Stay Where You Are at Work (The Monastic Virtue of Stability): Part 1
A Note from Chris
Attentive blog readers may have noticed that I haven’t published a blog post on LinkedIn since mid-July. I don’t flatter myself that the world has been on tenterhooks waiting for the next installment, but to anyone who did notice the gap, thank you for your patience!
This three-month break from blogging has facilitated the launch of our new podcast Finding God at Work. With a 15-minute episode every Tuesday and Thursday, this is a new way to engage the conversation about faith and work in a shorter, more frequent format.
Given the new podcast schedule, we’re switching the blog to every other Wednesday after five years of usually posting every other Thursday. This week with a two-parter, we'll have Part 1 on Monday and Part 2 on Wednesday.
As always, writing here is meant to serve the purpose of Mission Central: Forming Christians for Mission in Everyday Life. We pray that the Holy Spirit will use these words to form Christ in you, far beyond my skill or ability.
You can always reach me at [email protected]with blog feedback, ideas for future series, or recommended taco recipes.
Thanks for reading!
Half a century ago, people who switched jobs frequently were diagnosed with “Hobo syndrome.” In 1973, industrial psychologist Edwin E. Ghiselli described people afflicted with this malady:
Floaters readily provide socially acceptable explanations for their peripatetic activity, but under careful examination these explanations turn out to be little more than rationalizations. The simple fact is that after being in one place for a matter of months, or perhaps a year or so, depending on the strength and periodicity of his itch, the individual is impelled to pack up and move to another place and another job.
Contrast this dismissal of job hopping as a type of mental pathology with the increasingly accepted wisdom of working professionals today: The best way to increase your salary over time is to switch jobs every few years. Behavioral economists warn us that we leave money on the table by staying in one job too long, simply because we fail to grasp the opportunity costs of doing so.
Perhaps the research is making a dent in the attitude of younger workers: Job hopping is most common among Millenials and Gen Z, with about 78% of the youngest generation in the U.S. workforce saying they plan to leave their current employer within the next five years—including 43% who plan to leave within two.
Rather than jumping to one extreme (job hopping as a form of mental illness) or the other (job hopping as a flawless career strategy), as followers of Jesus we would do well to ask this question: How does staying in a job or leaving it fit into our part of God’s mission in the world?
When we reframe career changes within the context of mission, we find both freedom to go for reasons we won’t regret, and freedom to stay in our job even when doing so is countercultural. To help us do this important work of reframing, the Benedictine monks offer us a forgotten value: The virtue of stability.
In Part 1 today, we’ll set the historical context for Benedictine stability. In Part 2, we’ll look at three reasons to practice this virtue by staying in our current job.
?[Thanks for reading. This post continues our new series Monastic Wisdom for the Marketplace. Check out our other posts on faith and work and spiritual growth for more resources on living an integrated Christian life. Subscribe to get the next post in the series in your inbox.]
Monastic Moochers of the Middle Ages: Meet the Gyrovagues
You might think that being a monk involved an unpleasant life of austerity. But in the Middle Ages, monasticism relied on certain norms of hospitality that opened up unintended patterns of abuse and excess. A monk who traveled from one place to another would, naturally, stay at monasteries as he went. He could count on his fellow Christian monks to provide him with food and shelter for a few days and nights and then go on his way.
Some people disinclined to make a permanent home realized they could exploit this generosity and freeload off of monasteries simply by moving around frequently. An unending sequence of all-expenses-paid Airbnb rentals, with some prayer thrown in. What’s not to like?
These monastic moochers became known as Gyrovagues (literally “circle wanderers”). They caused constant headaches for church leaders, who sought a way to bring them into line without losing the hospitable ethos of monastic houses. St. Benedict of Nursia was one such leader, and his distress about the patterns of abuse is evident in his Rule:
Gyrovagues . . . spend their whole lives tramping from province to province, staying as guests in different monasteries for three or four days at a time. Always on the move, with no stability, they indulge their own wills and succumb to the allurements of gluttony. . . . Of the miserable conduct of all such men it is better to be silent than to speak.
