Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure

by Nancy J Nordenson

Overview

What do you want to be when you grow up? The answers were our childhood dreams. The reality of adulthood is that what we are and do now is what we became. Finding Livelihood is a book about work for grown-ups. It's about not just the work we thought we wanted but the work we found and the work that found us. It's also about the work we have lost.

At once a shrewd challenge of Buechner’s assertion that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” and also a lyrical journey to the place where labor and love meet, Finding Livelihood explores the tensions between the planned life and the given, between desire and need, between aspirations and limits. Through story, collage, and juxtaposition, Finding Livelihood invites you to consider work in its many facets. Who gets to decide if our work is “good”? How do we deal with forces and routines that leave us longing for escape? How do questions about money and meaning change when you are holding a pink slip in your hand? How are we transformed when our current work becomes part of a spiritual journey that encompasses all of life? Drawing from thinkers as diverse as St. Aquinas, Josef Pieper, and Simone Weil, Nordenson affirms the doctrine of Imago Dei and brings it into the real world of work: a world full of brokenness and hope, of dead-end jobs and live-saving interventions, of daily bread and transcendent meaning. In the midst of it all, we find our livelihood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781733684606
Publisher:	Metaxu Press
Publication date:	05/15/2019
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Nancy J. Nordenson is an author and essayist whose work has appeared in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Indiana Review, Comment, and in other publications and anthologies. Her essays have earned multiple "notable" recognitions in the Best American Essays and Best Spiritual Writing anthologies, and Pushcart Prize nominations. Nancy holds an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University, and by day, she earns her living as a medical writer. Nancy and her husband live in Minneapolis. For more information, visit www.nancynordenson.com and www.thelivelihoodproject.com.

Table of Contents

What This Book Is and Is Not

Travels in Sunshine City: On the Point of Launch

Case Study: On the Method of Exploration

Summa Laborum I: On What Is Good Work (A Debate)

Metrics: On Measuring Significance

First Author, et Al., ad Infinitum: On Who Gets Credit

Breath and Blood: On Giving Your Life

Still in French Airspace: On Looking Out and Up

Witness: On Seeing Each Other

Two-Part Invention: On the Practice of Divided Attention

Break: On Buffers

Away We Go: On Longing for Escape (Or Is It Freedom?)

Summa Laborum II: On Money's Place (A Debate)

A Place at the Table: On Managing Pink Slips

Spinning and Being Spun: On Where Guidance Comes From

Summa Laborum III: On Who Gets Called and For What (A Debate)

One Thousand and One Tales of Now: On Timing

Centripedal Centrifugal Counterpoise: On Reimagining Work

Body of Work: On the Hope of Brokenness

Physiology Lessons: On How Things Work Together

Portrait Gallery: On Imago Dei and Countenance

A Challenge and A Benediction

Editorial Reviews

"In this extraordinary new book, Nordenson asks what we all want to know: Can our daily workplace grind really become our daily God-blessed bread? (My personal question: Can cleaning fishing nets of rotting jellyfish really be redeeming work?) Nancy answers an unequivocal "yes"! Through layered eloquent prose and her own vast experience, she offers us real ways of finding astonishment and transcendence even in the most stultifying jobs. This book is a revelation. It goes with me to my fishing camp." —Leslie Leyland Fields, author of Surviving the Island of Grace and Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers

"Finding Livelihood is a breath of radical honesty for the workaday Christian. Nancy Nordenson does not fear the long dark night shift of the soul, but neither does she accept it. Her real world stories of people at work inspire and challenge at every turn." —Marcus Goodyear, Editor of The High Calling

"Finding Livelihood is deeply felt and deeply satisfying to the reader. Nordenson grapples with hard questions and avoids easy answers. Of work itself she writes: 'You take the first steps in a state of delight, equipped with skill or talent, ready to make a difference. But the path is never straight, and it takes you through places you never envisioned.' Nordenson's book is practical, powerful, and rooted in biblical wisdom and the wisest thought of the Western tradition. With a light step, and gratitude, Nordenson teaches us to deal with jagged changes and ugly surprises, 'to live and work in the flow of God's love.'” –Emilie Griffin, author of The Reflective Executive and Souls in Full Sail

"Written with a rare wit and elegance, Finding Livelihood offers a profound, often surprising reflection on the necessity of earning our daily bread. This fine new collection by Nancy Nordenson, which gathers under one cover such unlikely bedfellows as venipuncture, a flute-playing cabbie, and the prudent way to unpack Russian icons, includes some of the best essays I’ve read in years." —Paula Huston, author of A Land Without Sin and The Holy Way

"This is an absolutely timely book, and an absolutely beautiful one too. Ms. Nordenson examines what it means to work, and does so in a lyrical, practical, moving, and spirit-filled way. In giving us her personal stories and universal observations, we are given as well the means by which, in these difficult days, to make sense of what it means to work. I like this book a lot for its voice and vision, and especially for its hope." —Bret Lott, author of Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian

"Nordenson describes wrestling with work as with a large force that wants to have its way with you, even as you want to have your way with it. This wrestling, sinewy and particular as its wrestler, enlarges us as we read our way into her life with its incisive insights and explorations. Can one wrestle meditatively? This author has learned the art and we are the benefactors." —Luci Shaw, writer in residence, Regent College; author of Adventure of Ascent: Field Notes from a Lifelong Journey

"Nordenson's prose is beautifully polished, lucid, and imaginative." —Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image, author of Beauty Will Save The World

From the Publisher