the publican of philadelphia
by Andy Coval and Michael Higgins
For what faith really states is precisely that with Jesus it is not possible to distinguish office and person; with him, this differentiation simply becomes inapplicable. The person is the office, the office is the person. Here there is no private area reserved for an “I” which remains in the background behind the deeds and actions and thus at some time or other can be “off duty”; here there is no “I” separate from the work; the “I” is the work and the work is the “I”.
—Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger,
Our lives are fragmented. Both of them. Maybe yours is too. That seems to be the way things work here: people move around, commute from suburbs to cities, have friends all over. Everyone’s spread out, and so are we—especially when it comes to work. There’s fissures running all through our lives, but the broadest and deepest of them cuts between our work and everything else. Indeed, this overarching sense of fragmentation seems to sprout primarily from the fundamental rupture between work and life. And it’s grating on us.
It seems like it’s grating on Pope Benedict XVI as well. The Holy Father calls us to many things in Caritas in Veritate, but the challenge that resonates most deeply with the two of us, and that seems to speak directly to that sense of fragmentation, is the insistence on integration that runs through his most recent encyclical.
Throughout the document, the Holy Father approaches and presents various topics not as a series of rigidly delineated compartments, but as organic, integrated wholes. This posture is perhaps most evident in his insistence that all development be directed towards the organic whole of the human person, towards “the whole of the person in every single dimension” (11). This emphasis on integration, however, extends far beyond the Pope’s anthropology. It encompasses, for example, his understanding of the document Caritas in Veritate itself: he insists that the encyclical be situated within the organic whole of Catholic social teaching, which represents “a single teaching, consistent and at the same time ever new” (12). This organic whole of Catholic social teaching, in turn, can only be understood within the context of the organic whole of “the Church’s ever-living Tradition,” as flowing from and related to the entirety of Church teaching (12). To this end, the Holy Father makes explicit the links between social ethics, life ethics, and evangelization as interrelated parts of the integrated whole of Catholic doctrine (15), and he later highlights the connection between the Church’s teaching on environmental stewardship and those on matters of “life, sexuality, marriage, the family” (51). He even applies this hermeneutic of integration to education and scholarship, decrying “the excessive segmentation of knowledge” and urging us to understand and engage our disparate fields not as isolated and self-sufficient, but as part of “a harmonious interdisciplinary whole” (31).
This call to integration runs alongside another of Pope Benedict’s chief concerns: challenging us to reimagine the array of economic questions, problems, and possibilities that confront us, and to recast our economic activity in the Truth. So we’ve both been reimagining what our own economic activity—our work—could and should be; and we’ve been reimagining it in terms of integration. We’ve been imagining what it would mean to have our work integrated into our lives, into our faith and our relationship with Christ, into the whole of our persons. We’ve been contemplating the Holy Father’s claim that “authentically human social relationships of friendship, solidarity and reciprocity can also be conducted within economic activity, and not only outside it or ‘after’ it,” and that “the principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as an expression of fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity” (36). And all this reimagining and contemplating has brought us to the conclusion that, while the Holy Father’s call might lead to various concrete applications in various concrete situations, for the two of us right now, the biggest obstacle to our work’s incorporating solidarity and gratuity is the fault line that cuts it off from the rest of our lives. Our work isn’t integrated, and we think it needs to be.
This reimagining, furthermore, hasn’t been abstract speculation; it’s been based on concrete experience. We’ve each lived in situations where our work was integrated into our lives, and our lives were integrated wholes: Andy for two years as a novice and simply professed monk in a Benedictine monastery, and Mike for a year as a missionary in Brazil. As a monk and a missionary, we both worked, and we worked hard—Andy a teacher in the high school run by the monastery, and Mike in outreach ministry to the poor in the neighborhood where he lived—and this work was central to our lives. Our jobs now, in fact, are remarkably similar to those we had before: Andy now teaches in a high school, and Mike works with the homeless as a social worker. Yet while the content of work hasn’t shifted radically, the way we approach and experience work—and, consequently, the way we approach and experience life—has changed, and changed radically. The root of that difference, however, does not lie with a change in the content of the work; it lies instead with the loss of the overarching rhythms and structures that governed our lives and into which work—along with prayer, friendships, study, leisure, celebration, and everything else—was integrated.
As beautiful as those lives were, however, we both left them, and we did so for the same reason: beneath the attraction to the monastery and the mission, we felt called, and still do at this point in our discernment, to marriage and family. Yet not to marriage and family as one more fragment in competition with work, prayer, and friendships for our time and energy, but to marriage and family as integrated into a coherent whole; or, perhaps better, to marriage and family as the fundamental vocation into which the entirety of our lives—including our prayer and our work—are coherently integrated. Such a married life, we believe, would be governed largely by variations on those rhythms and structures that gave shape and substance to our lives in the monastery and the mission. In what remains of this article, we’d like to describe some of those rhythms and structures and explain why they affected us so profoundly, to describe our current lives and explain what concretely is lacking now, and to explore ways in which we might reclaim and reintegrate our lives outside of the monastery and the mission.
