The Sacrament of Duty
Duty is the sacrament of the present moment.
– Jean-Pierre de Caussade
I dream of escape. Escape on a getaway vacation, escape to a solitary retreat, escape to the thrill of first attraction, escape to an imaginary world. The thing all these scenarios have in common, come to think of it, is a lack of duty: none of them involve chores. Or bills. Or the more irksome parts of relationships.
Duty is dreary. It’s no wonder we dream of escape at times. These things are the invisible yoke of life, the stuff so mundane it’s not worth talking about, yet so pervasive it can’t help but drag down our days, every day. The reality is that glamorous vocational moments happen only a fraction of the time—the rest of the time, we’re washing the dishes. For every revelatory moment of growth in our children, there are many, many more moments of thankless discipline and menial labor. For every gratifying clinical outcome, there are many more hours spent grappling with broken systems or wading through inefficient paperwork.
I have pretty much functionally come to see obligatory responsibilities as annoying things to be gotten through. They are ancillary to the real things in life: their main purpose is to be gotten over so the truly meaningful work can occur.
And yet, if meaningful work can only happen through duty, could it be possible that the duty itself carries real meaning? In Genesis, before sin ever came into the world, God set man down in a garden “to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). In Ruth, Boaz provides for Ruth not by delivering her from menial labor but providing for her through it (“leave it for her to glean,” Ruth 2:16). Before Jesus ever preached a sermon or performed a miracle, he was laboring in a carpentry shop. He worked as a tradesman in a no-name town far longer than he ever lived in the public eye.
“Duty,” writes Jean-Pierre de Caussade, “is the sacrament of the present moment.” The dictionary defines “sacrament” as “a religious ceremony or ritual regarded as imparting divine grace; a thing of mysterious and sacred significance.” St. Augustine describes sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace.”
There is something true in de Caussade’s sentiment. Not that doing the laundry is the same thing as taking communion—but there should be something of the latter in the former. Life is not divided into the Holy and the Irrelevant, into Sunday and Weekdays. Even the most mundane moments should be shot through with something of the holy. As Wendell Berry wrote: “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.”
What is there of sacrament in the duties of everyday life?
the allegory: the eucharist takes the most commonplace items of the dinner table—drink and bread—and uses them to both point to and recall a spiritual truth, the necessity and occurrence of Jesus’ death in our place. Nearly every repetitive chore that we do tells the same story: this world is broken. It tends towards dirt, and degeneration, and entropy, and hunger. Intervention is required. And every time we intervene through cleaning, or healing, or tidying, or cooking, every time we right that brokenness, we echo God’s redemptive intention in this world. We make visible that invisible truth, only to do it again, because nothing will ever be fully fixed until the recreation of the heavens and the earth one day. Douglas McKelvey’s A Liturgy For Laundering begins, “May I recall in this needful parable / of soil and rags / of soap and water and cleaning / the word which you have done for your people / O Christ, and the work which you are now / doing, in me.” Every chore is a needful parable. Every task has a tale to tell.
the path: sacraments are something we physically enter into. We don’t just feel the bread and wine: we chew and we swallow. We don’t just look at the baptismal water: we get wet. There is nothing more tactile than daily chores: in fact, they are often the most physical and least cerebral things we do. We haul ourselves out of bed, sit through a commute, chop onions, wipe a butt, fill out forms, feed the dog, wipe the counters. But when we do these things, we’re not just dragging ourselves through the motions. We are entering into a particular path. We do them because we’ve chosen to restrict our freedoms, to subsume our wills, for something of particular worth, don’t we? We do it for someone we love, or a cause or responsibility we believe in. And even as we do it, we begin to understand that someone once did these things for us, in a way we probably would not have fully grasped otherwise. It is in part because people in my past chose the path of duty to serve me, that I can do the same now. It is because Jesus walked the hardest path of all, that I can walk my own path now, and in that choice, I follow him. The smallest tasks are some of the greatest expressions of my choice to follow him.
the present: the Bible warns us against taking communion without being fully present to what it means. That’s the thing about the sacraments: they prompt us to be present, on a regular basis. Chores often lure us into multi-tasking—that’s not all bad, and I’ve gotten pretty savvy at doing that myself—but they can also be one of the simplest invitations to be present. I once heard someone say that mindfulness is “doing the dishes to do the dishes.” De Caussade writes, “All we need to know is how to recognize [God’s] will in the present moment… this divine will… nourishes the soul. These blessed results are not produced by any particular circumstance but by what God ordains for the present moment. What was best a moment ago is so no longer because it is removed from the divine will which has passed on to be changed to form the duty to the next. And it is that duty, whatever it may be, that is now most sanctifying for the soul.” In God’s economy, there is no such thing as a waste of time, as something worthless to be gotten through until we get to something better. There is only what he has for us in the present moment, if we are available to receive it.
For better or worse, duty makes up a large portion of my life these days. I have grappled with this before, and I probably will again. But I am coming to increasingly believe that the humblest, dreariest of tasks are not merely the side effect of more important things, but the way to them. I am finding, and learning, and hoping, that it is in these most thankless of ritualistic tasks that divine grace may yet be most deeply imparted.
