Surviving the Workday

This week is the 2006 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, a week long time of ecumenical prayer for Christians that embraces the unit between denominations (Jesus Christ as the savior of humankind)and not the divisiveness (celibacy of leaders, abortion, ordination of women). The theme is that there is more that unites Christians than divides them.

Matthew 18:18-20

“Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in Heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Prayers for Unity Week

Dear Ms. Theologian:

There is a woman in my office who is a very conservative, sensitive Christian. For Halloween, she was really bothered by the celebrations. Perhaps it was the slaughter of little animals in the kitchen. Just kidding. Seriously, she was bothered that we had decorations and a party. But for Christmas, she was all over the celebration thing. How can one bring better balance into the work place for celebrating holidays that have a religious base?

-Happy at Halloween

Dear Happy,

This is a good question. It’s also a difficult one.

You cannot change your coworker. You need to respect the fact that she celebrates Christmas and is bothered by Halloween. You can also try to understand this a bit more.

Some conservative Christians are not into pluralism or inclusivism. They’re into exclusivism. (It’s worth noting that most religions have at least one group of folks who think of themselves as having the exclusive rights to the Truth.) Their view is basically this: We got it right in our faith and everyone else is wrong. And not just wrong, but dangerously wrong because they’re partly or completely controlled by demons and/or Satan. Hence, Halloween is not a time to celebrate.

Should you try and change your coworker’s opinion? Absolutely not. You cannot point out that all holidays have pagan roots and that pagans are happy people who love nature and don’t sacrifice human beings. She’s not going to believe you.

It would be wise to develop an office policy involving HR and management and concerned workers that explored these issues. Every workplace is different. You need to consider how the party is celebrated, when it is celebrated (during the workday or not), and what the options are for those who don’t want to attend.

One solution?

Celebrate all holidays with an office sponsor. So if you’re the Halloween sponsor, you plan the office party outside the workday (during lunch or after work). If you’re not the sponsor, you can attend the party or choose not to. The party isn’t a requirement for work.

And, just because I found it amusing, I give you this:

Top Five Things Overheard at Office Holiday Parties

-Ms. Theologian

Dear Ms. Theologian,

The head of our company acts like a crass, frat boy. Recently they had an advertisement that was very offensive to me as a woman and as a Christian. Any suggestions on how to deal with him? He doesn’t really give any regard to the HR woman who I have also shared my objections with.

–Sick of frat boy antics

Dear Sick,

A long time ago, when I trained to be a geologist at field camp (a remote location in Montana with 12 men for every woman), one man insisted on wearing a particularly offensive T-shirt. The T-shirt advertised his fraternity and showed a large well-hung Squirrel-Man dragging off two drunk Squirrel-Women (presumably to go feed them acorns).

It had any number of rape-connotations, not to mention alcohol-abuse. Every woman at field camp was offended, we talked to him, we talked to those in charge. What happened? He wore the T-shirt more often.

What is the point? This was a pervasively misogynistic culture, which was not amenable to change. Certainly not from us. This sort of culture wears you down. It’s gradual. You don’t even notice it. And all of a sudden you’re deeply depressed and can only conceive of yourself as an about-to-be-raped-drunk-squirrel. The solution was to get out.

Is that the case in your workplace? I’m not so sure. I do know that culture is very hard to change, especially when those in charge maintain a fratboy mentality.

What can you do to change this culture? You need to try and balance your sense of justice with self-care. See if any of these options make sense for you.

1. Read up on what constitutes a hostile work environment. Consider if there are any other elements in your workplace that contribute to a hostile work environment. Think deeply about this. It’s a serious question.

3. Consider talking to the HR person again and framing your inquiry around questions based on your research rather than just concerns about the advertisement. If you do determine that there is a hostile work environment in place, there are any number of legal concerns that she should take seriously.

4. Consider aligning yourself with a sympathetic male at work and others who share your concerns. Consider asking this person to approach the management about the advertisment.

Good luck with this. My thoughts are with you,

–Ms. Theologian

You’re not alone.

This seems like a huge trend in religion and spirituality in the United States: people are finding ways to meet their spiritual needs outside of a formal environment.

In this article, Dissatisfied Jews, Christians Share Ideas, dissatisfied Jews connect with Christians who have found ways to bring their faith into their daily lives outside of services.

Admonishments to believe in God and attend services regularly aren’t enough to help people make sense of today’s world, said Wade Clark Roof, a professor of religion and society at University of California, Santa Barbara.”There’s a very general sense of wanting to find ways to embody faith - to live it,” said Roof, who spoke at the conference. “There’s a very deep quest within the culture for that and you find it broadly based.”

