SAW Innovations for 2000!

The leadership of Spirituality at Work has contracted with professional website designer, Ian Pollock, to re-design our website.  Our original site, designed by an SAW volunteer, worked just fine as we were starting our work but as both SAW and the Internet have grown, we’ve begun to see the potential of the web as a place where we can share our vision, ideas and materials, invite people to share theirs with us and perhaps, actually host on-line conversations.  We’ve been using the web address SPIRIT-ATWORK.ORG but recently discovered that we “own” the domain name spiritualityatwork. com. When our new website is ready to go, we’ll switch to this address.  Stay tuned…

      We’d love to incorporate links to other relevant websites on our page and have our site linked to others, so if you think your website and ours ought to be linked please get in touch with us at whitney@spiritualityatwork.com.  

SAW’s resource guide entitled Spirituality at Work: A Handbook for Conversation Convenors and Facilitators is being edited and reformatted by Barbara McGowran, a specialist in desktop publishing and participant in SAW. Barbara’s work will give our handbook a more professional look without making it less accessible to conversation group leaders.  The Handbook contains 40 conversation “agenda” (our tongue-in- cheek name for the conversation guides which help focus our SAW sessions) as well as other tips and formats useful to those initiating or facilitating spirituality at work conversations. 

Saw has recently received word that spirituality at work conversation groups using our materials are beginning to happen beyond the San Francisco Bay Area.  Over the past several years, SAW Coordinator Whitney Roberson has made several presentations in Toronto at the Spirituality in the Workplace Conference.  As a result, several conversation groups are now meeting in Ontario, Canada. 

        The SAW Handbook has also been a resource helpful to those wanting to initiate groups.  At the University of Texas in Austin, for example, Diane Selkin started a group with the help of our Handbook.  We’ve sent Handbooks all over the country and are always delighted to know they’ve been useful.  Most recently we’ve been in conversation with the Rev. Caroline Fairless of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke, VA whose parish is exploring the possibility of initiating a Spirituality at Work outreach project.

              While Spirituality at Work does not maintain any oversight of these groups – they are entirely independent – we are delighted to offer consultation and mutual support.  We have learned some things we are pleased to share and are eager to hear the learnings of others.

         Do you know of folks in other areas who might be interested in Spirituality at Work conversation?  Why not tell them about us, perhaps sending them a copy of this newsletter or encouraging them to contact us.  We’d love to welcome them to this wonderful conversation which is becoming national and even international!

My own particular denial that I’m getting older seems to focus on flu shots: I don’t get them.  “I’ve never gotten the ‘flu,” I‘ve always told myself, “I’ve got a dynamite immune system.  I’ll wait ‘til I actually get it, then the next year I’ll start with the shots…” Okay, so next year I’ll get a ‘flu shot! 

I suppose I was luckier than most: my “dynamite immune system” boosted my fever to 102° which knocked out the active virus in three days, but left me spacey and exhausted for three more weeks.  The virus did some interesting things to my psyche, though, and I’ve come to see how divine Mystery was present there, working unexpectedly even in the ‘flu!  My illness became a sort of enforced Sabbath in which my perspective on my life and work began to shift. I began seeing what I can’t always see when I’m caught in the tangle of my busy work week: that I often confuse “urgent” with “important,” spending far too much time and energy on unimportant things which have a deadline.  I saw how I often say “yes” just because it’s “urgent” when a “no” might be far more creative for everyone.  Some things don’t have to get done at all!

What’s this about? I wondered, as I lay there.  What is it that’s driving me to work harder and harder, longer and longer?  Well, for one thing, of course, there’s more out there:  more possibilities, more choices to be made.  You know, I wonder whether we Americans haven’t come to expect – perhaps unconsciously -- that we can have it all or know it all or do it all. Maybe we haven’t really noticed that in the past ten years or so with the advent of the Internet and other high tech innovations, our choices have multiplied exponentially.  What I began to see as the Spirit-led virus danced in my psyche is that it may be time – well past time, actually – for us to let go of the fantasy that we ought to be able to have, know, and do it all. I began to realize that something in me is programmed to feel guilty and fearful when I confront the possibility that I just might not be able have-know-do it all! Something in me hints darkly that I may be less than adequate, that I may lose the respect of colleagues and friends, that I may perhaps even be unlovable… (My psyche tends towards extremes!)

What the virus seemed to do, at least temporarily, was disable the carefully constructed defenses which protect me from seeing clearly these dark, whispery inner fears.  It opened a window, pulled back a blind, so to speak, and let me see what’s there in me acting behind my everyday awareness.  The experience drove me to prayer, the sort of desperate prayer that’s usually reserved for real life crises!  What could I possibly do to deal with the fear and anxiety which kept me living on the uncomfortable edge of “Overwhelmed” a good bit of the time?

As often happens in such encounters with Divine Mystery, no “answers” were given but a process was initiated, a new, more generous vision implanted in my now “space-ier” psyche.  The prolonged exhaustion forced me to keep paying attention, invited me to continue the prayer and reflection in a less desperate but more disciplined way and opened me once again to the bigger picture of the divine wholeness and generosity which we’re all invited to enjoy and to manifest in our work lives.

Well, the virus has gone now, thank God, but even more thankfully, the Spirit has remained as has my renewed awareness of divine Presence in my life and work. Remember that old joke: “He opened the window and in flu (flew) enza…?!” When the window of my psyche opened to “enza,” apparently the Spirit was right behind, an unlikely manifestation of the divine hospitality at work