By Christi Humphrey
‘08
Someone said to me
recently that it takes as many years as you were in seminary to reestablish
yourself once you have graduated. I don’t know if this is always true, but I do
know that it has taken me several years to adjust to life outside seminary. My
husband, son, and I sold our home and moved to the Episcopal Divinity School
campus for the three years I was a student. After graduating, we rented a home
in Watertown, Mass., while I attended a program at the Center for Religious
Development, where I earned a Certificate in Spiritual Direction.
For those four
years, living my faith seemed fairly straightforward. I was surrounded by other
Christians. I studied prayer, scripture, and ministry. Community worship was
offered daily a few steps away from my home. After graduating, my first
ministry position was as a part-time minister of spiritual care for two
Episcopal parishes an hour away from home. Living my faith continued to be an
extension of the work I did.
There was time in my
day for prayerful silence, sacred reading, and contemplation.
In October 2011,
three years after graduating from EDS and needing the financial support of
full-time employment, I left ministry in the Church to become an assistant
store manager for an off-price retail chain. Living my faith suddenly took on a
whole new meaning. No longer was I cocooned with people who practiced the same
religion I did. Even harder to adjust to was the fact that religion, God, and
spirituality were not politically correct topics for discussion in the
lunchroom. I was used to speaking about faith and God’s presence in the world
openly, but working in a secular environment, I found I had to find new ways to
express myself. I seemed to move at a totally different pace than was the
custom in the retail world. My fellow managers rarely took breaks or stopped
for lunch. They regularly worked overtime. They spoke infrequently about their
lives outside of work, and did not engage hourly store associates in conversation
about topics other than work. With the increase in my work hours, 40-55 hours a
week instead of 20-30, it became harder and harder to find time, to make time,
for prayer, spiritual reading, and meditation. Instead of slowing down to
appreciate the season of Advent, being in retail meant working six days a week,
including most Sundays.
Working in the
secular world, I struggled to maintain spiritual practices. I thought that
living my faith meant creating a space to be in relationship with God apart
from my work. It was hard to find God in the ever changing store environment,
where the atmosphere was one of competition and not contemplation. My struggle
led to a reexamination of what it meant to live my faith daily. I decided I
needed to find ways to see God in the work I was doing and the people that I
came in contact with. Three simple practices helped me do that.
The first thing I
did was buy a plant for my desk. Luckily, I didn’t spend a lot of time in the
back office. It was a sealed-off box of a room with no windows, white walls,
and no decorations, but the living plant connected me to the natural world and
helped me remember God’s created world outside that room.
The next thing I
began to do was to say a prayer each time I was called to the front of the
store to help an associate, to greet a customer, to meet the armored car
driver, to help move a piece of furniture. I prayed that I would find Christ in
the one I met and also bring Christ to them. I adopted this practice after
reading about a Jesuit who greeted people daily at a monastery for 60 years.
When asked how he was able to do this for so many years, he responded, “I
sought Christ in each person I met.”
Finally, I began to
pray regularly for the work I was doing and the people I worked with. Even though
it wasn’t as easy for me to find God in the hustle and bustle of merchandising,
I tried to pray each day as I drove to work and prepared myself for what the
day would bring. This was something I did when I worked with congregations, but
for some reason it took me a while to begin this practice in the secular world.
My spiritual reading at the time included Joan Chittister’s The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages.
A portion of The Rule discusses daily
manual labor. Chittister states, “The function of the spiritual life is not to
escape into the next world; it is to live well in this one … Work and prayer
are opposite sides of the great coin of a life that is both holy and useful,
immersed in God and dedicated to the transcendent in the human. It is labor’s
transfiguration of the commonplace, the transformation of the ordinary that
makes co-creators of us all.”
My experience
working in retailing for a year helped strengthen my faith. It helped me see
that there is no need to separate living my faith from my work. In fact, what
God calls us to do is to live every part of each day in God’s presence. God
waits patiently to be invited in, to be recognized in the ordinary routines of
each day.
What has been your
experience of living your faith day-to-day? What ways have you found to
“transform the ordinary” to experience the presence of the divine? This article
is posted on the EDS blog so you can share your own experiences.
May our hearts and
minds be open to God’s invitation to find the divine in the everyday, and may
God guide us to express the hope we know through faith in our work.
Christi Humphrey ’08
is the Director of Alumni/ae and Constituent Engagement at Episcopal Divinity
School.
