The Fourth Week of Lent 2025

The Protest(ant) Work Ethic
Work As A Spiritual Practice

This week’s Lenten “W” is work.^* But not gerbil wheel kind of work.  Work as a spiritual discipline. People of faith call that kind of work vocation.

These days, many people are asking “What are we going to do?!” It’s very easy right now to get distracted, in part because those in power in Washington want us to be distracted and exhausted.  We frantically think, “I’ve got to do something about this, I’ve got to do something about that, I don’t know what to do!”

Picking a lane will help us respond to this shock and awe campaign and the flood of bad news.  It is a beneficial spiritual practice to figure out what two or three things we are really called to do to help others at this difficult moment, and to make sure that our democracy doesn’t disappear.

Good things take work—democracy, community, politics all require work. We all have to do it, but each of us can’t do every part of all that work.  We must do our own work according to what our gifts are. When you discern what your work uniquely adds to the common good and the strengthening of democracy, to helping people in this difficult and chaotic time, you are figuring out your vocation. Vocation is a combination of your deepest passions, your spiritual gifts developed over time, and your willingness to share them.

To discern your vocation, it’s helpful to review your life and identify what your spiritual gifts are and how you’ve practiced them—in a paid job, as a volunteer, in relational work in the network of your family and friends.

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

1 Corthinians 12:4-7

So, your work won’t be something new.  It’s what you’ve always done, only now done better, with more urgency. Each of us must ask how our particular gifts can be used strategically in the larger work of protecting our democracy and of caring for people who are part of threatened and vulnerable communities right now.

The work we have to do is real. It really matters, more than it has ever mattered before in our lifetime.  As Marge Piercy says in this poem, it is our work to bring the food in and to put out the fire, to do with massive patience what has to be done again and again to move things forward.

Thinking of that work as a spiritual practice will help us find the way. 

To Be Of Use

By Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

*A reminder to subscribe to “The Cottage” by Diana Butler Bass for her Lenten series, A Lent of Wellbeing and Witness, https://dianabutlerbass.com/the-cottage/