Living in One Physical Space
“It struck me that you lived and died in one place here. I saw it to be all one unit, the cohesion and the coherence. Everything was one.”
—Mother Benedict Duss, Foundress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis, on her first visit to a Benedictine monastery.
As a monk, Andy lived in a monastery, and as a missionary, Mike lived in a neighborhood. Now, in Philadelphia, we each sleep in a neighborhood. And then we each work in another neighborhood. Some days, either one of us might pray in a third neighborhood, see friends in a fourth neighborhood, or maybe even visit family in a fifth neighborhood that’s all the way in another town. As a monk and a missionary, we prayed and worked, slept and ate, entered into and built up relationships, all in the same place.
In Brazil, Mike’s work consisted of welcoming friends into his home and visiting them in theirs. Almost all of those homes were in his neighborhood, and he could walk there from home, two-by-two with one of his companions in community, in less than ten minutes. His own home, in turn, included a chapel with the Blessed Sacrament, where his prayer life was centered—centered within the same physical space where he shared the rest of his life with his community. He spent the vast majority of his time inside the same neighborhood, and much of that time inside the same house. Similarly, when Andy was in the monastery, the bed where he slept, the school where he taught, the church where he prayed, and the brothers with whom he shared life were all physically located within the monastery.
In both cases, there was one place where we worked, lived, and prayed; there was one place where each of our lives, as a unified whole, was poured out. We each, of course, had vacations and regular outings to prevent a sense of stagnation and of being trapped, and to maintain a real connection with the world beyond our specific communities. Yet when we left on such outings, we each left a clear and undisputed center of gravity, a place where we spent the bulk of the bulk of our days, into which we were deeply integrated, and in which the vast majority of our energy, time, and persons were invested.
Now, we both live in Philadelphia with several other guys who, praise God, share our faith. We even have a chapel in our house, and live right next to a church where there’s Mass every morning. We’ve been given the grace of praying Night Prayer together most nights, but we can’t pray together during the day, because we all have jobs; we can’t go to Mass together in the morning, because we all have different schedules. Each of us works in the other side of the city, and after working there for a year, we both feel familiar with and comfortable in those places; but they aren’t home. And neither, somehow, is the place where we live. Again, we feel comfortable there, but in the sense that this is the place we come back to at night, where we enjoy some strong friendships rooted in Christ, and where we sleep—it’s where parts of our lives happen, but not where we live. Ultimately, there is no place where we live now; there are various places competing with each other for the fragments.
The lack of such a clear physical center of gravity is perhaps the most obvious way in which our lives now are fragmented. Indeed, a big chunk of the fragmentation we feel could just be a function of driving a half-hour to work everyday, of having so many different physical places of which we’re a part that we never really get grounded in any of them. But while that physical rooting is important, even essential, the problem goes deeper that that as well.
Work Integrated into Prayer
“How pleasing to our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is the short quarter of an hour that we steal from our occupations, from something of no use, to come and pray to Him, to visit Him, to console Him.”
—St. John Vianney
Neither of us prays enough. For the most part, prayer functions as something like the bookends of our days: we pray before work begins to prepare ourselves for the day, and we pray when work ends to offer the day to the Lord. And we certainly offer up little remembrances, requests, thanks, and praises amidst our daily activity, and that’s certainly important, but it can’t substitute for time spent alone with the Lord, focusing all of our attention and all of our person on Him, reorienting, regrounding, and rejuvenating ourselves in Him.
This article is about integrating our lives. As Christians, however, the only sort of integration that ultimately matters is integrating ourselves into Christ, incorporating ourselves into His body. We want to integrate our work into our lives, but only so that we can then give our lives, whole and entire, to the Lord, who demands our whole selves, not our fragments. If it is in prayer and in the sacraments that we encounter Christ most immediately, then it follows logically that to integrate our work into our lives, we must integrate our work into our prayer—not by praying before and after work, but by structuring our work in such a way that it is infused with prayer, built on prayer, and flows from prayer—prayer that is regular and distinct from the rest of our activity.
Again, that can sound abstract, but in the mission and the monastery, it was very concrete: our lives were structured in such a way that we never went more than a few hours without setting aside our activity, physically walking into the chapel, and focusing totally on Christ. And it made such a difference: it certainly wasn’t always easy, and there were times of aridity as in anything, but for both of us, beneath the feelings, deep down, regular and distinct prayer created a sense of substance and solidity in our lives, a constantly renewed orientation towards, connection with, and sustenance from our Lord. As a consequence, life was integrated, for it was all integrated into, and seen through the lens of, our relationship with Christ. Our work was able to be included in that integration largely because we never worked more than a few hours before setting aside the work, taking substantial time to recenter ourselves in Christ, and then returning to work.
