Work that Matters

A few words about "To be of use"

Maybe it’s this early spring, mucky-muck gray-sky weather we’re having in the Upper Midwest. Maybe it’s the expectation of Easter and the reality of the Cross. Maybe it’s just life, living in a world that is currently so technologically advanced and yet so morally and emotionally inept, that you end up spending a lot of your days wandering around from place to place, task to task, never catching up and knowing all the while that the hourglass of your life is tick-tick-tick-tick-ticking away as you sit at red lights and wait in lines and floss and pay another bill.

I’ve found myself in that place lately from time to time, overwhelmed by the violence and disaster of the world at-large, from Israel and Palestine to the earthquake in Turkey and ongoing war in Ukraine; and overwhelmed as well by readjusting to the changing rhythm of my own and my family’s life, as I recalibrate after leaving my role as called Pastor to a particular church, as I muddle through a minor surgery recovery and also watch my parents face surgery recoveries of their own; as I watch my kids grow older and older each and every day, while I am unable recapture the days with them gone by, and equally unable to guard and protect their future.

Perhaps you can relate?

I’ve always had this intense sense that I do not want to waste my time, or waste my life. I want desperately to do work that matters: to spend my time purposefully, and to hone relationships that are grounded in meaning, authenticity, and love.

The ironic part, though, is that the real meaning often comes in the minutia. The meaning - the love - comes when you realize that all of these moments are imbued with the spirit of life, the magic of respiration and energy and matter - an ecosystem that keeps on going - a teeming world that I cannot grasp in full, can only touch and feel my corner of it when I find a way to be present in the moment, right where I am, a tiny little human whose life is but a speck in the history of the world; whose life means the world to the ones who love me.

Maybe all of this is why this poem, “To be of use,” by Marge Piercy, meant so much to me today when I read an excerpt of it in my daily newsletter from the Minnesota Reformer. I’ll share it in full here below:

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

“Who do what has to be done, again and again.”

What I love most about this poem is that it honors the simple and weighty individual human life: not because of its wealth or power or influence but because of its effort and its integrity. So often the world sends us messages that our lives are worth less than others, others who might have more power or influence or wealth.

I have known so many people over my almost-38 years in this world. I have known a few famous people, some celebrities, actors, business moguls, professional athletes. I have known many more people who are not famous at all - but who over the years have become my heroes in “work that is real.”

When I think about it, these people who I have known who I now admire so deeply are often quite different from one another. They are not exclusive to one place or another, to one type of background or another. Many of them, I will say, are people I have known from churches. They have this deep, unshakeable integrity, and they “do what has to be done, again and again.”

This too is who I strive to be. And then on these days I get tired, because I wonder if any of it has mattered. Doing what needs to be done is not glamorous or lucrative most of the time.

Marge Piercy’s poem reminds me, though, it is this very thing that - this doing what needs to be done - that changes the world and saves our lives, again and again and again.

This post is dedicated to you - readers and loved ones and the ones who help me to do this work that matters so deeply to me. May you rest assured that your work matters, too, and the little things you do each and every day bear the blessing of the God who loves you.

A Few Notes …

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