When Benedict gathered the community of Monte Cassino in the early decades of the sixth century, he did so as a reformer, insisting on a solid commitment to community life in one place for any would-be monks.
Are You a Careerist Gyrovague?
It strikes me that Gyrovaguery is alive and well today—not among monastics, but among certain careerists. Just as moocher monks hopped from monastery to monastery every few days without ever getting rooted in true monastic formation, some workers hop from job to job every few months in search of a greater paycheck, without necessarily contributing much meaningful work along the way.
You can’t tell someone’s work ethic just from the length of the job stints on their resume. There can be good reasons to leave a job quickly, or to pursue an unexpected opportunity. So, too, in the Middle Ages there were at times good reasons for monks to travel and rely on others for temporary hospitality.
But now as then, mooching is also a real possibility. Consider how long it takes to get trained in a job, learn the company culture, and build relationships before you can begin doing high-value work. There are jobs where you can start contributing on Day 1 due to your experience—say, if you’re a competent line worker or Python coder. But in many jobs, you’re getting a paycheck for weeks while you’re still learning the ropes, and you don’t start paying that value back to the company in the form of work accomplished until you’re up to speed.
Say it takes a company six months to break even on hiring you, and then you leave after only two more months for an 8% pay bump in another organization. You may feel smart about your career moves, but it’s likely that you’re exploiting the system for personal gain rather than accomplishing any work that really matters.
Reasons to Leave
A cynical professional might reply, “Of course I’m exploiting the system for personal gain. Doesn’t everyone?”
A hard-eyed capitalist might argue, “It’s the company’s fault if they’re not paying enough to retain me. I’m taking my services to a higher bidder in a free market.”
It’s true that responsibility for how well work does or doesn’t go is shared by both employers and employees. There are dehumanizing patterns of disregard for employee well-being that understandably breed cynicism:
Even without giving into cynicism, you may have good reason to leave a workplace after only a short stint. Sometimes, you are underpaid and leaving for a fairer wage is the best thing. Sometimes, a work culture isn’t going to be healthy for you long-term, regardless of how many resources have been poured into training you. Sometimes, the writing is on the wall and it’s better to jump at a new opportunity than wait around and get laid off. Sometimes, the injustice of the situation is not on your side, but on theirs.
Work that Counts in God’s World
Sometimes, but not always. As disciples of Jesus, we have good reason to care deeply about the work we are doing, not just the corresponding compensation and benefits. Career cynicism suggests we should never worry about whether our employers’ ventures ultimately succeed or fail, just about how much money we can squeeze out of those ventures for ourselves.
But the story of the Bible teaches us that our daily work can be part of God’s mission in the world. Consider the story of Nehemiah rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. Nehemiah was not a priest or a prophet; he was a civic leader. The wall he rebuilt was not the wall of the temple, but of the city. It protected everyone in the community.
The need for such protection was evident from the conditions of the construction project itself; the Israelites who laid the stones had to be prepared against violent attack from neighboring kingdoms: “Those who carried materials did their work with one hand and held a weapon in the other, and each of the builders wore his sword at his side as he worked” (Nehemiah 4:17-18 NIV).
Now imagine that one of those Israelites had said, “I’ve got a job offer to be a construction worker for the next kingdom over, and they pay 8% more, so I’m going to go help them instead.” The idea would have been laughable! These Israelites—the construction workers, not just the priests and Levites—were on a mission from God. Their work mattered in God’s world because of the way it served the community. They didn’t leave their post, even though working conditions were, to say the least, not great.
If you believe that you’re in your current job because it’s part of God’s mission in the world, you’re not going to be in a rush to leave it.
Cultural Assumptions about Meaning at Work
Granted, that’s a pretty big “if.” I’m not saying, as some Christians would, that God specifically calls us to every single job post we ever have. Sometimes (as with Nehemiah), he surely does. But sometimes he may be content to leave the choice up to us. Like a good parent, he knows that we grow into greater maturity not when he tells us everything we should do, but when he helps us become people who can choose what is good for ourselves.