Dear Ms. Theologian:

One of my co-workers and I discuss our Christian faith with each other in the work place. Other co-workers know I am a Christian. She is new to the faith and can talk about it with other co-workers to the point where it annoys them. As proselytizing is discouraged in our offices, I try to encourage her to talk to me anytime, but be aware that some people aren’t really open to her sharing. Any suggestions on what she can do to “share” without “sharing”?

–Shared Enough

Dear Shared Enough:

Do you know what happened when I discovered the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser? I wanted to tell everyone. It worked so well. It made cleaning the bathroom a joy. I wanted everyone to have one. I had never felt this way about a cleaning product before. I was ecstatic.

This is how people feel right before they proselitize. They feel they have their hands on something so good, so right, so perfect, that everyone needs to know about it.

But not very many people wanted to hear about my sponge. My mother didn’t. My husband didn’t either. Friends and neighbors thought I was a lunatic. Ah, but they did want to use my sparkling clean bathroom. Oh yes! I ended up bonding with other women who had found the sponge and appreciated it as I did.

Christianity affirms the common dignity of every human being,

And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth (Acts 17:26 RSV).

This is something that immediately translates into a workplace value. Encourage her to treat all people with respect regardless of their religious beliefs.

Not everyone has to use the same sponge. Remember that. Some people already have a sponge that works just fine. They like their sponge. It makes them ecstatic too.

You’ve heard the expression, “Actions speak louder than words”? Remind your coworker of this. Encourage your coworker to demonstrate her values, but not necessarily talk about her beliefs to those who do not welcome the dialogue (I’m assuming this is a dialogue and not a lecture).

Off to buy more sponges,

Ms. Theologian

I’m not into forgiveness in the same way that I’m into letting go. The last article I excerpted from and linked to Moving Past Pain mentions forgiveness quite a bit, especially in reference to healing yourself. While I respect the author greatly and I think she wrote superb mantras, I think this is off base in terms of my own spirituality regarding forgiveness.

I’m highly motivated to use the art of letting go in my daily worklife. In one position that I held, one of my bosses used to play favorites. She would invite only certain people to conferences or dinner at her house, buy Christmas gifts for certain people, reward certain people with gifts of pumpkin bread from Whole Foods, and give lavish raises to (you guessed it) only certain people. The rub? The certain people were never the same people. This created an environment where people were always competing to be her favorites.

It was definitely an irritating characteristic and didn’t create a workplace that was conducive to cooperation. And I can’t say I wasn’t pissed when I didn’t get a pumpkin bread. But if I held onto every slight in the workplace, I would be preoccupied with their perceived sins and not my work.

Some people would say there is also a lot to forgive of this boss. Here’s how letting go is different than forgiveness. Letting go is a one-way street. This is something I engage in all the time. I try to be persistent, but not obsessed. Eventually, if necessary, I can let go. It was only me and my mental processes involved in this. I let go of the pumpkin bread. After all, I can buy my own. And more importantly, I don’t like pumpkin bread.

But, on the other hand, forgiveness is a two way street. One person apologizes, another person forgives. Perhaps not immediately or even that year. If my boss had apologized to anyone in the office for her oversights, that would have been the beginning of forgiveness. But she never did. It takes two people and mutual actions to result in forgiveness. But often this is mistaken for letting go and it’s not the same process. It’s an important distinction.

Lastly, I’m reminded in high school when some of the born-again Christians would regularly tell me that they forgave me for not being Christian. Again, I didn’t apologize, so they can’t really forgive. One can only hope that they let go.

So much of what we do to survive the workday has to do with confronting and dealing with our own problems as well as the problems of others. This article has simple affirmations that you can repeat once (or break down and use line by line) all through the day.

If You Repeat the Same Patterns

I keep experiencing the same events in my life because I have not learned a lesson at the deep level of the soul. I am committed to changing my behavior, attitude, and negative belief systems. I learn from past mistakes. Life is a self-educational process and I am a perceptive individual. I watch others as they model what I need to learn. I love all my talents as well as my imperfections because that is what makes me the beloved person I am.

excerpted from Moving Past Pain on Beliefnet

When we lived in Watertown, we lived in a two-family home. Mark and Sue lived above us. Mark was an assistant football coach at Harvard and Sue managed a health club. Every Saturday morning, Mark and Sue would rise before 6 a.m. and tromp around the house getting ready for a football game. Part of their preparation was loading an enormous six-foot long cooler with Gatorade. They were gone all day. On Sundays, they watched sports on TV. They took our trash out, shoveled the snow off the steps, put up the storm windows, and in general, made everything run smoothly. We managed to feed ourselves. Just barely though.

