Work

I started my Friday in a foul mood. I was the only lawyer at our law office in Ortigas and there was so much work to be done. Specifically, we had to file an important petition with the Regional Trial Court that day. Unfortunately, two of our lawyers were out of town for personal reasons and another associate lawyer was with a client, filing criminal complaints in Manila and Navotas. The filing of the complaints, as well as the travel time, would consume the whole day and I didn’t expect our associate to return to the office anymore.

So, essentially, I had to do the work of preparing the petition, reviewing the rules, making sure all the documents for submission to the court were ready, and insuring that the petition would be filed on time all by myself. Aside from this, I also had other pleadings to review and draft, which had to be ready for filing by next week.

So, with a heavy heart, I hunkered down over the books, documents, and files and started preparing the petition. Then something surprising  in fact, wonderful  happened: slowly, gradually, my mood started to lift the more I got into the work. It felt good to be doing legal work, back to being a full-time lawyer, back to doing what I had spent years of study and training for.

And as I was preparing the petition, I made up my mind to produce  or at least attempt to produce  excellent work. The petition would bear my name as well as the name of our law office, so to come up with a mediocre pleading would be an offense not only to the client, but also, equally important, a personal offense to me, my partners, and our law office itself. I ended up that day being very happy  happy to be working.

I have always believed that work  in whatever field, industry, or discipline  is more than a mundane endeavor for money or profit. Rather, work, in the truest sense, has a deeply spiritual aspect and involves elements of ethics, faith, and even the divine.

As a Muslim, I was raised with the dictum that God had prescribed excellence in all things. Clearly, the exhortation to excellence applied as much to work as it did to spiritual matters. Indeed, one of my clearest childhood memories was my father’s advice and direction for me to shine his shoes well  meaning excellently  because we had to do even the simplest things with due care and attention. According to my father, in Islamic belief, God loves those who perfect their craft and this idea of perfection extended to doing even mundane things like shining shoes and keeping our house tidy.

Simply put, it feels good to do your work well. We know, instinctively, whether or not we have done a good job. Additionally, the knowledge that you have done it well is even more pronounced when you earn a living from your work. For an ordinary person like myself, who has no great inheritance or family fortune to fall back on, I have to work to pay my bills and help  since my wife is a working person as well  to provide for my family. But I’ve always seen this, the need to work and not having family fortune to fall back on, as a positive.

In Islam, there is a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that no one eats better food than that which comes from the work of his own hands. This expresses the Islamic concept of the dignity and importance of work and will resonate with anyone who has ever worked an honest day in his life. Personally, when I go home and have dinner with my family, I enjoy not only the food and the company but also the knowledge that the food that we are partaking of has been obtained through honest work.

Clearly, work  and the fruits of work  to be meaningful and sustaining on both a practical and  spiritual level must be moral. For example, when I was a government official, as president of the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (University of the City of Manila), there were some people who attempted to give me bribes in order to get lucrative contracts from the university. While my income as a government employee was, compared to what one could earn in the private sector, meager (about P30,000 a month), I refused the bribes because I knew that had I accepted the money, among other ethical and legal considerations, I would have violated my personal view of the meaningfulness of work. Thus, no matter what improvements that I might do for the university, no matter how excellently I might strive to serve the constituents and stakeholders of the university and the City of Manila, ultimately, all my work would be tainted by the bribe.

So, while honest work will produce the best food  or fruits, both material and spiritual  for the worker, dishonest work, such as doing illegal activities like taking bribes, will only provide the most poisonous of sustenance.

Work is obviously important and it is so significant that for others, work is, in fact, worship. One of the things that I admire about the Opus Dei (although as with any religious group, they have their detractors, notable is their negative presentation in The Da Vinci Code) is their view on the sanctity and holiness of work. Thus, according to their teachings, Christians are encouraged to work excellently, which echoes Islam’s call to excellence, out of love so that their work is transformed into a fitting offering to God. Consequently, the mundane task of work, when done in this manner and within this context of love and belief, is transformed into something that is holy: work becomes worship.

Of course, these ideas and approaches to work  striving always for excellence and making mundane work into an act of worship  are difficult and problematic. It is but natural that there will be times when we do not want to work and when we prefer to do things in a mediocre fashion. As a matter of fact, it is even healthy for us to slack off sometimes and not do all our work full throttle and with fierce intensity.

However, for work to become the sustaining, nourishing, transformative, and even divine action that it can be, we must return to the aspiration for excellence, which is, to paraphrase the words of Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, to go about your professional duties for love’s sake.

For some, my view of work may seem absurdly religious, theoretical, or esoteric but for me, in the ultimate analysis, it is very simple. At my cubicle at our law office, near my desk, is a picture of my wife, Weena, and my two sons, Santi and Mike. Whenever I feel tired or lazy and not in the mood to review case files, prepare pleadings, etc., all I have to do is to glance at that picture and I know precisely why  and for whom  I work.