimpse this our destiny in a fragmentary way, darkly, as through a mirror. But those glimpses are immensely important; they sustain us and direct us in our journey towards joy. And the name we give to such moments - and to the places and habits where we regularly encounter this fullness to which we are called - is “sacred.”  Sacred is the name for our windows to the holy. 

That which is not sacred we call profane (“outside the temple, not sacred”) or, increasingly, secular (“belonging to ‘worldly’ rather than sacred time”).

As Christians, we are called to make the secular sacred, to see our work as holy no matter our particular vocation.  When we discover that our work has a certain flatness about it, that our work is all too often filled with moments of confusion, melancholy, and despair, it may be that we have allowed our work to become profane. Work that is profane has been emptied of its vertical dimension; it is flat and so it flattens us.

If this describes you, I remind you of the warning given us by the great Anglican poet and priest, George Herbert, that we take care not “to labor anxiously, distrustfully, or profanely.”

"...they labor anxiously, when they overdo it, to the loss of their quiet and health; then distrustfully, when they doubt God’s providence, thinking that their own labor is the cause of their thriving, as if it were in their own hands to thrive or not to thrive.  Then they labor profanely, when they set themselves to work like brute beasts, never raising their thoughts to God, nor sanctifying their labor with daily prayer; when on the Lord’s day they do unnecessary servile work, or in time of divine service on other holy days, except in the cases of extreme poverty, and in the seasons of seedtime and harvest....[They] labor for wealth and maintenance as that they make not that the end of their labor, but that they may have wherewithal to serve God the better, and to do good deeds.”

Is your work profane? If so, I urge you to ponder seriously Herbert’s words, especially during this Lenten season, and to consider well how you might go about making the secular sacred in this important part of your life. For God gives all things that we might enjoy God.