Or Perhaps It's Work

Or perhaps it’s work that takes us through the doorway. Perhaps it’s work that brings us into his presence. Perhaps it’s writing. Perhaps writing is one discipline. One way. And as one writes, perhaps God joins us in the writing.

He enters in and suddenly this is not what one is writing for oneself or one’s friends but what God is writing to one. And he’s using one’s own fingers and eyes to communicate this. Is using one’s own mind. Has control of one’s own mind because one has relinquished control, gladly, to him.

Or not control. More a conversation that’s going on in here, and it’s God’s turn. He’s speaking now, and this is what he has to say to me. Maybe to us. To some of us. A few of us who might read these writings. But that’s enough, he’s saying. That’s plenty.

Then your work Bill. Your work will have coincided with my work, and we will be one. Your work and my work will be one work. Your work will be good because it is my work, you see.

Or perhaps it’s work in the sense that one loses oneself in one’s work. Loses one’s self-consciousness and gives oneself over to the pleasure of unconsciousness of self. Of the absence of self. As if self had disappeared and been absorbed in the work itself. Totally submerged in the work itself. So that the work becomes the work of another. The work happens outside the self. Outside of all the silliness one finds in oneself.

And is done only with a sense of the rules of performance and the sense of what the outcome should look like. And that’s about it. Only this. A purity here. Oh, like a tennis player, maybe. A person pared down to the role of player on the court. Pared down to whacking a little fuzzy rubber ball across a net. And that’s the thing. Getting that little fuzzy rubber ball back over the net in such a way that one’s opposite—one’s friend there on the other side who makes this loss of self possible—cannot whack it back over the net.

Or a clay mill operator calling for the overhead crane operator to dump clay into the hoppers and then running water into the hoppers and then turning on the metal gangs in the hoppers and then filling the hoppers with water to a certain level so that the clay becomes dilute but not too dilute. And then one sits with one’s giant squirt gun in front of the screen in the side of the cylindrical hopper and squirts the screen until one dislodges the particulates enough that the clay in solution flows a bit out of the screen and down in front of one into a catch basin and through a pipe into a pool the size of an Olympic swimming pool where an agitator keeps the clay solution stirred up until it’s pumped to another building where it is reduced to powder and added with crushed limestone and other stuff to form cement.

Dry cement. That is pumped into silos and stored until it is pumped from the silos into bulk container trucks or rail cars or bags to be stacked by strong men on trucks to be trucked who knows where. To form something somewhere like stone.

Or a limestone mill operator who enters art work into the computer that runs the giant saw and then sets the limestone slab that was made millions of years ago by dying creatures over millions of years accreting here in Iowa on the bottom of a sea on a table to be cut by the diamond tipped blade of the saw in increments of an inch. And the slab after it is cut by the saw will be placed on the polishing table, where it will be polished by a tool that uses a synthetic stone to grind the surface of the limestone until there is a slickness and a shininess to the surface that is sufficient for the person placing the order for the slab that will be used as a table top in his home.

The stone mill operator like the clay mill operator is working with the stuff of the earth and will as he works become in a sense hypnotized by the work itself. Will become unconscious of his cares and of his particular history and of his particular obsessions and worries and sorrows and personhood quirkiness. He will for a time forget his family and his friends and his very own particulars and will in this blissfully forgetful state do his work with the work of the earth.

And the fruits of his labors will satisfy. Will augment. Will enhance. Will give pleasure to. Others. Will be the worker’s contribution to the human enterprise. Will be his enduring legacy. At least one important sort of contribution to this enterprise. And this God smiles upon. This God blesses. Because this sort of work is selfless, by its nature. Is self-denying. Self-forgetting. And it is other-blessing. Is other-centered. Is the creation or fashioning of something that will be sent out. Will be offered up. Will be given for another to use.

So. This work. This enterprise. This occupation. This calling. Is doubly blessed. Because if one is looking. If one is listening. If one keeps one’s nostrils open. One finds God here. Perhaps especially here. Because this is after all what one does with one’s life. This is where one lives most of one’s waking life. It is finally and indeed one’s calling whatever one’s paradoxical emotions. Whatever one’s negative emotions.

Whether one has emotions on this subject at all. Because emotions are beside the point. It is the discipline that matters. It is through discipline that God works. And joins us in our work. It is through discipline we lose ourselves and find the Other. Find out Otherness. Seek a holy Otherness. Seek a holy blessedness. Which turns up at work, believe it or not. Turns up regularly at work. I kid you not.

In the space one makes between crises, for example. In the space one finds between arguments and hard words. In the space that opens like a sea between one conflict and another when. Oh. Let’s say someone is promoted and gets a raise. Or a contract is won. Or sales figures suddenly shoot up. Or the new application finally decides to work. Or the SEC does not object to the purchase and another company—another group of people one has come to know—suddenly becomes us. Our company. Is suddenly now in the fold. With us. After all. After all that work. That it took. To make this. This new thing. This new reality. This new company. Happen.