Unemployment and Spirituality.

The first morning that you awaken and have no where to go is depressing.

It could've been a Monday morning, if you had been spending all your time in an office or a classroom. A factory or an Ag. firm.

It could've been a Saturday if you waited tables, or were a nurse.

It could've been really any day at all.

See, before this, you had something, you contributed something, even if it felt meaningless, there was some meaning.

But then you were pink-slipped, fired, or your retired after 35 years of teaching little children.

No matter what you did before, you know face a long, yawning gape of time before you, one that lacks structure but is equally as important as your work-a-day life, but it’s less lucrative.


Now, hopefully, if you've retired, you've been thinking about this day for a long time, and you've even celebrated it's arrival. You've made financial preparations, and even if your belt will have to be tight, you've done some planning.

But if you've been let go, laid off, made redundant, fired, sacked, you're likely to still be in some state of shock. You'd been counting on those steady paychecks to help make your life to add stability to your life. You enjoyed the steady weekly, bi-weekly or monthly pay checks that you got to deposit, which is very convenient when it comes to things like the first of the month and your rent or mortgage is due.

Unitarian Universalist, and Civil Rights leader, Whitney Young, Jr. wrote: The hardest work in the world is being out of work.

I don't know about you, but I have been fired.

I was fired once when I was a 15 year old dishwasher from the Bonanza restaurant not far from our house. I was fired because I was too young to legally work, and I had fudged my work permit papers. I also was not the fasted dishwasher ever.

I was fired at 22 from a job that I'd had for 3 years because my boss had discovered something about me, that I had only recently discovered about myself: I had a burgeoning attraction to members of my own gender.



In 1910, Jane Addams wrote: [O]f all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.


I can tell you from first hand experience that being fired is a shock to the system. Rarely do they tell you in advance, so that you can save up a nest egg.

Also, another aspect of being involuntarily separated from your place of employment is that you find yourself suddenly without your work friends.



If you quit a job well, than there is no stigma to that, is there. You can still meet the gang after work, for a little while anyway, and hear the latest gossip and what have you.

But if you've been fired, well, that's a little too much for most people to handle. Your name has been besmirched. Your reputation tarnished.

And there's also the fear of association. "Well, if he fired Joe and he knows we hang out, what's that going to mean for me? How will Randy think about me then?"

“When you took a man's job away from him, his ability to feed and clothe his family, that man was going to get angry.” wrote Darrin Grimwood, in his book, Destroy All Robots.



Above all, for most there is the fear about money. Where will it come from? Will there be enough?

One hard lesson that every person who's ever lost a job unexpectedly losses a job learns, and quickly. Looking for a job is hard work. It is not vacation. Yes, suddenly you can go to the Queen Bean on Tuesday afternoon, but you do so at your own peril.

In many ways you're forced to become your own entrepreneurial employment agency, with only one client, and no one gets paid until that client finds a job. As fear sets in and bank accounts diminish, you find yourself working more hours to find a job than you ever worked when you had a job, and there's no paycheck on Friday.


When I was asked to create this service, once by a person who actually won the raffle to request a theme, and by one other person, I wanted to both convey the feeling of losing one's job, and a corresponding spiritual answer to losing one's job.

Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times column for May 30, 2010:  “More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.”

One can’t help but feel anxiety when separated, unwillingly, from one’s job. From his 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, George Orwell wrote these poignant words:

“I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. The feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird – that, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.” 

I’m always tempted to tease good old George about his dystopian outlook. I don’t know what it is about the British and their affection for dystopia, but so often I find Orwell’s words speaking at times to my own life.



For me, it is exceptionally difficult to think about how great the universe is, how abundant life can be, when I'm applying for employment.


But breathe with me for a moment.

This is EXACTLY when one should try to think about abundance and greatness.

I know it won't always be easy. I know you'll feel the pressure of bills and deadlines, and the self-esteem does take a hit at times like this, but....

This is also a chance to reinvent yourself.

“My first bit of advice is to not personalize a job loss.” Writes John-Talmage Mathis, in his book For the (Soon) Unemployed, “The cause for the dismissal was a business calculation. This is difficult for many to grasp; it’s difficult to accept that events just occur. Come to see this as an experience. Obviously not the most pleasant experience, but it is one that you’ll overcome.” 

This will be hard work, but spiritual work is hard work.

Try your best not to take the first job tossed in your direction, unless it is awesome, in which case, jump at it!

As part of figuring out what your next step might be, interview your friends. Ask them what they think you're strongest skills are. They may surprise you. What do they know about you that you don't?

 Ask you family about the burning passions you had as a child, can any of those help direct your next job search?

Keep a daily log of the jobs you've considered, applied for, didn't get and the ones that you chose to reject because it wasn't a good fit. This will show you, when you think you haven't done enough work, that you have in fact, done A LOT of work.

If you have to take a crappy job, a McJob, a job not in the direction you want your life to go, take it, but don't rest too long there. When taking a job waiting tables, for example, you don't need to feel an obligation to stay there for five years. Waitstaff are notoriously transient folk, you won't be the first to quit after 6 months.

And accept this assignment: Spend one hour, every day, being good to yourself. This doesn't mean an hour on Facebook. Find things to do here in town that are cheap or free, and do them. Many of them.

Spend ten minutes a day writing in a journal. Write about the things that you are grateful for, things you are good at, things you've seen on your walk in Graceada Park.

Many of us find a lot of validation in our jobs, and to find that source of grounding that we've been relying on, to find that it is gone is a shock to the system.

Financial concerns aside, we feel lost. We may even wonder who we are now that we are not a teacher, a nurse, a combine driver, a member of the military.

I strongly encourage you, when and if you find yourself in this state of flux to tend to you spirit.

I understand that your spiritual life may suddenly seem like a secondary concern now, now that you’re worrying even more than before about bills…

But this difficult time is exactly what one’s religious and spiritual life is for. When our lives get hard, we have our religious community to turn to, our spiritual practices to rely on.

Sometimes Unitarian Universalism is judged to be ill-prepared to deal theologically with the sufferings of life. There are those who decry our seemingly endless optimism, and the way we sort of whistle past the graveyard so as to not have to look to hard at all the humans who’ve gone before us.

We, as a people of faith, are very good at pointing to the suffering of others and then making posters and protests on their behalf, which is something indeed to be very proud of.

But we are not as good at sitting within our own suffering.

Often we look for some problem to solve, some injustice to rail against, some way to be useful.


I think this desire to be useful is what makes unemployment so difficult for us. If we are not doing something, than who are we?


Our first principle is that we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

This includes us.

It includes you.


If you find yourself struggling with the forced idleness of unemployment, remember that while your labor is valuable, you are more valuable than your labor.

You are a beautiful soul, beautiful in all of your complexities, your brokenness, your wholeness, your holiness.

One of our favorite hymns is “Come, come whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. Ours is no caravan of despair. Come, yet again come.” When it was set to music, the Rev. Lynn Ungar left off the line “Though you’ve broken your vow a thousand times” because she just couldn’t get it to fit in.

Though you’ve broken your vow a thousand times, as we all have, you still matter. Though you are imperfect, you still matter.

Though you’re in a tough spot right now, though you wish things were different, though you feel powerless and alone, you are not.

To us, to me, you matter.

May each of us, when hardship comes into our lives, remember that every person has intrinsic worth and deserves to be treated with dignity.

May each of us remember, that we too, are part of “every person.”

Amen.

© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry

Written for and delivered to:

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

of Stanislaus County

May 05, 2013