Why We Need Sunday

Are you caught up in the rat race or do you get a chance to sharpen the axe and refuel the spirit? GRAHAM WILLIAMS makes the case for a proper rest on Sunday.

Is a seamless work and worship life possible?

We are commanded to observe the Sabbath day, keep it holy, dedicate it to God, and to rest in him. Is this a reasonable command? There has been debate about whether such observance or duty is still relevant today, and whether or not we should play sport, work, heal, or do anything that takes our focus off the Sabbath.

On the whole it seems reasonable to refrain from judging where and how others spend their Sabbath, and rather to think about what it means personally to ourselves and our practices.

Here are some points we could mull over.

Am I unable to rest?

Are you caught in a hamster wheel? Do you take pride in being busy, even overwhelmed?

The Bergen Work Addiction Scale,  devised by clinical psychologist Dr Cecilie Andreassen and her team at the University of Bergen, Norway, found that close to 10% of that population suffer from problematic workaholism. This “seems unrelated to gender, education level, marital status, or part-time versus full-time employment”.

If you answer “often” or “always” on four or more of the following seven statements, it may suggest you are a workaholic, and you may need to seek help.

You think of how you can free up more time to work.

You spend much more time working than initially intended.

You work in order to reduce feelings of guilt, anxiety, helplessness and depression.

You have been told by others to cut down on work.

You become stressed if you are prohibited from working.

You prioritise work over hobbies, leisure activities, and exercise.

You work so much it has negatively influenced your health.

A workaholic has gone far beyond being a hard worker or having a good work ethic, and is a “work-obsessed individual who gradually becomes emotionally crippled and addicted to power and control in a compulsive drive to gain approval and public recognition of success”.

It is an addiction, impacts heavily and negatively on family life, and on the person’s perspective, behaviour (“nothing else matters”) and character (when the person is ego-driven, seeks perfection at work and their “feeling function no longer informs judgment”), according to Dr Barbara Killinger.

Workaholics are riddled with (usually unconscious) fears, tend to become control freaks, are afraid to delegate. They may develop panic attacks, depression and sleep difficulties.

Deep down they lack self-esteem. This often results in them being unable to say no for fear of displeasing others. They are prone to a lack of empathy, a breakdown of ethics and values, and to denying their addiction.

Do I “sharpen the axe”?

Sadly, the profit-maximisation motive, structures, cultures, roles, controls and behaviour norms in far too many organisations today still reflect machine and psychic prison metaphors.

We are reminded all too often, as the late poet Maya Angelou is reported to have said, that “making a living is not the same thing as making a life”. We exclaim that there must be more to life than to be a cog in someone else’s great machine.

It’s 2016 but we still have “line managers”, a carry-over from production lines in the machine age. Many people are effectively nothing more than “factors of production”, “human resources” or “human capital”.

In such organisations a paradigm usually develops where individual self-interest and survival takes precedence over others and the community. It’s interesting that the root of the Greek word mechane (machine, mechanistic) means “to trick”, an illusion. In these places, we find ourselves putting on and wearing protective armour against the fear of disapproval, conflict, loss, attachment, being hurt, judged, humiliated, punished, exposed, made vulnerable, isolated, rejected, made uncomfortable, criticised—against having our aspirations and cravings blocked (often unconsciously). 

This “protective” armour may manifest in our demeanour, prejudices, withdrawal or disengagement, arrogance, indifference, aggression, cynicism, greed, how we interact with others—again, often at an unconscious level.

Temporary escape from such situations becomes a powerful need.

A concept popularised by Stephen Covey, author of the bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, in the late 1980s was “sharpening the axe”: to find ways and means of relaxing and becoming refreshed in order to continue serving our work life (whether once or twice a week, every fortnight or month), and as a means to try and maintain a work-family-social life balance.

The “doing” part of sharpening the axe is necessary. We do need vacations, rest, pauses. But ultimately, it is about “being”, about our humanity, about what 20th-century German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper called “a condition of the soul”.

Pieper referred to lack of leisure as being a suppression of freedom and called upon us to pay “contemplative attention to things”. Leisure for the ancient Greeks was an ideal, and the word depicts “a state of being free from the necessity to labour”, with contemplation seen as “the key to moving from the materialistic world towards self-actualisation”.

For most of us, reality is very different.  But perhaps contemplation is, as Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams said in an address to the 2012 Synod of Bishops in Rome, “the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit”.

Archbishop Williams advised: “To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.”

Is a seamless work and worship life possible?

In a wonderful section of his book titled Work as Opus, Jungian therapist Thomas Moore points to work as probably the most unconscious of all of our daily activities, yet potentially the most important soul component of our spiritual lives—which is not about religiosity but about the fundamental essence of what it means to be fully human, how we relate to others, and how we access meaning.

He sees that work can be something “that both awakens and satisfies the very root of our being”. It is a soul aspect that lies outside ourselves, and mirrors back to us who we are, and what we can be. When we do what we are meant to do this brings transcending intensity, passion, acceptance of self, peace. Work becomes our “opus rather than aptitude”.

Thus finding a higher purpose and meaning in our work, a reason for being, surely becomes a worthwhile quest?

This is the thrust of The Virtuosa Organisation: the Importance of Virtues for a Successful Business, a book I wrote with Dorian Haarhoff and Peter Fox which was published in 2015 (www.haloandnoose.com).

The Spiritual Leadership and Management movement is one of many organisations that are springing up and offer help and insight along the journey.

Consider this story: Once in an old medieval city, there were three bricklayers hard at work on the same building. A man walking past asked each of them what they were doing.

The first man answered gruffly: “I’m laying bricks.” The second man replied: “I’m building a wall.”

The third man answered enthusiastically: “I’m building a cathedral.”

There is a difference between a job, a career and a calling.

A cautionary word from the mystic Fr Thomas Merton: “We can love and be called to our work, yet not worship it nor invest our identity in it, nor obtain our security, esteem and importance from it. Rather we can recognise that all we have, all that we are, all our gifts, all come from God.”

An ‘If-Then’ proposition

If we are not addicted to work, do not rely on it for our identity and esteem, have no need to constantly balance our work, family, social and worship lives, can repose in a state where these are blended and we find contentment in a higher purpose and meaning, then spontaneously observing the Sabbath day and its rhythm—keeping it holy, dedicating it to God, and resting in him—is sure to follow.

It becomes a delightful gift of freedom, an escape from being enslaved by unwanted desires, fears, institutions, and pressures.

Graham Williams is an author, executive coach and a certified management consultant active in leadership development.