Keeping the Easter Spirit at Work, Part 2
We're talking about keeping the Easter spirit at work. We have risen with Christ, but risen to what? To the life - a new life - that He, Our Lord and Savior, intended for us, His creatures. Last time Archbishop James Leen told us about this new life:
Do you remember the dawn of online shopping. (Yes, there was a time when shopping online didn't exist.) When it first appeared people spent inordinate amounts of time at their computers at work doing their personal shopping. It became a problem. It seemed like the problem was somehow the result of technology. But it wasn't. It was simply people doing what they knew they shouldn't: filling up time that they should have spent on work on non-pressing personal matters.
It became such a problem that companies developed ways to monitor individual's activity. I remember that too. People howled that their "privacy" was being invaded with the new monitoring software. (Imagine there was a time people thought their online activity was actually private. How things have changed!) Of course, had they controlled themselves in the first place, perhaps such software wouldn't have been necessary.
If this seems trivial it's not. It's simply an example of an attitude that results in certain behaviors at work. But even more important than keeping our minds on our work is how we work. Remember, most of us spend the majority of our waking hours engaged in some sort of work. And what we do and how we do it counts as part of our Christian life. Not simply our work life.
To kick off some serious thinking about all this we turn to Rev. George Zimpfer. Here's a starter:
The Christian life consists in actions which reflect the spirit of Christ, nay, more, in actions that incarnate, as it were, the spirit of Christ. Jesus must, by our union with Him, by our elimination of self in favor of Him, be permitted to perpetuate, in some measure, His life in us...Now let's drill down and look more at the details of our Christian life. As we do, remember that living as a Christian, reflecting the spirit of Christ, applies to every bit of our lives, including our work. While most of us know we're not just "Sunday" Catholics, some of us have a tendency to bifurcate our lives into "work" and "personal." Sometimes that's a necessary, practical distinction. We don't - or shouldn't - spend our time at work excessively on purely personal matters. So we don't constantly talk to or text our family and friends during the time we should be spending on matters related to our work.
Do you remember the dawn of online shopping. (Yes, there was a time when shopping online didn't exist.) When it first appeared people spent inordinate amounts of time at their computers at work doing their personal shopping. It became a problem. It seemed like the problem was somehow the result of technology. But it wasn't. It was simply people doing what they knew they shouldn't: filling up time that they should have spent on work on non-pressing personal matters.
It became such a problem that companies developed ways to monitor individual's activity. I remember that too. People howled that their "privacy" was being invaded with the new monitoring software. (Imagine there was a time people thought their online activity was actually private. How things have changed!) Of course, had they controlled themselves in the first place, perhaps such software wouldn't have been necessary.
If this seems trivial it's not. It's simply an example of an attitude that results in certain behaviors at work. But even more important than keeping our minds on our work is how we work. Remember, most of us spend the majority of our waking hours engaged in some sort of work. And what we do and how we do it counts as part of our Christian life. Not simply our work life.
To kick off some serious thinking about all this we turn to Rev. George Zimpfer. Here's a starter:
...the life we live is our greatest prayer. And that life does not consist so much in knowledge or activity as it does in knowing how to use what we have learned, in our mental attitude toward our activities, our interpretation of them. If we would be truly spiritual, we must seek to fashion our own life upon that of Jesus, to think and act and speak with Him as Pattern and Guide. Our true life, as the Kingdom of God, is within us. What we do and how we do it are simply expressions of this spirituality.This kicks our discussion up a notch. It takes us beyond "doing our best" at work. He's saying we need to "fashion our life upon that of Jesus." He's not saying we should do this when we're at church or at home with our families, or when we're helping out a friend. It encompasses every part of our lives, and that means, of course, our work life too. We'll have more from Rev. Zimpfer next time...
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