A Balancing Act

During my time in the Episcopal Service Corps, I had a spiritual director who used to say, “We are beings first and foremost, above all else.”

Her nuggets of wisdom always came during our Thursday night formation, which typically involved arranging magazine clippings into collages or making mandalas with colored sand.

“Yes, we’re writers and painters and artists and tax attorneys,” she would say. “But above all else, God created us simply to be. This is our first and most important mandate.”

In our capitalist economy, where profit so frequently takes priority over basic human decency, we’re trained to prioritize work above all else. Our hobbies become side-hustles. Any time spent doing the things we enjoy is framed as necessary maintenance to help us amp up our productivity. We measure our days in dollars earned, units sold, and vacation days accrued.

With the Divine Office, I’m able to practice something missing in our modern life: the sacred balance of working and being.

By establishing a routine of prayer and work, I’m reminded daily that I am not my productivity. God’s love for me is never contingent upon my paycheck. Instead, I am loved simply for blossoming into the most fully realized version of who I was created to be.

-- Joshua Chamberlain, a founding member of The Divine Office