A Reminder About Love at Work

After providing a series of specific recommendations to help us keep our spiritual life grounded at work, it's time for a reminder about love. Just love. Specifically love at work. 

If we want to be holy, if we devote time to a mix of spiritual exercises to keep ourselves firmly grounded, love must emerge as the main ingredient.

Let's apply love, in this context, to our work. We're not about loving the work itself. Some of us may love our work; others not so much. A few (and I hope it's only a few) may hate what they have to do for a living. If love at work doesn't entail loving our work, what does it mean?

Simply this: We must bring love to our work. Even if we hate what we're doing right now, we can still bring love to it. Indeed we must.

"Must" because we want to super-naturalize our work (you do, right?). We super-naturalize our work by lifting it up with our mind and heart and offering it to God everyday. 

When we say we work for His greater glory, that's part of how we super-naturalize our work. 

If we patiently bear any difficulties, temptations, and suffering that may come to us during the work day, that's  part of how we super-naturalize our work.

How we perform each task is part of how we super-naturalize our work. If we do so fervently and with exactness, we elevate our work above it's practical use to a spiritual purpose.

But all of that can only happen if we start with love.

Without love, we run the danger of offering Our Lord a tasteless, even bitter morsel when we tell Him we offer everything to Him for His greater glory. As long as we're not lukewarm in our offering, it's likely He won't spit it out when offered. But wouldn't it be better to offer something tastier?

Love will be the "secret sauce" that will make all our work a tastier offering.

If you're already putting all your love into your work, bravo! You get it.

If you're not putting your love into your work, or aren't sure whether you are, here's a simple way to be sure you are: Start with the most rote, menial tasks you typically do without giving them much thought. 

My rote, trivial tasks come up almost everyday. Sometimes I have to download data or documents into files and organize them. There's a set protocol for this so all I have to do is follow it. While not horrible work, it's pretty mindless. Then there's my weekly Business Review. (I'm a sole proprietor.) With rare exceptions, I just follow my written outline and make sure I cover all relevant items like: enter revenue and expenses, check credit card, deposit checks, pay bills, review weekly tasks for completion, create next week's list, etc. 90% of this is repetitive and, frankly, boring. I could almost sleepwalk my way through it if it weren't important to be aware of how the business is doing on an ongoing basis (the 10% that's requires attention).

Whatever your rote, menial tasks might be, here's some input from 3 spiritual writers we've referenced many times over the years. They'll help us understand what it means to put love into our work a lot better than my attempt;

Fr. De Caussade writes: “To achieve the height of holiness, people must realize that all they count as trivial and worthless is what can make them holy … consider your life and you will see it consists of countless trifling actions. Yet God is quite satisfied with them, for doing them as they should be done is the part we have to play in our striving for perfection.”

As St. Therese once told a lay sister: “Your life is one that is humble and little, but remember that nothing is small in the eyes of God. Do all you do with love.”

And as Abbot Marmion wrote: “Try, my dear child, to do all for love. God is Love, and He accepts the least thing done for love’s sake. Love is like the philosopher’s stone which turns all that it touches into gold.”

Note the words: trivial, worthless, humble, little, the least thing. With love, we can turn all of these into spiritual gold, as Abbot Marmion puts it. 

We'll have more to say about love at work next time...