Sacred Work and Sacred Professions

The NSP is building campaigns to change the way we organize the world of work. One part of that is bringing the “New Bottom Line” into the world of work. We are looking for people in every possible line of work to help create a professional or work-based task force to enlist others in the process of transforming your own profession or work place. Obviously, this is a long-term process, and we are seeking people who are willing to start that process now!

So after reading all this below, if you want to help us build a professional task force in your area of work, please contact cat@spiritualprogressives.org and tell her about your reactions to what you read below and what you’d be willing to do in terms of time commitment, focus, outreach to others in your work world or profession, and what parts of what you’ve read below resonates most deeply for you.

Our work and professional task forces are a way to help us create workplaces that are not merely endured as a means to earn a living, but instead become a place where people can experience work and life as a way to live a life of meaning and purpose.

Work can take on a whole different character when we feel it to be part of a sacred contribution to the highest values of the community.

Revisioning Work: A Spiritual Practice

Part of the strategy for our national professional task forces is to encourage people in each profession or workplace to envision the world that you really want to live in, not just the way things are now, and then envision how you’d construct your own profession or workplace.

Here is the process:

Get together with four to six fellow workers at your workplace, or with people in the same profession or line of work and spend an afternoon or evening on the following topic: What could this workplace, profession or type of work look like if we had a new bottom line? Imagine if our bosses, supervisors, and colleagues all agreed that we were going to be judged efficient or productive to the extent that our office practices, the products we produced, the services we offered, and the way we promoted our services and products created or helped promote love and caring awe and wonder ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and ecological responsibility.

The hardest part of this discussion is to get rid of what we call “the reality police,” all those voices in our own heads that tell us that “they” won’t let us make these changes and that therefore we are wasting our time even thinking about all this. As long as people allow the reality police to hold them back, the discussions will remain stunted and uninspired.

When people allow themselves to truly engage in this discussion, they end up with the most amazingly creative and inspiring ideas. The discussion of how to change your own work world or profession can often lead to a new kind of “consciousness raising group” that broadens the question from the world of work to our whole lives. The question then becomes, “What would be different in our lives if we lived in a world with this new Emancipatory Spirituality as its bottom line?”

We start with this question in the world of work, but quickly the discussion broadens to our family lives, our relationships with neighbors and friends, the kind of media to which our children are exposed, the kinds of social pressures we face, the kinds of products we consume, the degree of safety we feel in our streets, the problems we face building loving relationships.

The more we allow ourselves to enter into this “fantasy” the more we become aware of how very distorted our lives are in our contemporary “reality.”

We have begun these conversations in the area of Mental Health, Education, and Law and welcome others to join our efforts. If you are interested in being part of a taskforce, please email cat@spiritualprogressives.org.