Shaking Off The World at Work

By now our Engine of Enterprise has fired up after the extended Christmas-New Year's respite or perhaps complete break. As we bury ourselves in our worldly work, it's time to shake off the world.

Shake off the world? How do we, immersed as we are in our work, shake off the world - the very place where we ply our trade? Let's consider return to a full-speed-ahead work day after our glorious time off - or mostly off - from work.

On this end, getting our little Engine of Enterprise usually requires a couple of pulls on the starter. You know how that goes if you work with various machines for domestic chores - things like mowers, string trimmers, or, more appropriate to the current season, snow throwers. Sometimes you've got to pull more than once. And sometimes the machine coughs or rumbles a bit before it starts firing away.

And so it has been this year again. The Engine of Enterprise settled into its "long winter's nap" at Christmas and was a bit reluctant to rise up and face that Task List yet again. But rise up it did. And fired up it is now.

Hearing our engine humming and applying ourselves to the next task at hand can take up all our attention and effort. And in that attention and effort, it's easy to "leave" the supernatural world - the real world - and immerse ourselves in this world - the natural world. Indeed this might be necessary at times when we need to focus in a particularly intense fashion.

So be it.

But it's not always necessary to be so immersed. We Catholic men at work strive to find little pockets of time - even throughout our busiest days - to turn our minds and hearts to God. A simple acknowledgement of His Presence, perhaps an aspiration or two, helps us break away even if only for a moment.

It's important that we do. For most of us, it may be the primary method for "shaking off" the world even as we work in the world.

But why shake off the world?

It's simple really. We were created to know, love, and serve God in this world; and to share eternal happiness with Him in the next - in Heaven. Our work serves this primary purpose of our life. It is not the center - or should not be - of our attention and effort every day.

Sure, it likely takes up more time than most other thoughts, words, and deeds on a typical work day. But that's just the price we pay for being the Children of Adam and Eve. The Garden is a distant memory now. Upon being expelled from the Garden, they had to toil in a fashion that they did not while in their earthly paradise. The sweat of work, the exhaustion from work, even the seeking of work to earn a decent living come from Original Sin. 

Work itself, on the other hand, was not the result of the Fall. Work was and remained a basic component of living. While it's hard to imagine what work in the Garden of Paradise might have been like, we just need to know that work itself isn't part of the a punishing consequences of that First Sin, of that rejection of God's commandment not to eat of the fruit of the Tree.

We're not shaking off our work. We're shaking off our attachment to the world - that natural world which comes packaged with flesh and the devil. In shaking off our attachment, we can create a separation, one that allows the light of the supernatural to filter through to our souls, ultimately to our hearts and minds. That filtering purifies our thoughts, words, and deeds such that they become a more perfect offering.

Work itself, becomes a pure - or at least more pure - offering, if we can push the world away, bit by bit, and raise our eyes to Heaven, our ultimate destination.

Okay, so it's an ideal, this shaking off of the world. But perhaps it's only an ideal because we've not taken the first steps. Let's all try to take those steps in our own way.