“Be always employed
in something useful,” wrote young Benjamin Franklin, promoting the virtue of
industry and discouraging the wasting of time. “Cut off all unnecessary
actions.” Surely, though, he did not intend that we maintain a perpetual
busy-ness just for its own sake. After all, as Thoreau pointed out, “It is not
enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”
Franklin undoubtedly
meant that we should keep engaged in activities that make us productive members
of society, that advance our prosperity and improve our character. Probably of
less consideration in his era was the more contemporary notion that our work should
also be personally meaningful – in other words, it should nourish our soul.
“Idleness is an
enemy of the soul,” reads The Rule of St. Benedict for monastic living,
written twelve hundred years before Franklin created his list of thirteen
virtues. Though we usually think of the monastic life as contemplative and
spiritual, St. Benedict believed that ora
et labora – prayer and work –
formed a partnership of labor that not only engaged, but united both body and spirit.
When I lived in the
San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1980s I spent more than a year working full-time
at the home of my friend, mentor, and professor, a medievalist named George
Tuma. He had hired me to help him with what I gradually realized would be the
never-ending process of remodeling his home. I was a complete novice at
carpentry – my previous experience wielding a hammer had been limited to
putting together a few prefabricated bookcases – but that wasn’t important to
him; I would acquire the basic skills quickly enough, he knew. What was important to him was that I understood
the spirit of the project and brought the proper attitude for an apprenticeship.
I quickly realized
that this project had more in common with the construction of a cathedral than
the typical home remodeling. In the Middle Ages, the erection of a cathedral
was a Herculean endeavor that often took hundreds of years and involved, in one
way or another, most of the community. It was possible to work one’s entire
adult life on one of those extraordinary edifices of soaring stone arches and
resplendent glass and see neither its beginning nor its completion, but its
purpose was grander than any one person. Participating in raising this holy
monument toward heaven, then, was a centuries-long labor of humility, devotion,
and spiritual satisfaction for generations of individuals and the community as
a whole.
Like the cathedral
builders and monks of the Middle Ages, the medievalist George Tuma had
undertaken a project that was a similar act of daily ora et labora, albeit on a much more modest and personal scale than
that of a cathedral, of course. From replacing the Spanish tiles on the roof of
his single-level home to crafting a skylight to making and hanging doors, George
saw the ongoing construction and remodeling of his home as a lifelong
partnership of prayer and industry, a reflection of the Benedictine imperative
to combine both. He never intended for the work ever to be “finished” – there
was always something to add or change or perfect – because that work was
George’s daily devotion. Each morning that he wasn’t teaching he went to work
on his home with a commitment of body and soul that was as spiritually meaningful
to him as if he were constructing a cathedral. That was the spirit of his
project, and that’s what I had been invited to participate in, and to learn
from.
Mine was an
apprenticeship not only in the craft of carpentry, but in this monastic focus. In
his bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft,
Matthew B. Crawford shied away from acknowledging that there is a mystical dimension
to craftsmanship, but anyone who has experienced the “flow” resulting from focused
manual labor knows that that dimension is part of the “soulcraft,” and knows
how satisfying it is.
Eventually I moved
on from George’s house and out of the San Francisco Bay Area as well, but he
continued teaching and working on his house until he passed away several years
ago. The lessons of that apprenticeship stayed with me: to not only make my Franklinesque
busy-ness productive but to bring to it a Benedictine commitment of body, mind
and soul that make it spiritually meaningful.
From the Ben Franklin Circles Blog, 6/7/17
