The-Touch:-Sample-Chapter-Three

Chapter Three – Our Relationship with Work

“Work is love made visible.” ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Work occupies a great proportion of our lives, yet most of the time we spend working we also spend missing the point. The trouble begins when we start seeing work only as a matter of dollars and cents, a mode of survival, a way of paying the bills and filling the belly. As long as we think in this sick way, we are missing the Love flowing through both work and money.

An ancient story gets at the point I want to make. It tells of a wise man who came upon three brick masons at work and asked each in turn what he was doing. The first mason was gruff and short-tempered. He turned on the wise man and barked, “I’m just laying bricks. So, big deal.” The second mason responded somewhat differently, saying, “I’m building a wall.” But the third one looked up from the bricks and mortar and spoke in a voice that was both prayerful and lacking in pride. “I’m building a temple,” he said.

This story illustrates three basic attitudes about work. The first brick mason is the man or woman who works only because he or she must in order to pay the rent. “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go” reads the bumpersticker, and that is exactly the spiritual state of people who work only from the need to survive. This approach lacks Love, yet it is precisely what most people do.
The second mason, the one who says he is building walls, does see what his work is adding up to. But even he misses the point. He is simply building walls without perceiving what the walls add up to. He’s building the walls because he’s getting paid to build them. Many people work the same way, doing just enough to get by.

The third mason, the one who says he is building a temple, has a handle on something unique and deeply moving. It doesn’t matter whether he is building a real temple or not. He may be working on a bank, a gas station, a liquor store, or even a house of ill repute. But whatever he is working on, the mason has caught the spirit of his work. He is doing it from the well of Love within himself, and that is what work is all about.