Yet it wasn’t only a matter of frequency of prayer: the root of the problem now isn’t that we don’t spend enough time praying, it’s that even the time we do spend praying is qualitatively different than it was in the monastery and the mission, because it’s severed from our work. In those settings, we didn’t just pray regularly, we prayed in a way that drew from and breathed into the rest of our lives—lives that were wrapped up in community. We both experienced a life in which, as a community, we prayed within the space where, as a community, we lived and worked; as a community, we brought that common life and common work to the Lord and found strength in Him so that, as a community, we could return to our mission of proclaiming to the world the Lord whom we had met and adored in prayer. Those acts of prayer and work within the same space and alongside the same people forged a unity between prayer and work, which, in turn, forged a unity of our lives, which became lives of Ora et Labora—but only insofar as Ora and Labora were united by concrete people and places.
Work and Prayer United by Community
“Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.”
—John Paul II, Labores Exercens
It’s different now, though. Now we each have coworkers with whom we spend more time than anyone else in our lives, and alongside whom we give ourselves to the poor or to students, but with whom we can’t pray—at least not to the extent that would solidly and sustainably ground us in Christ. At the same time, but in an entirely different physical space, we have friends with whom we share our faith and who might lie closer to the center of our hearts, but with whom we don’t share work—at least not the work in which we are primarily invested and that demands the bulk of our time and energy in a given day. Ultimately, the sense of fragmentation we’ve been describing takes many forms, but at or near the root of it is the fact that we have one set of places and relationships centered on prayer, and another set of places and relationships centered on work. Our fragmented lives are built on a set of fragmented communities.
Conversely, our unified lives as monk and missionary were built on unified communities—communities that shared faith, prayer, and work within a single place. It was ultimately those communities, our fellow monks and missionaries, who served as the concrete center around which the rest of life cohered; it was that nexus of deep, Christ-centered relationship that served as the locus of prayer and the locus of work. Prayer and work were thereby integrated into each other, reinforcing and informing each other as our prayer gave direction to our work and our work gave substance to our prayer and both, together, as a coherent whole, formed our lives. This integration, however, was only possible because of the concrete reality of those persons with whom we shared life and because of the very real bonds that stretched between us and sprung from our shared faith, prayer, place and work.
Closing Thoughts and Moving Forward
Community is the place where work and prayer—work and life—meet. And that sort of community is what we want; it’s what we need if we are to be faithful to this call to marriage without being sucked dry in an environment that can’t accommodate the sort of prayerfulness and groundedness to which we also feel called. What it would mean to concretely reconcile and pursue those two calls—to marriage and family and to integration through community—isn’t terribly difficult to imagine. The actual work could depend on the specific gifts of the community and the specific needs of the neighborhood. In broad strokes, however, it could mean our living in close physical proximity to other families and single people who share our commitment to Christ and His Church. It could mean committing with them to live in and serve a particular neighborhood through a common work, and to build this work on a common and intense life of prayer. It could mean that this work, in turn, would not be just a hobby, a charitable activity, or a side-project, but a full-time job, our primary economic activity and the means by which we support ourselves and our families.
In terms of the externals, such a life could ultimately look a lot like fairly traditional ways of raising a family and earning a living. One of our great-grandfathers, for example, owned a Laundromat with his brother, and their business was on the same block as their respective houses, which, in turn, were right next to one another. Throughout their adult lives, they lived together, worked together, raised their families together, and attended Sunday Mass together. The only fundamental differences between the life we’re proposing and such a traditional family business lie in scale and in the fact that our communion would be based not on biological kinship, but on spiritual kinship and a shared discipline of prayer—and we would be all the stronger for it.
Still, this may all sound radical. But then, that to which Pope Benedict is calling us is radical, and is radical specifically regarding our economic activity. This model we’ve outlined of communities sharing faith, place, prayer, and work is but one response to the Holy Father’s challenge—yet the two of us are convinced that without those specific elements, our own work will remain split off from our lives and our lives will remain fragmented and frustrated. We’ve tried living like that, we’ve tried navigating those fragments, and it’s left us chopped-up and empty.
But it’s not left us without hope: God has placed us in each other’s path, and we’ve drawn strength from our shared experience, dissatisfaction, and desires. And we’ve met a few others who also feel called to serve Christ and His Church through concretely integrating their work into a community of shared faith and prayer, to do so in full communion with and obedience to the Church, and to do so in a way that’s open to all states of life. So in that hope, we’re ready to try something else—or at least to start thinking about what, concretely, something else might look like and what, concretely, we can do now to move towards realizing it. We’ve tried offering a few principles along which one such something else might run, but this vision isn’t complete, it needs other insights and perspectives, it needs trimming and refining, its needs expanding and deepening. But it’s a place to start.
A Place to Start
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