By Seán O’Seasnáin
Published December 2003
I first came upon the initial seedlings of ‘workplace spirituality’ in the 1960s when I was introduced to Marie Dominique Chenu’s The Theology of Work. Chenu observed that perhaps the only way the mass of humanity can find self-realization is through work. Work, for Chenu, is the normal way we achieve our perfection as persons.
At St. Jerome’s University about ten years ago, a dozen or so faithful souls braved three wintry Wednesday evenings to explore – ‘spirituality in the workplace’. The workshops at St. Jerome’s explored the phenomenon in the context of theology and psychology using Lawrence Kushner’s God Was in This Place & I, I did Not Know and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience.
At the time I was in a state of burn-out after more than a dozen years as a front-line vocational rehabilitation counsellor at the Workers’ Compensation Board – WCB – now known as the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. The belated name change resulted, in part, from the perceived negativity associated with ‘WCB’ as an impersonal bureaucracy. And I worked there! God was in this place?
Coincidence of Commonalities
Kushner’s intriguing title God Was in This Place & I, I Did Not Know caught my attention in my search for sanity and spiritual renewal. The title comes from Kushner’s translation of Genesis 28:16 and it is what Jacob says when he wakes up from a dream in which he had a vision of a ladder that joins heaven and earth. The book is sub-titled ‘Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning’.
This ingenious commentary on one line of Hebrew scripture engaged my interest and imagination. There is an extraordinary resonance between Kushner’s analysis of Jacob’s dream experience and the ‘flow’ psychology of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Searching for dainty – finding flow
My search for sanity and sources of ‘workplace spirituality’, had unearthed Csikszentmihalyi’s many works including his 1997 self-help guide Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life.
‘Flow’, according to Csikszentmihalyi, requires seven specific elements or ingredients. By coincidence, God was in this place… is about seven different ways of reading the same biblical verse which describes Jacob’s experience of the divine presence. Could Jacob’s spiritual experience be described as ‘flow’? (see chart on page 5) listen to Csikszentmihalyi:
“The metaphor of “flow” is one that many people have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as “being in the zone,” religious mystics as being in “ecstasy,” artists and musicians as aesthetic rapture. Athletes, mystics, and artists do very different things when they reach flow, yet their descriptions of the experience are remarkably similar.” (p29)
So what are the implications and significance of all this?
The conversation method
One method is to put these two authors in “conversation” with one another and come up with indicators as to what ‘spirituality means in everyday routine’. Kushner, for example, explains that while Jacob’s words sound simple enough, they describe an extraordinary situation. He writes:
“A man lies down in what he takes to be a God-forsaken place and unexpectedly has one of the great visions of the Hebrew Bible. The next morning he says that any normal person might say after such an encounter.” (God was in this place… pp17-18)
And that’s the very point of this search. Is it possible to find a job and find flow in any situation? – in any occupation? Is it even realistic? Can we have a spiritual experience in any job or line of work? Many jobs are so mundane, even soul destroying, or at least uneventful. Some jobs are downright oppressive. And there are employers who harass and intimidate their workers. Is this ‘workplace spirituality’ restricted to certain kinds of work, maybe in management positions or particular professions? Or is it for everyone, regardless of their occupation?
For Csikszentmihalyi the ‘flow’ experience can be for everyone. He concludes from his empirical research that even though “a typical day may be full of anxiety and boredom, it is the flow experiences which provide the flashes of intense living against this dill background… It is the full involvement of flow rather than happiness that makes for excellence in life” (Finding Flow… pp30-32). Likewise for Kushner and the Judaic tradition there is only one world which at the same time is both material and spiritual.
The material world is always potentially spiritual. For Judaism all things—including, and especially, such apparently non-spiritual and grossly material things as garbage, sweat, dirt, and bushes—are not impediments to but dimensions of spirituality. To paraphrase the Psalmist, “The whole world is full of God.”
Rabbi Kushner observes that each Rabbinical interpretation of Jacob’s expression is supported by the original Hebrew text – each coherent, self-contained, and yet convincingly representative of what Jacob may have meant. They are certainly, the Rabbi contends, “viable options for understanding the relationship between God’s self-concealment and our own self-preoccupation”. Like ‘flow’ they provide a helpful framework in which to search for an authentic ‘spirituality of the workplace’.
These two scholarly authors are both ecumenical in their outlook and write intelligently for a pluralist audience. Like Kushner, Csikszentmihalyi sees the ongoing need to reinterpret and rediscover ancestral wisdom, and states it would be ‘an act of childish deceit’ to ignore the scared books of the major religious tradition. He also cautions against believing that whatever was written in the past last forever or is absolute truth. Both authors, suing long understood wisdom, breathe fresh ideas into workplace spirituality.
Seán O’Seasnáin works at The Working Centre, bringing his unique combination of employment counselling and work spirituality.
