Spirit Journal – September 2020

About Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was one of the most influential contemplatives of the 20^th century. He was an American Trappist monk, best-selling author of more than 50 books, poet, social activist, and scholar of comparative religion. Merton wrote about spirituality, social justice and pacifism; his best-known work is probably his compelling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). Merton’s work helped to jump-start renewed interest in Christian mysticism and drew strong linkages between contemplation and social action. He was also an effective proponent of inter-spiritual dialog and understanding.

According to Alan Jacobs, distinguished professor of humanities at Baylor University, “Merton was a remarkable man by any measure, but perhaps the most remarkable of his traits was his hypersensitivity to social movements from which, by virtue of his monastic calling, he was supposed to be removed. Intrinsic to Merton’s nature was a propensity for being in the midst of things.”

About Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1897. Her family moved to the San Franciso Bay area and then to Chicago where she was baptized in the Episcopal Church.  She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana and became interested in radical social causes as a way to help workers and the poor.  In 1916, she moved to New York City where she worked as a journalist on socialist newspapers, participated in protest movements, and developed friendships with many famous artists and writers.

Dorothy had grown to admire the Catholic Church as the “Church of the poor” and her faith began to take form with the birth of her daughter in 1926.  Her decision to have her daughter baptized and embrace the Catholic faith led to the end of her common law marriage and the loss of many of her radical friends. While covering the 1932 Hunger March in Washington, D.C. for some Catholic magazines, she prayed at the national Shrine of the Immaculate Conception that some way would open up for her to serve the poor and the unemployed.  The following day, she met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant and former Christian Brother, who had a vision for a society constructed of Gospel values.  Together they founded the Catholic Worker newspaper which spawned a movement of houses of hospitality and farming communes that has been replicated throughout the United States and other countries.

At the Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day lived a life faithful to the injunctions of the Gospel.  Often the newspaper quoted G.K. Chesterton’s famous observation that Christianity hadn’t really failed — it had never really been tried.  Day’s life was spent trying.  She was shot at while working for integration, prayed and fasted for peace at the Second Vatican Council, received communion from Pope Paul VI at the 1967 International Congress of the Laity, and addressed the 1976 Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia.  Her pilgrimage ended at Maryhouse in New York City on November 29, 1980, where she died among the poor.

About Julie Leininger Pycior

Julie Leininger Pycior is professor emerita of history at Manhattan College.  In addition to her new book on Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, she has published on Merton in The Merton Annual and, most recently, in a prize-winning article in American Catholic Studies co-authored with Lawrence Cunningham, James Martin, SJ, and Monica Weis, SSJ.  The author of three previous books, she also edited the bestselling Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times, by Bill Moyers.  She lectures widely and has a PhD from the University of Notre Dame.

The Wisdom in Having Two Sets of Hands

After several twists and turns, my business has settled into a focus on the restoration of architectural wood.  While I started out the business as a solo venture, I soon recognized, like many self-employed craftsmen, the wisdom of having two sets of hands.  (Hence, the iconic model of the “mom and pop” store.)  And so, for many years now, I have had a full-time assistant working with me.

But it took more years than I’d like to admit to realize that the quality of the assistant I hire makes a huge difference in my work product.  If a business has fifteen employees, one mediocre worker isn’t going to sink the ship.  But when that worker represents 50% of the workforce…?

Nevertheless, one of the difficulties small-business owners face is that one has ten hats to wear, but only one head.  So, one is always scrambling to make limited resources stretch to meet the demands.  And one area where this limitation has always dogged me is in the hiring process. For a number of years, now, I have been blessed with a healthy backlog of work—customers willing to wait months until I am available.  But the downside of this abundance is that I’ve always got to keep moving.  So, in the past, when an assistant has quit or been let go, I’ve needed to move quickly to rehire.

Added to this urgency is the reality that there is an increasingly small pool of candidates from which to draw. (Mesmerized by high tech., fewer and fewer young people are attracted to careers working with their hands on anything other than a keyboard.)  More often than not, then, I have felt the need to hire the first viable candidate that comes along.

But when a recent assistant quit just before the coronavirus pandemic hit, prompting the subsequent stay-at-home order, forces converged to create a gleaming silver lining for me.

Because I did not consider my work to be “essential,” I gladly abided by the stay-at-home order.  Frankly, I welcomed this hiatus, which afforded me the time to complete several back-burner projects.  More importantly, given the convergence of events, it also afforded me the leisure to conduct a more thoughtful hiring process than I had ever been able to conduct in the past.

Nevertheless, it still proved a difficult task!  Typically, I have relied on free and low-cost postings on popular job search websites to fill open positions.  But I wasn’t even getting nibbles by means of this method this time.  In part, I attributed this to the fact that the government was paying people more money to not work than I could afford to pay them to work.  (Never mind that I was intending the person I would hire would begin work AFTER the stay-at-home order lifted.  With money in their pockets and promises of at least short-term continuance, candidates seemed reluctant to apply.)