We lived in such close proximity to them that we could smell their meals as they wafted through the vents in the bathroom. We also knew about the minute details of their lives. Sue stored their winter clothes in large plastic bins in the basement with itemized lists on the side. I’m actually scared to think of what they might have noticed about our lives.

Symbiosis is the close association of two dissimilar organisms. We often live and work in close association with others in these sorts of relationships:

Mutualism: a symbiotic relationship in which both organisms benefit.Commensalism: a symbiotic relationship in which one organism benefits and the other is unaffected.

Parasitism: a symbiotic relationship in which one organism benefits and the other is harmed.

Our relationship with Mark and Sue was a commensal relationship. We benefited greatly from the relationship, but contributed very little. I don’t think we affected them at all. They seemed so well-adjusted, so happy, that we could have been aliens and they would have continued to put up the storm windows.

In the workplace, I try to cultivate more mutualistic relationships in which we both benefit. When I taught at a high school, I became friends with another teacher, Freddi. We became partners in a grant to develop a water quality curriculum for students. We both contributed as intellectual and pedagogical partners, we both benefited enormously as our teaching-lives became more satisfying.

Likewise, my friend, Jenny, and I managed to survive a very stressful workplace by working out at lunch. We used elliptical machines next to each other in a fancy-schmancy gym, brought books for each other to read, and traded stories in the locker room. It was only an hour a day (ahem, maybe more for some of us), but we helped each other survive. And in the end, that’s really all that seemed to matter.

Parasitism seems to be a trickier relationship. At first, I couldn’t seem to find any parasitic relationships, but then I remembered how I used to glom on Anne in college for help with hydrology problem sets. I was definitely a parasite, possibly an equation-sucking one, but I would hope I contributed to the betterment of her life in other ways. Stuffed baked potatoes, my culinary masterpiece. Possibly wine coolers.

When I first met Jim, he lived across from an older woman named Rosella. She was very kind, but she always wanted something from Jim. First, she wanted help hanging a picture. Then she wanted help clearing a drain. Finally, she wanted him to install a toilet. He didn’t mind helping her, but he explained he wasn’t a plumber. She wanted more. She wanted him to take her to sort of raucous night club to hear flamenco music. She invited me too. Eventually, we turned the lights off and hid in Jim’s room to avoid her. Not very mature. Sort of humiliating, really. But she didn’t seem to take no as no. She seemed to always try harder.

Every relationships involves an exchange of energy of sorts. Sometimes this is to your benefit, sometimes to your detriment, and sometimes there is no effect at all.

If there is one person who has managed to tie his sense of spirituality, of truth, of justice to his work, it might be Dr. Martin Luther King. King popularized the phrase, The Beloved Community, to describe his vision of the potential of our society. He could see a community in which poverty and hunger were not tolerated because our standards of decency would not allow it. He understood that discrimination could be replaced by inclusiveness.

In the words of Coretta Scott King,

We commemorate as well the timeless values he taught us through his example — the values of courage, truth, justice, compassion, dignity, humility and service that so radiantly defined Dr. King’s character and empowered his leadership. On this holiday, we commemorate the universal, unconditional love, forgiveness and nonviolence that empowered his revolutionary spirit.

Today is World Religion Day, a holiday sponsored by the Bahai faith to encourage acknowledgement of the similarities of religious traditions.

Joan Halifax Roshi is a Zen priest and founder of the Upaya Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Ironically, I didn’t meet Joan when I lived in Santa Fe, but when I took a class with her in graduate school on working with the dying. My experience with those who are dying has been limited in some ways to my work as a chaplain-in-training at a hospital outside of Boston. In other ways, I believe we are all dying, all the time, and the sooner we realize this, the easier it becomes to live with ourselves peacefully.

Joan has some lovely reflections on the words we leave with others when we die in When Goodbye is a Gift.

In this article, she writes:

I have often sat by the bedside of dying people with their relatives close, waiting for those “last words.” The threshold between life and death imparts poignancy to the utterances of the dying. Some believe the veil between this world and the next is thinnest at this time, that we can somehow penetrate the mystery of death through their experience.

You may have noticed quite a few new years festivals at this time of year, but not exactly on December 31st and January 1st. For a long time, no one agreed on what calendar to use (and in fact many religions use different calendars than the Gregorian one), but people, including farmers and early astronomers, noted the passage of time by the moon and the stars.

For Mahayana Buddhists, today is the New Year, the first full moon of January. There are other Buddhist new years (Tibetan Buddhists celebrate at the end of this month).

