Stand and Wait (Abram Van Engen)
The new home office
Many of us are waking up to a world of suspended work. We will carry on, of course, but the load we can carry will not be what it was before. While healthcare workers and others pick up double duty, some will tend to children while typing emails, and all of us will wade through anxiety and extra precaution while attempting to accomplish our tasks. In whatever state we find ourselves, there is only so much that can be done. If we had fallen into the trap of defining our worth through our work, this season could come as a spiritual reckoning.
Christians have often fallen into that trap. I know I have myself, and in part it is because of the way work has been spiritualized. Talk of “vocation” in many Christian traditions has translated into making productivity a gauge of our usefulness to God.
That is never what the word “vocation” meant, but one can easily see how it happened. As Lee Hardy summarizes in The Fabric of this World, Martin Luther and John Calvin both viewed vocation as a participation “in God’s ongoing providence for the human race.” Our work makes us partners in God’s care of this world. Responsibilities result from an intentional design of interdependence. God wanted us to need each other, and so “we are obliged to find a station in life where our gifts can indeed be employed for the sake of our neighbor’s good.” The point is “our neighbor’s good.” Yet traditions flowing from Luther, Calvin, and others have often elevated work as a measure of just how much good we can do.
Perhaps now is the time to rethink the meaning of vocation and return us to “our neighbor’s good.” What happens to vocation when “our neighbor’s good” is best served by staying put?
Many Christians have raised these questions before, often by seeing their achievements melt away in unexpected circumstances. When the renowned Catholic priest, professor, and writer Henri Nouwen left his prestigious academic posts at Yale and Harvard for L’Arche Daybreak (a community for the developmentally disabled), he quickly came to see how little his awards meant in his new community. As he later explained, “The first thing that struck me … was that their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then. Since nobody could read my books, they could not impress anyone, and since most of them never went to school, my twenty years at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard did not provide a significant introduction.” Nouwen had to relearn what it meant to serve his neighbor’s good.
What he learned, in the end, was a new view of himself. “These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self,” he wrote, “—the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things—and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.”
Perhaps my favorite account of this new realization comes from the great poet John Milton. As he was beginning to go blind in middle age, he raged at God, wondering what could possibly be asked or required of him without his sight. This is the response he heard:
God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.
To “wait,” as Milton knew, has a wonderfully double meaning. On the one hand, it entails a great deal of activity, serving a patron, a client, a king—to wait on them hand and foot. But “wait” also means to cease from activity altogether, to stand still, to wait. And in Milton’s case, and for many of us now, the two had become one. To serve is to wait, and to wait is to serve.
I have taught this poem to many different audiences, and each time the elderly have responded most emotionally. Many of them have come to a point where productivity cannot be their measure of worth. Instead, they serve by bearing up under God’s yoke, witnessing without glory or honors to a love that considers first “our neighbor’s good.”
In college, I knew a man like that. He was in his 90s when I met him. He had once been a college president, a scholar, a person of great ambition and activity. But none of that mattered anymore. I knew him only as a kind man with a cup of coffee who sat beside students and asked them how they were doing. And that bit of waiting did so much good for me.
We cannot bring people a cup of coffee right now, but we can still ask them how they are doing. And maybe, in our current moment, that is precisely what they need.
As many of us enter into a season of suspended labor, stretched thin yet accomplishing less than ever before, perhaps we are being called not just to protect the elderly, but to emulate what so many of them have learned: “they also serve who only stand and wait.”
Abram Van Engen is a Carver Project Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Recommended Readings:
Lee Hardy, The Fabric of This World: Inquiries into Calling, Career Choice, and the Design of Human Work
John Milton, “When I Consider How My Light is Spent”
Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership
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