Clarification about my God and Work Project

We have been led to believe that we must make choices- family or work, the good of the earth or the corporation, our good or the good of others, spirit or commerce.  Our time and our minds are splintered into a thousand parcels.  Yet we were born of this earth, into families, which cannot exist outside of communities and organized activity we call "work". Work is born of our imagination and what we have done with it what we have to serve our needs - whether that be gathering berries, plowing the field, working the factory line, building sky scrapers, dancing in front of an audience, or programming code.  As time went by it simply made sense to say, "hey you go shoot arrows at things, and I will go over  there and dig because I can't shoot worth a darn."  While the complexity of our work and lives has certainly increased, any line drawn between the realms of spirit and work is arbitrary. 

The difficulty in imagining work and spirit woven together within a larger whole stems from our Western habit of dividing the world into discrete categories. The habit of breaking things into specialized parts, while beneficial for advances in knowledge and efficiency, has some unfortunate consequences.  In a world where our perspectives are so splintered, our connection to each other and to the sacred is trivialized.

We in the West have relegated theology to churches, temples, or very small sections of academia.  For the vast majority, their participation is nothing more than enjoying poetry of some ancient words for a brief moment only to return to the drudgery of life with no different viewpoint or appreciation of who they are.  As a simple matter of time, even if we spent one hour per day praying and three hours per week attending a religious service, religion would be less than 6% of us.  And few among us can muster even that.  Yet, on the other hand, by necessity, most of us spend at least 30% working, and the rest recovering from work and replenishing our bodies so we can return to it again. 

I propose that by nature we desire a whole experience of the world- one in which work and spirit, individual and community, earth and its inhabitants participate.  We prefer a world in which work serves us, as opposed to us serving work.  Call it what you will or even fail to define it, you prefer some mystery, some reason for hope, some belief, or some faith.  Life is difficult, why do you bother?

Now, go somewhere where the city lights are dim and look up at the sky and think about what you are looking at. Zoom out as many miles as can you imagine.  A million, a billion, even more. Hold there for a moment and look back. Imagine you are outside the boundaries and you can see the universe as a whole, perhaps you can see our galaxy as a distant speck among this whole.  Then as quickly as you can zoom back in. You see the galaxy, then the earth, then your country, your community, your family, and finally yourself standing there. Go even further if you like; you see your eye, then travel to the back of the eye, then travel through a nerve, up the nerve, into a collection of electronic impulses organized by an organic object we call the brain. Now, you are back standing there looking at the stars. As pro-ponderous as this sounds, you are in fact viewing light that has traveled that far and more that was born that many years before it touched your eye.  


Light is something so powerful it can survive that long and travel that far, yet delicate enough that it does not disturb you.  What is that light made of?   Physicists have spent a great deal of time studying and thinking about light.  In separate experiments they have proven it acts as both a continuous wave and also as tiny separate packets.  Make no doubt about it, light is remained a conundrum to even the most brilliant of our scientists.  

Out of the conundrum of light, has emerged a discipline of study called "quantum physics". It is a collection of theories formed into a particular scientific way of understanding the world we live in.  A quantum physics perspective see the entire universe from the largest viewpoint down to the smallest particles as a vast flow of energetic processes, unfolding in rapid succession.  Within this flow, everything from the largest objects down to the smallest particles has its own process of movement.  Each small movement is effected by the next and included in the larger. In this way, everything is interlaced in a vast pool of becoming.  Life, everything that exists for that matter, is by its very nature whole and connected.  We are made from the dust of the earth, which in turn is just the ancient dust of the universe collected there together and delicately protected from the amazing, powerful, and fearful chaos all around us.

Call it what you will, the implementation of life by god or the evolution of life, life is a creative process. I think we can all agree that the creation of life on earth stems from prior life, in fact cannot exist without prior life, and regardless of religion by faith we believe it will continue to happen for as long as we know.  The creative processes is the expression of divine activity.  It is an expression of the individual and the whole, of a point in time influenced by prior points, in turn influencing the future.  

If we can accept the fundamental notion that divinity can inhabit the fruits of our labor, the divide between work and God has the potential for being bridged.