By Lucy O’Donoghue
Doesn’t it just bug your socks off the way someone in the workplace – your boss especially – manages to rub you so ridiculously up the wrong way? You cringe to think what frustration and subsequent lack of charity emanates from you – how this doesn’t feel at all like ‘living the Gospel’.
A while back I had a really lame boss. With all due respect and charity, and acknowledging my own glaring imperfections at times, I still maintain that this boss was, well, off the charts. I’d even taken to reading books like “It’s OK to Manage Your Boss.” Of course, sometimes you have to skip to Chapter 9 “How to deal with the ‘jerk’ boss”. That’s helpful, but as a Christian, I needed some guidance that took account of God’s presence, his Grace and His mercy (and my need for all that) – practical was great, but not enough.
Then I read Heather King’s ‘Redeemed: Stumbling Towards God, Sanity and Peace that Passes Understanding’. Following her journey from 20 years of alcoholism to sobriety and then to the Catholic faith, she recalls her short-lived career as a lawyer in a Beverley Hills law firm, working for “Frank, a sole practitioner, [and] a cigar-smoking bachelor eight years my junior who specialized in personal injury and employment discrimination.” By way of anecdote, she helped soften my heart, reduce the stress…and lose 10 pounds in three weeks (ok, not quite).
My work experience at the time mirrored Heather’s. She had come in with great optimism, “yearned to contribute”, only to find the place in “stupendous disarray” full of disillusioned and cynical folk. Nevertheless, she worked like a Trojan, in search of constant affirmation, nay adulation, for the ideal that she always thought was ‘the law’.
“Unfortunately, nothing could have impressed Frank less, and I never quite recovered from the shock that he found my best, most sacrificial efforts barely worthy of notice. Instead, he viewed me as a pitiful crackpot and I got stuck doing not only my own work, but the work of Eric, the toadying paralegal, as well. Eric had a bald spot and clammy hands, twiddled a knockoff Mont Blanc pen and wore blazers with gold insignia over the breast pocket, like the captain of a yacht….In lieu of working, Eric wrote memos to Frank, filled with suggestions of work I could do, that began, “Your Royal Highness” and ended, “I await your bidding.”
The comical descriptions went on. I lay in stitches of laughter late into the night relieved to know I wasn’t the only one whose feeble attempts to ‘keep calm and carry on’ were ever-threatened by the seething rage bubbling just beneath the surface…
“Underlying every other loathsome aspect of my job was the fact that I hated Eric with a black and festering hatred. [Ooh, ouch…really?] I burned with it, writhed with it, fanned the flames of it morning, noon and night by pinpointing, categorizing and analyzing his infinite character defects: his stupidity, his cunning sloth, his soft, slug-like hands. Behind my closed office door, I worked on it like a sculptor working molten wax: a mass of indignities and slights, whose contours I endlessly, obsessively reshaped.”
The power of brutal honesty, humour and frankness in dealing with life’s struggles is, I think, a hallmark of a mature spiritual life. Call a spade a spade. The catch, of course, is not to rest in the negativity but to work through it and learn from it, and reach out to God’s love and mercy. That’s how we can be freed from the frustration. Indeed, when Heather recalls leaving the law firm, and taking the time to apologise to Eric for any moments where she had failed in charity, despite his “puffing and preening” response, she realized she was suddenly free. The person in the workplace that had held her “bondage” through her anger and resentment was really “someone almost as pathetically insecure” as she realized she was. Now, that’s the power of God’s grace and our seizing it. And I like the sound of that.
Lucy O’Donoghue lives in South Asia with her O’D husband (true Irish right there). Lucy changes her mind every week what she wants to ‘be’ or ‘do’ in her life, much to her husband’s and parents’ dismay. Nevertheless, she has spent the last few years earning her bacon in the humanitarian sector in Africa and South Asia and is currently completing a Master of Arts in Catholic Theology at the Augustine Institute.
Heather King is a Catholic author, blogger, speaker…and ex-bar fly, sober alcoholic, former lawyer from Los Angeles. Her writing has been rated by Catholic, Christian and secular media alike. Heather is set to come on tour to New Zealand in April 2013 – more info, click here.