LA MUERTE DE ENRIQUE GUILLERMO PÉREZ MORA “EL TENEBRAS”.

If the PSW is called to seek God in the world outside the church, then that clearly includes the workplace. However, I want to go beyond affirming the PSW’s vocation to seek God in people or in places, and to consider their vocation to seek God through their secular work.

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One of the CIG was ordained priest in her early twenties, but later decided to exercise her priestly vocation part-time in the church, and part-time through her own business; the other three (myself included) had been ordained towards the end of successful secular careers. Similarly, for four of the interviewees, ordination did not present them with an alternative to their pre-existing secular work, but would be something they needed to understand as part of a vocation which included that secular work. The other two interviewees had started out as FTSs, leaving parish ministry to become PSWs because they came to see their priestly vocation as including secular work. One of these was still in full-time secular work at the time of our interview; the other had decided to return to full-time parish ministry for the final five years of his working life after many years in secular work.

It became clear early in the CIG discussions that our secular work mattered to us all, so during the morning I spent with each interviewee, I asked them specifically about their secular work: what they did, for how long they had been doing it, why they had not given it up for full-time parish ministry. Answering, one of the teachers told me an anecdote about an occasion when she was having lunch with her husband in a pub, which she repeated in the recorded interview:

… this man came up to me and he said, ‘I'm in the Merchant Navy now,

because of you. … You were so strict, and you made me work and I got that B, and without it I’d have never been able to do what I always wanted’. And that kind of thing happens to me, not a lot, not every time I go out, but enough times for me to feel, well, I did it right.

She believed that her work as a teacher mattered, because

… a good education allowed a person to become the person God ordained them to be. I mean, ordained in its widest sense – God designed them to be, made them to be. … And I drove myself as a teacher to enable as many children as possible to achieve their potential.

As another interviewee, also employed in a ‘caring’ profession, observed, it is easy to see this kind of work as part of the PSW vocation, but interviewees, whose work was not so obviously understood in this way, also affirmed their sense of their secular work being part of their vocation. One interviewee, who summed up his work as being a bureaucrat, took pride in being good at his job, pleased that a line manager, in an annual appraisal, had said to him “you didn’t accept the call to be a priest in the church of God to be a bureaucrat, but it doesn’t stop you being good at it”. Later he reaffirmed that “for me it’s [being a priest] the core and I happen to be a bureaucrat. But I think it’s a good way at the moment of using my God-given skills”.

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Another interviewee emphasised: “you have to do a decent job of whatever it is you’re being paid for”. In her follow-up interview, she expressed very clearly “the feeling that your work is valuable to God” in and for itself. She saw an important part of what she does in the church as “valuing what everybody does, it’s not just the work you do for the church, it’s not for being the church treasurer, or running the Sunday School, or the coffee rota”. In her first interview, she had talked about a person who ran the coffee rota seeing that as her service to God, but ignoring all that she did in her job as a hairdresser: this was not simply about chatting or listening to her clients, but that, by doing her work well: “she’s making them feel better because they look a little bit better”, which is “a hugely important service to other people”. The interviewee who worked in health and safety talked about the importance of what he did because “it looks after people’s wellbeing”, continuing that he was very thorough, and would not let things go. Later he talked about an occasion when

… they asked me to close their [IT] systems down – bring it down to auditable level. I had a few directors a bit upset with me, because I took lots of privileges away from them, but they accepted it in the end.

Without exception, the interviewees all saw their work as important for its own sake, as well as when it contributed to people’s wellbeing. As one put it, “if one suspects it doesn’t matter, then you lose a grip on the importance of the whole of your work”. He then questioned whether his faith made him better at his job than his secular

colleagues, a question which I considered in the narrative ‘does it make any difference to how we do our jobs?’ (section 7.2). He concluded that it would be arrogant to say that it did, and, of course, he would never know if he would have been worse at his job if he were not a priest, or a person of faith, and so: “I think the two eyes, where one says, yeah, it’s important; and the other, no, it doesn’t make me better, are both important to me”.

The interviewees’ view that their secular work mattered in and for itself, and that doing it well was an important way in which they realised their vocations, helps to confirm my feeling that work is a primary theological category (section 6.3). As Sayers (1947, p. 47) wrote, work is a way in which human nature finds “its proper exercise and delight and so fulfils itself to the glory of God”, or as Laborem exercens (John Paul II, 1981, para 3, original italics) put it: “human work is a key, probably the essential key” to making “life more human”. Whether this is co-creation with God, as Laborem exercens claimed, or simply engagement with God in God’s work (the missio Dei), does not appear to me be the fundamental issue, which is that this world, all of it, is part of God’s creation, and so part of what God wills to redeem (cf. section 6.4). Not all work is good work, however, and this is the subject of the next section.