 Prayer as Risky Business

 I decided to take a risk.[3]   I invested in the assistance of a hiring recruiter offered by one of the popular job search websites.  If the stakes weren’t already heightened by my realization of the need to make a more thoughtful hire than I’ve done in the past, they were increased in manifold measure by the potential cost of this service—10% of the first year’s total wages for the successful hire if I held onto him or her beyond one month of employment.  With several thousands of dollars now at stake, an intense process requiring not just persistence, but flexibility and discernment ensued.

Have you ever considered prayer to be risky business?  Well…shouldn’t you?  I mean, prayer involves invocation of the Almighty.  And everyone knows one must be careful what one prays for, as the cliché goes, because you just might get it.  In Hasidic lore, there is a story of a rabbi who would kiss his wife and children and say goodbye to them every morning before he would go off to pray.  After all, who knows what might come about when one dares to come into the presence of the Almighty.

Authentic prayer places us in a space beyond ourselves.  It opens us to the unprecedented, the unexpected, the outcome that is beyond our control.  We know this to be the case because, when the situation is reversed and we find ourselves in such a state without having chosen it—when we face a life-threatening illness, when we lose a job, when a fire rips through our home and all is lost—we spontaneously are driven to prayer.

Upping the Ante: The Right Kind of Perseverance

Not only did I place myself at risk by hiring a recruiter, but I also did so by upping the ante in the kind of person I wanted to hire.

In the past, I had always thought of the assistant I hire as someone who would enable me to do the work that was already landing on my work bench. But now, since I was enlisting the services of a hiring specialist, that goal seemed too limited.  In fact, part of my thinking in hiring the recruiter was my decision to hire an assistant who could help me, as the cliché goes, take my business “to the next level.”  Rather than someone who could simply maintain the status quo, I wanted to find a worker who was willing to and capable of investing in the business so as to encourage its growth into new territory.

I laid out this plan to the recruiter.  She said this would not be possible if I were looking to hire someone to begin immediately.  But since I did not need someone right away, we had plenty of time to find the perfect candidate for the job.

What if we don’t receive answers to our prayers because we’re thinking too small?  What if we need to persevere in prayer to the point at which our desire becomes mature enough to ask for something more valuable?

But if I was able to articulate what I wanted, it did not mean the process of getting there was clear.  It had to be worked out along the way.  And the same is true for persistence in prayer.   While the parables Jesus tells focus on a single-message persistence, the simple analogy is only intended to point in the right direction, not to be a full account of the actuality.  And the actuality of the right kind of perseverance is that it evolves and, as it evolves, it becomes more complex.  At least at first.  After the complexity comes a deeper simplicity.

Complexity, Step-by-Step

Here, then, is a summary of the final hiring process that I and my recruiting agent developed through experimentation.

The hiring agency claims they reached out to more than 17,000 candidates, of which 400 applied for the position.  The recruiter winnowed this list down to 60 candidates she thought might be viable.

After reviewing resumes and additional materials, I identified 15 candidates of interest.  I then presented the recruiter with a list of questions for her to ask in a pre-interview phone call to these candidates.  She reported back to me their responses and we discussed their viability.  (As this 2+ month-long process progressed, she began to get a deepening sense of what I was looking for.)

I then chose eight candidates to interview by phone.  After making her own post-interview phone call to each candidate, the recruiter called me to discuss post-interview impressions, both mine and the candidates (as reported in that phone call).  I identified five candidates from whom I asked the recruiter to request more information, then invited them for a face-to-face interview in my shop.  After a post-interview phone call with each candidate, the recruiter contacted me to discuss impressions–both mine and the candidates’–of the interview.

The final candidate was then invited back to my shop for a three-day “shadow” interview, working alongside me so I could assess whether or not this would be a good fit.  After this test was passed, weekly meetings—separately, with  both the candidate and the recruiter–were set to ensure, after thirty days of work, that I could make a careful decision about whether or not to keep the employee on board (at which point, then, I had to pay the $3,000+ fee.)

Polishing Brass

I have taken the time to describe the depth and intensity of my process because it has proven essential, in retrospect, to why I concluded that this hiring process had become prayer.

I’m reminded of my childhood experience of polishing brass.

Among the many exotic treasures my aunt, a missionary in India, would bring home to us on her visits home were intricately stamped and pounded brass tables.  I loved these tables.  And I loved to polish them.  As I polished them, I was continually amazed how each cycle of polishing would reveal greater clarity, more intricacy, finer and finer detail.  Deeper and deeper—each refinement of the polishing process would reveal greater refinement of design and deeper glow of the metal.

And that is the effect this slow process of refining my hiring process had upon my intention.  Clarity of focus, deepening of desire, removal of peripheral concerns, revelations of hitherto unforeseen factors—these all came about by means of my “long obedience in the same direction.”

Perseverance in prayer is effective, in part, because it refines and clarifies our intentions.   Our prayer is deepened as we listen to the subtle shifts of the inner landscape as our souls come into alignment with the Life that is wanting to flow through us.  In the process, what we seek undergoes transformation.

