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we are blessed and sent into the real ways that we spend our hours.
We are part of God’s big vision and mission—the redemption of all things—through the earthy craft of living out our vocation, hour by hour, task by task. I want to do the big work of the kingdom, but I have to learn to live it out in the small tasks before me—the missio Dei in the daily grind.
We can feel like we are always at work, since work can follow us everywhere we go. With these changes come an increased temptation to make work and productivity an idol to which we’ll sacrifice rest, health, and relationships. What might vocational holiness look like when technology can breed habits that feed an unhealthy and ungodly appetite for endless productivity? Like
At the opposite extreme of workaholism, I can idealize and exalt escapism into a contemplative ideal.
I need a third way—neither frantic activity nor escape from the workaday world, a way of working that is shaped by being blessed and sent. This third way is marked by freedom from compulsion and anxiety because it is rooted in benediction—God’s blessing and love. But it also actively embraces God’s mission in the world into which we are sent.
where we seek vocational holiness in and through our work even as we resist the idolatry of work and accomplishment—allows us to live with work as a form of prayer.
ora et labora, or “pray and work,” marked monastic spirituality, particularly in Benedictine communities.
plunged into an ancient spiritual practice in the middle of the freeway—forced, against my will, to practice waiting.
the reality is that I do not control time. Every day I wait. I wait for help, for healing, for days to come, for rescue and redemption. And like all of us, I’m waiting to die. And I wait for glory, for the coming King, for the resurrection of the body.
Christians are people who wait. We live in liminal time, in the already and not yet. Christ has come, and he will come again. We dwell in the meantime. We wait.
Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar suggests that impatience is at the root of all sin.
Patience [is] the basic constituent of Christianity . . . the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one’s own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism, the meekness of the lamb which is led.
the liturgical calendar
Now time was sacred. It was structured by worship.
In the church calendar we learn the rhythm of life through narrative. Every week we reenact God’s creative work and rest. Every year we retell the story of Jesus. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany: the story of God’s people longing for a Messiah, Christ’s birth, and then, slowly, his revelation as a King to all the world. Lent, Easter, Pentecost: the story of Christ’s temptation, life in a fallen world, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, and then the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. We live this story every year, week by week, living out what we confess in the creed
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In the liturgical year there is never celebration without preparation. First we wait, we mourn, we ache, we repent. We aren’t ready to celebrate until we acknowledge, over time through ritual and worship, that we and this world are not yet right and whole.3 Before Easter, we have Lent. Before Christmas, we have Advent. We fast. Then we feast. We prepare. We practice waiting. In the sacred rhythm of our time, we embrace the tension of our reality.
We delude ourselves into believing that if we can just get everything done, if we can only tie up all the loose ends, if we can even once get ahead of the crush, we will prove our worth and establish ourselves in safety.
we come to believe that we, not God, are the masters of time.
The reality is that time is a stream we are swept into. Time is a gift from God, a means of worship.
Time revolves around God—what he has done, what he is doing, and what he will do.
Waiting, therefore, is an act of faith in that it is oriented toward the future.
Yet our assurance of hope is rooted in the past, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and in his promises and resurrection. In this way, waiting, like time itself, centers on Christ—the fulcrum of time.
Practicing the liturgical calendar is a counterformation to a culture of impatience.
“I always felt like I was waiting for the gift. But I’ve come to see that the waiting is the gift.”
there is more happening while we wait than just waiting.
God is at work in us and through us as we wait. Our waiting is active and purposeful.
Patience is grounded in the Resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that is God’s doing, and its sign is longing, not so much to be released from the ills of the present, but in anticipation of the good to come.
Even now as we wait, God is bringing the kingdom that will one day be fully known. We can be as patient as a fallow field because we know there are gifts promised by a Giver who can be trusted.
Heaven will be established right here in our midst.
We are oriented to our future hope, yet we do not try to escape from our present reality, from the real and pressing brokenness and suffering in the world.
We live in a brutal world. But in the life of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit we glimpse redemption and participate in it.
The future orientation of Christian time reminds us that we are people on the way. It allows us to live in the present as an alternative people, patiently waiting for what is to come, but never giving up on our telos. We are never quite comfortable. We seek justice, practice mercy, and herald the kingdom to come. The liturgical calendar reminds us that we are people who live by a different story.
“We aren’t just conversing with each other when we recite the Psalms antiphonally or responsively. We are talking to God, too. Reminding one another and God of his promises and our complaints. We are witnessing one another’s cries for help and reminding God that we are in this together.”
Christian friendships are call-and-response friendships.
We tell each other over and over, back and forth, the truth of who we are and who God is.
This call and response is the rhythm of good friendship, of life together, of the community of saints.
If we believe that church is merely a voluntary society of people with shared values, then it is entirely optional.
But while an individual relationship with Jesus is an important part of the Christian life, it is not the sum total of the Christian life. Our relationship with God is never less than an intimate relationship with Christ, but it is always more than that.
When we confess in the Nicene Creed that we believe in “one holy, catholic, apostolic church,” we are confessing that we cannot know Christ on our own, or merely with a small cadre of our friends. Instead, we rely on the global, historic church that Christ initiated and built.
When we worship Jesus, we rely on millions of Christians over thousands of years whom God has used to bear witness to himself. The only reason we know anything at all about Jesus is because his disciples told their friends, neighbors, and enemies about him, the apostles preached and wrote down his teaching and stories about him, and believers have carried his message everywhere they’ve gone in each generation.
when we take Communion, we mysteriously feast with all those who are in Christ.
We profoundly need each other. We are immersed in the Christian life together. There is no merely private faith—everything we are and do as individuals affects the church community.
Yet many believers of my generation are not sure what the church is for. Some have denigrated the need for it all together.
But if Christianity is not only about my individual connection with God, but is instead about God calling, forming, saving, and redeeming a people, then the church can never be relegated to “elective” status.
Jesus sent his Spirit to a people. The preservation of our faith and the endurance of the saints is not an individual promise; it is a promise that God will redeem and preserve his church—a people, a community, an organism, an institution—generation after generation, and that even the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
Sin in the church can be insidious and systemic. We can be injured by a misuse of power or entrenched institutional pathology. Any of us who have hung around the church long enough have a few scars to show.
Flannery O’Connor said, “You have to suffer as much from the church as for it. . . . The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed.”7
despite our sin, failure, and pain, will one day be made beautiful and new. Yet our task is not simply to dwell on what the church will one day be, but to face what she currently is squarely and honestly, and to seek Christ in and through the body of Christ.
In the sin and failure of the church, we see the darkness and ugliness for which Christ suffered and died. But we also see the spectacular hope that in the midst of sinners, God can bring forth redemption, repentance, and transformation.
And here’s a further complication: the church is not an entity outside of me. I do not stand on the outside looking in.