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Seeking God in the mess

As one of the interviewees put it, “God in the mass on Sunday, God in the mess on Monday”. This was said in the context of describing how she saw her vocation as different from that of the FTS:

I think it’s partly because people who have spent most of their life in full-time parish-based ministry simply don’t have the same experiences, which have been gained in contexts that they may have been somehow or other trained to regard as slightly iffy. I mean, all this management stuff and money, and decisions, and risk-taking and so on, and that’s not what, that’s not what you’re about if you’re a member of the clergy. That’s messy stuff, somehow.

A little later she commented that

… there may be a feeling that secular management is nasty, and sacks people, and disciplines people, and things, and if we are – I caricature to a certain extent – but if we’re nice, holy people, we don’t behave in that sort of way, we have a different way of going about things.

Another interviewee expressed a sense of frustration:

… that they [FTSs] compartmentalise their life a lot, and they don’t recognise that the world is a bit more messy than it used to be. And for things like

protected sabbath time, I’m in absolute agreement – in absolute agreement that we should all have a day off a week, and I accept that, and I think that’s great – I wish I did every – but when you come across stumbling blocks, like, no, I can’t do that, it’s my day off …

Yet another interviewee described doing some work with a group of FTSs working in “some of the tough, outer estates around the cities of Britain” who are “fantastic, they’re deeply interested in their parishes and the people, in the culture, and so on”. He found, however, that “when we moved from reflection to action, something kind of drains out of the conversation”. His point was that in his job he has to identify a problem, decide what is to be done about it, by whom, by when, and how “will we know we’ve done it?”, and “so the work ethic is different”.

As the excerpts above show, the interviewees felt that the FTS is to some extent protected from many of the issues with which the PSW has to grapple. Although one commented that it was “a bit of a doddle” to “join the dots” to see how one might seek God in professions such as teaching and counselling, dedicating one’s “working life … to helping other people grow”, he also talked about an MSE he had known who

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was a secretary to a small building firm: “maybe a building site is a good place to spend time, but you have to discover why”. Later, he mentioned an occasion when his wife, who was a school teacher at the time, was

… doing some work on the workplace, and she realised after a bit that there was a look of incomprehension, because she was actually reflecting on her own experience of working as a school teacher. But she’d got a class of kids, all of whose fathers were employed on the track at Chrysler, where the question why are you here, and there was only one answer, it pays better than anywhere else, but that it’s no way to spend time really …

The alienation of work was an issue for another interviewee, specifically the situation of

… a guy who used to help me with the youth club, who was a machine operator, lathe operator. He said, ‘I’ve worked there for’, I can’t remember, thirty odd years. ‘I have never known what it is I am making. I simply make a part to the drawing, and I don’t know what it is, or what it’ll be used for.’

The interviewee continued:

… we had someone – we were very short of church wardens, and someone who always came to church with his family said, ‘Do you have to be confirmed to be a church warden?’, and well, yeah, yes, you do, actually. He said, ‘Well, I can’t do it then. I’d be very happy to be church warden, but if I got confirmed, I would have to take seriously the ethics of what I do in weapons research, Monday to Friday. And I have a mortgage to pay, and I have kids to support, and it’s a question I dare not let myself ask …

It was issues like these which led to his leaving full-time parish ministry to pursue a vocation as a PSW, because “it was work questions people were bringing into their engagement with the church, and we didn’t know how to deal with them”, “it was about people’s working lives”. Involved in research about the experience of people who had gone into their professions, believing them to be part of their Christian vocation, he discovered that when they experienced problems, such as “bankers saying ‘I thought my job was to manage money responsibly, and now I am simply there to sell financial products to people who often will be disadvantaged by buying them’”, that the responses of the participants’ churches fell into three categories:

One, is I’ll pray for you; one is, why don’t you get another job; and the other is blank incomprehension, that was the gamut of response from the ministers, the clergy.

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As far as he was concerned, the church had totally failed to connect with the very real problems which lay Christians encounter in their workplaces, because work is not always good. Because of that, the workplace is the place the PSW is called to be:

It was tough. And, in a way, I think one of the things I enjoyed about the

[workplace], was working with the tough bits because that way we were working with the real, and, in some sense, that we can't be so precious about our place, that we have always to be pure … [we have to] be happy to get our hands dirty, or else who will?

For me, it is an article of faith that God cares for all creation, and so there can be no workplaces or workers who are beyond redemption. Volf’s argument (1991, cf. section 6.3), that human work matters, because it contributes to the eschatological building of God’s kingdom, the missio Dei, is therefore one that appeals to me, and that is the context in which I see the secular work of the PSW. Our work matters to God, so it matters that we do it well, and that we find ways to engage with the messy issues that workplaces throw at us. There is a personal cost to this, however, and that is the next aspect of secular work that I consider.