On Drudgery and the Desk

Being newly-inserted into the great American deskforce, I've come to know a bit more about myself in these last months. How my speech begins to slur after about 6 hours of slumping in front of a computer screen (NB: if you call between 2:30 and 4:30, I will likely be surly and difficult to understand. This doesn't mean I'm a bad person. Honest). How my eyes start losing the ability to focus on anything further than a foot and a half away after 6 and a half hours. How I feel several inches shorter when I leave than when I came (literally - the other day I got in my car after work and couldn't see out of my rear view mirror because of how slouched and beaten I was).

This product is rather intriguing. Or at least it would be on those days I can't decide whether I want to nap or just be softly suffocated.

At any rate, I'm sure you're thinking "But Sir! (or madam?) What has all this to do with Christ?" I'm getting to it (I hope). In the muddle of the day to day, I have to do any number of things that I would prefer to leave for the birds, perhaps the foremost of which is answering the !#@&$  phone.

I wish I was this cool, but our phones have buttons on them.

It rings and rings, never when you expect it, always when you're just about to actually get some actual work done. I have piles of paper on my desk that still need to be sifted, an inbox that I haven't touched in months, and a good backlog of things I need to do but have probably already forgotten about (how do I keep my job? Looks alone, apparently). I keep catching myself thinking, "If someone else would just answer the freaking phone, I might be able to do my job."
Then I thought, "Wait a second. Answering the phone is my job." The phone isn't what interrupts me when I'm doing my job, it is my job. It is the reason I was hired. And here comes Jesus: Isn't that a lot like the spiritual life? We separate things out, and the religious part of our lives is only that which is encompassed by church on Sundays, or maybe an occasional awareness of God's presence. The rest of the time we kind of float through, without any feelings either way (or maybe even feelings of sadness, abandonment, and anger). We think, "If only I could feel God's presence all the time and quit with this other stuff which is unimportant and distracting, then I would be holier/better/perfecter/awesomer/the bester/etc." But we forget that those moments of mundaneity are life. That is, these moments of boredom, disconnection, etc. are not merely moments to be gotten past and forgotten.
This is admittedly a weak metaphor. But the point remains the same - life is not made up of those moments you move past and the occasional moment of transcendence, where all importance lies in those brief moments and the rest are to be forgotten. Life is life - it is all wonder, even those times when we sit at the desk and slowly allow our backs to reform into a greater 'S' shape. This is the insight I still hope to one day be able to embody - to shout out with Bernanos' priest that "All is grace!"

Why can he say this? Because his eyes are on Christ.

It's not an easy thought - this "practice of the presence of God" in every moment, even those moments that seem the most worthless, the most easily ignored, the easiest to throw away (e.g., I still struggle to see how the hours between 8 and 4:30, roughly, 5 days a week have anything to do with my spiritual life. But unless I am to fall into the great American secularist pigeon-holing mindset, they must).

It strikes me that there is a definite similarity here between this description of time, and a description of the poor, which may provide the key to a way out. The poor are often seen as the most worthless, the most easily ignored, and the easiest to throw away. This applies whether they be the homeless, the socially awkward, the unborn, or even the people calling in to ask for information. It is often a struggle to see how these people relate to our spiritual lives, but if we are to be saved - since no one is saved alone, but only within the complex mesh of relationships in which we are already embedded - if we are to be saved, these people must be related to our lives, spiritual and otherwise.

Aside: On the topic of no one being saved alone, Dorothy Day had a great line in one of her articles, in which she quoted a French theologian as saying "If, when you die, you come to Heaven alone, God will look at you and say, 'Where are the others?'" 

Dorothy Day, biotches!

So perhaps here is the clue: if we begin to understand that all is infused with wonder, that is, with the very presence of Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can begin to open ourselves to His movement in our hearts, even in the most mundane of moments. In this we can take a cue from one of our most recent saints, Andre Bessette, who was a simple doorman at a monastery in Montreal, but who treated every person who came to the door as if they were Christ himself.

And if I were a far holier man, I would answer the phone in the same way. Because in a way, it is Christ who calls me on the phone, looking not for information, but for love, and for my love in particular.