What do Mahayana Buddhists believe?

that any person can potentially achieve Buddhahood, which is when you ascend to the ultimate reality (nirvana);
that Siddhartha Gautama was one incarnation of the Buddha;
that negative mental states must be worked through (karma);
that evil is a result of cravings, attachments, and ignorance; and
that life is suffering, but that intense suffering may lead one to achieve nirvana sooner.

Today is Makar Sankranti, the most auspicious day of the year, a day honoring the movement of the sun from the Sagitarrius to Capricorn sign. Although the festival is celebrated differently all of India, the use of sesame seeds is ubiquitous. It is a holiday that was noted in the Mahabarata, which dates from 1478 BCE to 3106 BCE. Now that’s an old holiday.

Hindus celebrate Makar Sankrani by waking before sunrise, bathing, and worshiping the rising sun. They may ray for knowledge, wisdom, and enlightenment and blessing to live a dynamic and inspired and righteous life.

More about Makar Sankrani

I wouldn’t wanna get tangled in your web. You are
the incarnation of fate. You have three
aspects, face, personalities, how ever you
wanna convey it. They are called Clotho who is
the youngest and the one who collects the STUFF
of humans and weaves them into threads,
Lachesis, depicted as middle aged who weaves
those threads into the tapestry of LIFE, and
then Atropos the oldest who cuts the thread of
human life. Sounds harsh and unfair, but the
tapestry doesn’t lie.

What Incarnation of Immortality are you? (wonderful pictures)
brought to you by Quizilla

Sikhs celebrate Maghi today, the occasion when more than 40 Sikhs fought for Guru Gobindh Singh Ji during an attack by the imperial army in 1705.

Sikhs often celebrate both “happy” and “sad” traditions in the same way. Maghi is officially a tragic occasion, but is honored with a three-day celebration.

Excerpted from Surf India

On the eve of Maghi falls the common Indian festival called the Lohri when bonfires are lighted in Hindu homes and alms are also distributed. However, the largest assembly, however, takes place at Muktsar (Punjab) where big fairs are organized and pilgrims take a holy dip in the sacred waters of sarovar and also visit several shrines. A mahala or big march of pilgrims from the main shrine to gurdwara Tibbi Sahib, sacred to Guru Gobind Singh, concludes the three-day celebration.

I have carefully constructed my life in order to avoid sexism. I have an equitable happy marriage and friends who are loving and just. My current work as a freelancer doesn’t involve sexism, because the bottom line for any freelance job is: Can the freelancer do the job well at a rate we can afford? End of story. It’s not about gender, it’s about money.

But in the past, I’ve had a number of challenging issues relating to sexism, mainly regarding expectations for my behavior. These incidences have never been in a formal workplace because I’ve chosen to work almost entirely with women, but at school or during internships or volunteer programs.

When I did my geology field training one of the goals of a certain male instructor was to get each of the female students to cry by the end of the summer. He succeeded. I, in fact, gave quite a show, including kicking and screaming. Unfortunately, I didn’t kick the instructor.

A different geology professor in college would always lay his massive hands on the female students’ backs as we crawled under the barbed wire fence to get to a rock outcrop. It was as if he didn’t think we were low enough to the ground and needed some help.

During both instances, I resolved to prove myself. I worked harder. I studied longer. It made no difference. I was treated exactly the same way: different than the men. The men were given the leg up, the men were given the hand, and I was shoved on the ground.

It was during this time, just before and into my twenties as I shifted from college to internships, that I remember feeling as though I had lost ownership of my own body. I always seemed to be unwittingly grabbed, fondled, or just rubbed against in the hall. It was like a rock that had been slowly chipped away until nothing was left. It became much worse if I drank (apparently alcohol = easy to many men). It was as if by virtue of being young, my body had become the property of random men who were entitled to touch my breasts, my ass, whatever they needed to get them through the day.

Let me be clear. I never wore short skirts or even short shorts. I never ran around naked. I didn’t flirt. And I always fought back. I pushed people away, I said no, I informed authorities, I wrote letters, I warned others. But the behaviors didn’t go away, life didn’t get any easier, and it was exhausting.

After a certain point, after a night when everything was almost taken from me, I learned how to camouflage myself so that I didn’t get this attention. With glasses, a layer of fat, and big, baggy clothes, I could decrease the amount of unwanted touching. Decrease it, but not eliminate it. At least that fixed part of the problem. If all I wanted was to go through life untouched, I had found one partway avenue open. But unfortunately, I wanted to be taken seriously too. I felt called to ministry.

