Finding God on the job - Greg Pierce

For most of his adult life, Greg Pierce has been wrestling with the issue of a spirituality of work. But the 53-year-old co-publisher of ACTA Publications in Chicago is something of a contrarian in his approach to matters spiritual.

"The traditional approach is based on plucking yourself out of the world, at least for a time," he said, "developing an inner world of contemplation, gaining insights through retreats, engaging in pious practices like the labyrinth. I have nothing against all this, but it doesn't work for me and I don't think it works for most people. Like a lot of folks I know, I am piety-impaired."

Pierce wants a spirituality that can flourish within the nitty-gritty of the workplace, one that recognizes "the intrinsically spiritual nature of work," and sees God's presence in life, "whether bidden or unbidden."

Appropriately, he has not been conducting his research in solitude. For many years Pierce, along with his friend Bill Droel, has been the power behind the National Center of the Laity, a loosely structured, Chicago-based organization that publishes a newsletter and sponsors occasional conferences on probing the spiritual dimensions of the secular work world. For the past three years, he has conducted a dialogue on the Internet titled "Faith and Work in Cyberspace." Every few weeks he throws out one of his insights to an ever-growing, free e-mail list (more than 400 at present), invites provocative responses and keeps the dialogue going at gfapierce@aol.com.

The effort has convinced him that piety-impairment is a fairly common condition among Catholics.

"There's no question Catholics are interested like everyone else in spirituality today," he said, "but what we're being offered are all these books and speakers and retreat centers that help you get away from the world. It's practically an industry. They try to provide extra things you can do to give value to the rest of your day or opportunities to recharge your batteries. But they somehow communicate that work itself is at best a burden to be borne." Some of this is a response to modern culture's insistence on the demeaning nature of work. "Take a look at `Dilbert,'" Pierce said. "Here's a very negative view of the workplace. The characters have no centeredness, no soul. They spend all their time reacting, never acting."

Pierce said those in his cyberspace dialogue want practical disciplines to somehow access a sense of the transcendent in the very jobs they are doing. "We're seeking practices that free you from having to remember to be spiritual," he said. In February, Loyola Press will publish Spirituality @ Work: Ten Ways to Balance Your Life On-the-Job. In the book, Pierce, aided by his cyberspace dialogue partners, attempts to present some of the practical recommendations they have developed.

Greg Pierce's disillusionment with the traditional approach to spirituality goes back a long time. As a former seminarian, he was well acquainted with recognized spiritual masters like Thomas a Kempis, St. Ignatius and Therese of Lisieux. And while some of these spoke of holiness as a possibility in the midst of the world, he found most of the Catholic tradition (a Kempis, in particular) suspicious, even hostile to everyday life.

In reading a popular reference work on the "most influential writings of the Christian tradition," Pierce was unable to find in the index any reference to work, job, community, politics, social justice or family. He did find one reference to marriage, but it was cited as "marriage, renunciation of." The one reference to children was listed as "children as evil."

All this did not jibe with Pierce's gospel image of Jesus, who lived in the thick of the world, eating and drinking with sinners, preaching to crowds and healing the sick. "It's true Jesus tried to get away occasionally to pray," noted Pierce, "but he didn't insist everyone join him, and he seems to have interrupted these interludes of solitude whenever the people came looking for him."

His opportunity to muse freely on spiritual matters became more limited after Pierce married his wife, Kathy, 15 years ago. In short order they had three children, and he found himself taking over the helm at ACTA. The company had been a significant publisher of religious education and Bible study materials in the 1960s featuring the works of progressive Chicago priests like James Kilgallon and Gerald Weber. But ACTA, housed in a nondescript former warehouse on the city's north side, had fallen on hard times. Pierce hurled himself into resuscitating the operation. (He kept the acronym title but altered the meaning from "Adult Catechetical Teaching Aids" to "Assisting Christians to Act.")

With a lot of work and a small staff, ACTA began publishing a wide range of materials on popular spirituality, most notably the storybooks, audios and videos of John Shea. And they still sell some 30,000 copies a year of the venerable old adult catechism, Life in Christ. Currently, they publish about 12 new titles a year.