One area where this had a dramatic impact in my hiring process was in becoming decisive about the level of education I required.  I had always waffled in this area, based on a false dedication to not being elitist.  Did I really need for this person to be a college graduate?  After all, I was hiring a person for their hand-skills, not their IQ.   But, in the end, I came around to realizing the value of a college education.  And I decided that intelligence mattered.  It took a good bit of courage to give myself permission to make this requirement.  And it paid off.  The person I hired not only has the general intelligence and verbal skills necessary to assist with the kind of growth I am hoping the business can achieve, but the fact that he has a degree in Mechanical Engineering means he has an understanding of things relevant to the business that I, having degrees in the humanities, find challenging

It took courage to assert what I wanted and hard-won belief that I was worthy of receiving it!  But admitting what I really wanted  resulted in clarity of conviction.  And this, too, is an effect of perseverance. The clarification of one’s intention goes hand-in-hand with wholeheartedness.  The more clarified I became in discerning what I was looking for in a new assistant, the more wholeheartedly I was able to give myself over to the process of finding this person.

The Alchemical Vessel 

Persistence is also a means by which such wholeheartedness is tested, hence proven to be sound (or not).  Think, for instance, of something you have wanted.  Not getting it easily causes you to either abandon the search (because you didn’t want it badly enough) or to intensify and refine your search (because you discover how deep is your desire for it).  Similarly, prayer is the alchemical vessel in which desire is both concentrated and purified.  I experience this intensification of desire as a deepening of my intention down to the core of my being.  While this is hard to put into words, one consequence of it was an increased sure-footedness in my discernment.  I felt an increased confidence in my rejection of candidates who had relevant skills, but who didn’t have more ephemeral qualities I was hoping to find.  I knew what I wanted and became able to quickly discern when I wasn’t finding it in any given candidate.

Mistakes and Blind Spots

Another reason perseverance in business is so powerful is that it gives you a chance to learn from your mistakes.  But to do so, one has to have the right kind of perseverance.  My reader is probably familiar with Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity—doing the same thing again and again, but expecting different results.  The kind of persistence that is useful for business is the trial-and-error kind of persistence.   At least equally important, though, is the kind of persistence that is willing to consider things one did not think possible!

This happened to me.

I had always assumed, when hiring an assistant, that I was looking to hire someone who already lives in the Chicagoland area.  I had never conceived that someone might relocate for the sake of the job!   This was, in part, because I had never thought highly enough of what I had to offer that a person would be willing to relocate.  But it had also simply been a blind spot.  Self-corrective perseverance has a way of revealing and correcting blind spots.

Fortunately, my recruiting agent didn’t have the same blind spot.  She expanded our search nationwide.  And she made sure the way we described the job to include this possibility.  For instance, commuting distance is a concern in any consideration of employment.  I have, then, typically asked the candidate to map out and report their typical commuting distance and describe their level of comfort with this distance.  My recruiting agent, though, asked that we also add the phrase “or relocate.”

The person I eventually hired moved from Colorado.  While he had intended to move to Chicago before he found my job announcement, he never would have found it had my recruiting agent opened up our search nationwide.

The power of persistence can also be experienced in the effect it has upon strengthening discernment.  When I first went into business, I had trouble detecting problematic clients.  Now I can spot them a mile away.  But I had the same problem with good clients.  I lacked the experience to know when I was facing a good prospect.  And I found the same principle to hold true when it came to hiring.  But by staying the course, I was able to pick up on finer and finer details which proved revelatory of character, or the lack thereof.

Finally, perseverance tests one’s belief, thus strengthens it.  On this count, I was a failure.  I continually doubted I would find what I was looking for.  But my recruiting agent never doubted.  She was sure we would eventually find the ideal candidate.  In doing so, she not only kept me going, but this confidence was also essential to recognizing the right candidate when he showed up!

A Good Outcome, and a Few Prayerful Questions

I have a young, enthusiastic, smart, and skilled assistant.  He wants to be doing what he is doing.  He learns quickly, and is eager to learn.  And he is both an agreeable person and not afraid to speak up when he needs to question me.  For the first time since I’ve started hiring assistants, I feel like I am working WITH someone rather than having someone who begrudgingly works for me.

Prayer takes many forms.  As I have tried to demonstrate, sometimes we don’t even know that what we have been doing has become a form of prayer.  And persistence is one of those areas of life which I believe can easily be deepened into prayer.  I’ll conclude, then, with three questions that might direct your attention.

What have you been persisting at that might benefit from a shift of focus which deepens it into a form of prayer?

What have you persisted at in the past that can teach you about the nature of prayer?

What have you given up on, stopped persisting in paying for, that you need to renew?

[1] While there is a slight difference between persistence and perseverance, for the sake of this meditation, I choose to focus on their broader similarity.

[2] Marcel wrote an essay titled “Creative Fidelity,” the key idea being that the only way to maintain fidelity in the face of inevitable change is to embrace a creative form which adapts itself to change rather than to adhere to some rigid commitment.  The same movement is, I think, essential to persistence.  Rigid persistence is folly; adaptive persistence is wise.

[3] Notice that I shifted my focus.  I did something different.  It is malleable perseverance that makes the difference, that brings success.  Rigid, unmoving, dogmatic persistence is the very definition of misguided “fundamentalism,” a synonym for folly.