What I mean is that even in situations where God grants us liberty to set our own course, so to speak, we are still on his mission. Our daily work is caught up into his purposes. If we do it “as working for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23 NIV), it becomes service to Jesus and therefore eternally significant. The work itself matters.
If we deeply believe that the work itself matters, then we won’t only think about our own individual ascent to greater compensation and status, but also make our choices with an eye to the long-term success of the endeavors where we are employed. To make career choices without thinking (or caring) about how they affect the organizations where we work amounts to an extreme individualism that is out of sync with the biblical vision of work.
Looking at how attitudes toward work differ in other cultures can help shed some light on what’s going on for us in the United States. A Korean redditor shared these thoughts in a recent post:
Koreans are not all that compelled to change employers. Leaving a job almost always tags you as being the one with a problem. Loyal service to a company is still a virtue. . . . I have no desire to move. Could I make more if I transitioned to an American agency? Maybe. But I have a lot of joy here. My friends are here. The company has been fair to me.
Look at the values that this worker mentions: joy, friendship, and loyalty. A sense of joy in work corresponds not to what we get paid for it, but rather to what the work means in the world. We feel joy when we do work that we know is worth doing. And friendship and loyalty are intrinsically social. This worker is finding meaning not just in her individual career path, but in how her work relates to a greater social whole.
Now, the solution here is not to simply trade individualism for collectivism. It’s to consider whatever cultural assumptions we bring to the table in the light of the Good News. We often don’t even see our individualism unless we see a contrasting cultural assumption alongside it. Once we see it, we can question whether it lines up with God’s missional invitation for our work.
Benedictine Stability as Cultural Resistance
Another way to get a cross-cultural lens for our work is to look at the commitments those sixth century monks were making when they joined the community of Monte Cassino. Benedict called them each to make three vows: “of his stability and of the reformation of his life and of obedience.” In future posts, we’ll circle back to reformation (or conversion) of life and to obedience. But what did the vow of stability entail?
As the word suggests, the main commitment was to staying in one place. Monks were not permitted to go on a journey or even to leave the enclosure of the monastery without an order from the Abbott. Their “default” was to remain where they were, doing work and prayer in community with one another. Now, lest we think that there was something superhuman about these monks that made this manner of life easy for them, we find this counsel from Benedict:
If a brother who through his own fault leaves the monastery should wish to return, let him first promise full reparation for his having gone away; and then let him be received in the lowest place, as a test of his humility. And if he should leave again, let him be taken back again, and so a third time; but he should understand that after this all way of return is denied him.
The need for such guidance makes it clear that then, as now, staying in one place is hard. Monks would leave, and then think better of it and come back. Some apparently would do this up to three times and still be received back into the community and finally make a good run of it.
Given how hard it is, and how much sacrifice is entailed (talk about opportunity costs!), why did Benedict so cherish the virtue of stability? He believed there were goods that served God’s purposes that could only be realized through long-term, rooted presence in a single community. We’ll have a chance to look at some of these goods one at a time in our next post.
For now, let me simply suggest that as disciples of Jesus, we might discern God’s movement in our work best if we are more Benedictine than Gyrovague. Let staying be our “default” option. As we’ve seen, there may be good reasons to leave a job. But in our cultural moment, we are prone to forget all the good reasons there are to stay.
When we choose to stay in a job, not for stability’s sake, but for the sake of how the work there accomplishes God’s mission in the world, we push back against cultural pressure to only prioritize our own career advancement.
We think about opportunity cost not just in terms of our paycheck, but in terms of the opportunities God is giving us in our current work.
At best, we practice a gentle cultural resistance that we can trust, in some small way, turns the tables toward a healthier, holier attitude about work.
When we choose to stay where we are at work for God’s sake, he’ll honor our faithfulness by accomplishing more than we can imagine.
Reflect and Practice
Take a moment to consider your own mind and heart.
Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.
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