As a seminarian, during one interview with a church, I was characterized as “flighty” to my face because I had grown up on the West Coast, gone to school on the East Coast, and also lived in New Mexico. At least they didn’t know I was a vegetarian. How did the church know that I could fulfill a two-year part-time committment to them when I had lived in 3 different places in 25 years? They sounded terribly provincial even at the time, but I wonder if they would have had the same criticisms if I had been a man. I probably would have been seen as worldy and experienced.

In every interview for ministerial internships, I was always asked how I balanced my life. I wanted to answer, “Well. I balance it well.” What they meant to ask was, “How will you handle a marriage and children when you are supposed to be married to the church with parishioners as your offspring?” I might have wondered if they expected men to remain unmarried and childless. But I already knew the answer. They didn’t have those expectations for men.

In the end, it seems all about assumptions that we all make about what it means to be female and male. It also seems like it is about what we do to survive.

I have found that in order to survive, in order to live a happy healthy lifestyle, I cannot be around places where overt (or even covert) sexism exists. It wears me down until I am nothing. And when I identify that situation, as I did recently, I eventually walk away. Granted, that may not be mature. It may not correct the problem, but in the long term, I survive this way and I certainly came very close to not surviving before.

But when I read my friend’s blog entry under Not cute or young enough, I was outraged all over again. And part of me is angry that this is still a discussion—that my mother’s generation didn’t end this with the first wave of feminism, and that the second and third wave didn’t seem to resolve the issue either.

I’m unwilling to believe that this is just how it is, I’m disheartened by how slow progress is, and I’m angry.

Eid al-Adha concludes the annual hajj (pilgrimmage to Mecca) and is the most important feast of the Muslim calendar. Eid al-Adha lasts for three days and commemorates Ibraham’s (Abraham) willingness to obey God by sacrificing his son.*

Muslims believe the son to be Ishmael rather than Isaac as told in the Old Testament. Ishmael is considered the forefather of the Arabs. According to the Koran, Ibrahim was about to sacrifice his son when a voice from heaven stopped him and allowed him to sacrifice a ram instead.
The feast re-enacts Ibrahim’s obedience by sacrificing a cow or ram. The family eats about a third of the meal and donates the rest to the poor. The sacrifice is a metaphor for the kinds of sacrifices we must make in order to choose the correct way of life.

*Three religions that are considered western (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) all draw to some degree from what is often called the Old Testament.

Eid al-Adha

Many people, particularly but not limited to women, find that craft projects calm their minds and allow them to connect with a divine presence. In this way, knitting, crocheting, and needlepoint (an Irish needlepoint head covering is pictured) become a way of meditating.

In this charming article, Vatsala Sperling explains how she calms her mind as she crochets hats to raise money for a local Waldorf school. She has found her calling by combining her talent and skills (crocheting and selling) with one of the great needs in her community (affordable and excellent education).

Shawl Ministry, a ministry of women all over the world, knits prayer shawls (also called peace shawls or comfort shawls) for people enduring illness, for women experiencing rites of passage (first menses, last menses), and other struggles.

Thanks to my knitting friend, Elizabeth, for this blog idea post.

Resources on Craft as Spiritual Practice

Being cast out of the garden always seemed like it must have been traumatic. Gardens are often places that people go for meditation. Something about the plants, the soil, the rocks calms people. Some people even have mini-gardens at their desks.

One of the lovely things about working for Houghton Mifflin was the interior courtyard, the Winter Garden, in which tropical plants drooped from the marble walls. The sky lights brought in winter sun. Unfortunately, it was too noisy to work there.

Today is Epiphany, a holiday that has a number of different meanings. Western Christians (Protestants and Catholics) honor Epiphany as a celebration of the three wise men, but it’s considered a fairly minor celebration compared to Christmas.

But for Eastern Christians, Epiphany is also known the feast of Theophony, one of the great feasts of the Eastern (and especially Greek Orthodox) Church, a celebration of the manifestation of the trinity.

Why does this holiday carry two different weights? It is a long story involving the combination of pagan (and I mean “pagan” in a good way) holidays with Christian and the separation of the Eastern and Western Churches. I know this separation may not mean much to most people, but let me tell you, for my Greek relatives, it sounds like the greatest event of the past 2000 years (other than the Armenian holocaust, but that’s a completely different story).

In a lovely essay, Sarah York compares planting a seed to an act of faith. I love this analogy, yet from a practical standpoint, I know how I garden: I overseed every bed and only end up with a few plants. So, frankly, I wonder if I have faith or if I just believe in stacking the odds in my favor.

What do you think faith is?