by Zoe White

I am an avid radio listener and especially enjoy listening to people talk about their lives and work. I was recently listening to a retired window-cleaner being interviewed. "Yes," he said, "I spent 30 years polishing-up people's outlook." As I listened, I knew that he had been doing a lot more during his work life than simply cleaning off people's windows. He also knew something about the secret essence of window-cleaning. His work had become sacramental. Somehow, through the many thousands of routine acts of washing and polishing, a transmutation had occurred and true enlightenment had come into the world.

Another program I remember was about a disused coal mine which is now a mining museum. An ex-miner was taking a group of school children for their first trip down a mine, and one of them asked if it was dangerous. "Well," said the miner, "you have to learn to listen for the talking beams." The children laughed nervously, thinking they were being teased. "You see these wooden beams holding up the ceiling?" continued the miner. "When they start creaking, you know there's too much weight, and the pressure's building up ... You also have to make friends with the rats."

"Ugh!" chorused the children in disgust. "Oh, yes," he answered. "You have to work alongside the rats. And if one day you don't hear them squeaking, that means they've left and you'd better get out fast because something's going to happen. The rats know things we can't know, you see." The children fell silent. Then the miner asked if they would like to see how dark it was in a mine without lights. He switched off the lights, and the children gasped at the thick blackness. "Now," said the miner, "when you're lost in a mine, in the dark like this, you can't light a match to help you see ... You have to smell where the fresh air is coming from and find your way out with your nose."

Again I felt that I was hearing some true wisdom being revealed through this man's experience. Just as the window-cleaner's work had let spiritual as well as physical light into the world, so, in the same sacramental way, this miner's years of hard physical labor, penetrating the blackness of the mine, gave him the capacity to mediate something of the mystery of spiritual darkness. Through a fairy tale language of "talking beams" and "friendly rats," he was able to lead the children safely into a vital dimension of their spiritual lives and help them feel an appropriate sense of awe and respect.

These two men were spirit-bearers, I think. Their years of work had been like the practice of an art, and through this practice, albeit mostly unconsciously, they had become co-creators; transformers; channels through which the great mystery of world conversion is taking place. So it is for all of us, I believe--in all of our jobs and professions. The process of creation and transformation happens in and through the practice of all work, regardless of any value we (or our society) may attach to it, regardless of any "good" we may imagine we are contributing to society, regardless of how we may feel about what we do. The work itself, and the faithful practice of it, is sacred, potentially sacramental, and therefore, in and of itself sufficient to mediate God's creative and redemptive purposes.

Yet most of the time we don't see our work in this light. We have become so accustomed to attaching certain values to certain kinds of jobs and creating hierarchies of usefulness and status according to the functions we perform (constructing our identities accordingly), that we are blinded to the true God-given nature of work. Thus there is a need for the "eyes" of our heart to be purified from the contamination of such idolatry. We have to practice looking at our work in a different light and from perspectives other than those given us by the society in which we live. We have to re-learn how to "see" what work is.

A piece of Shaker furniture is not only beautifully crafted; it is also a statement of belief which leads the eye to worship. It participates in this spiritual function because the people who made it have traditionally done everything "in the eye of eternity." Work is never "just work" to the Shakers; it is part of the fabric of their belief, a consecration. Mother Ann instructed the Shakers to "Put your hands to work and your hearts to God ... Do all your work as though you had a thousands years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow."

I find the same bare-boned, single-minded intensity and passion in many of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. She had the same eye for the essential, universal principle, and her work also sprang from the context of her calling. Her desire was not simply to create a work of art. Her desire was for God, for the "wideness and wonder of the world ... the distance [that has] always been calling me." Many of her paintings reflect this calling, this vision of the elegant simplicity of eternity.

What to my unpracticed, impatient eye might seem to be merely the empty pelvic bone of a dead animal, was to her a beautiful symbol of the living desert. She loved the bones because she knew how to see them; and because she knew how to see them, they revealed their true nature to her, drawing her vision out far beyond the bones themselves. What she was most interested in was "the holes in the bones--what I saw through them--particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky ... They were most wonderful against the Blue--that Blue that will always be there as it is now after all [our] destruction is finished."

So what do these artists teach me about seeing my work in a new light? How does their example help purify the eyes of my heart, help liberate me from the diminished and diminishing ways of regarding work which I've inherited from the culture around me?

I believe I am called to look at my work in the same way as O'Keeffe looked at the wonderful bleached bones of the desert. I am called to take all the bare bones of my work--the habitually performed, roughly related succession of routine acts and encounters--gather them together and hold them up in the sun. This is so that I can better appreciate the texture and grace of each individual bone, each individual act which comprises my working day.

I am called to do this so that I can see more clearly the luminosity of Spirit which shines through the bones, through the complex interlocking structure which is the skeleton of my working life. But most importantly, I am called to do this because through the gesture of lifting up the bones of my work in the sun, I place them in their true relationship with my primary commitment and my deepest desire, which is God, the eternally beautiful Blue.

Zoe, a Quaker woman from England, is a graduate of Shalem's Group Leaders Program. The Georgia O'Keeffe quotes are from Georgia O'Keeffe: American and Modern, Yale University Press, 1993.