Honest Work

There once lived a shoemaker and his wife who had fallen upon hard times, and it came to the point that they had money enough to buy only the leather to make one last pair of shoes. Though he knew not would happen to them after this last pair of shoes was made, the shoemaker dutifully went about his work just as he always had, cutting the leather into the necessary pieces in the evening and leaving them on his workbench to be sewn together in the morning. When the shoemaker woke the next morning, he found a completed pair of shoes sitting on his workbench; someone had come during the night and sewn together the shoes. Not only that, but they had done a marvelous job; the stitching was beautifully done with not a single stitch out of place. That day a customer came by who was so impressed with the beautiful pair of shoes, that he paid a price much higher than the shoemaker was accustomed to asking for the shoes he sold. With the money, the shoemaker and his wife were able to buy their food for the day, as well as the leather for two pairs of shoes. Curious if the same miraculous thing would happen overnight, that evening the shoemaker once again cut the leather into the pieces needed to make two pairs of shoes and left them on his workbench. The next morning, he woke to find two completed pairs of shoes sitting on his workbench, just as beautifully sewn as the first pair, and again that day he sold them at a very healthy price.

This went on for many more days, with the shoemaker always cutting the leather before going to bed and always waking to find even more pairs of completed shoes that he was able to sell. The shoes became very popular in the village where the shoemaker and his wife lived (and even some of the neighboring villages), and the financial state of the shoemaker household gradually improved until he and his wife were able to live quite comfortably.

One day the shoemaker said to his wife, “I would at last like to see who is doing my work for me; let us wait up tonight and see if we can catch a glimpse at the one who has been sewing these beautiful shoes.” And so that night, after the shoemaker and his wife had their dinner, the shoemaker cut out the leather pieces for several new pairs of shoes, as he had done every evening, and the couple sat up in the next room with the door cracked, waiting to see if they might catch a glimpse of the secretive craftsman. Before long, two little elves appeared, no bigger than six inches tall. They were completely naked but set to work all the same at assembling and stitching the shoes, and when they had finished, they disappeared once again. In the morning, the shoemaker examined the new pairs of shoes, and they were as finely made as ever. His wife said to him, “It seems quite wrong that these two fine craftsmen should be going about with no clothes on their back; I will make them each a set of tiny clothing, and you must make them each a tiny pair of shoes.” This they did, and instead of laying out leather for new shoes that evening, the shoemaker laid out the clothes and shoes he and his wife had made for the elves. That night they watched again and saw the elves discover the clothes. The elves put on the clothes and shoes and danced with delight before running out of the house. The shoemaker and his wife never saw the elves again, but neither again did they ever fall upon such hard times.

I was reminded of this story shortly after a guest teaching experience I recently had… serving as the guest conducting for a choral festival with about 150 participants in the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. When I have the privilege of being so front-and-center with a group of young people for such an extended but finite period of time, I often like to identify some lesson or piece of wisdom (beyond what they might learn about music) they I will try and emphasize throughout the day in the hopes that it might illuminate something for them – something within them – that they might take away from the experience.

The opportunity to conduct at this particular festival arose somewhat last minute; the festival had to be postponed due to winter weather, and the original conductor had a prior commitment on the new date. So, I was working with music he had already selected. They were good selections, and whether or not the other conductor had meant for it to be this way, I noticed a theme across several of the pieces: quite simply, they were about the joy and the power of music.

At the time of the festival, I had recently put together the essay for Episode 2 of the MeadowSong Podcast, and so the Ancient Greek concept of the daimon was fresh on my mind. The children at the festival were all between the ages of 12 and 15, which is when I believe a person might begin to get a conscious glimpse of this inner soul-twin that, according to the old stories, knows their destiny and attempts to communicate it to them through hunches, synchronicities, dreams, and symbols. It’s a delicate time in life, when an individual’s awareness of their own inner life seems to open before them while the pressures and expectations of the outside world become greater and greater. It is easy for one to lose sight of the inner image if some care is not taken to avoid such a loss.

Wanting to build on the theme in the musical selections – the theme of the power of music – and also having a hunch that singing was something that perhaps caused some of the young festival participants to feel more in touch with their souls, I told them about the idea of the daimon and asked them to do a short writing exercise. I asked them to finish the sentence that starts: “When I sing…”

My hunch about music being something that connected them with their souls was, in my opinion, confirmed by what many of them wrote. For example, one young singer wrote this:

“When I sing, I let go of everything and let the song guide me to a place of imagination. I feel like I am another person (in a fictional realm) that is feeling and experiencing everything. I feel calm but ready for anything.”

Another wrote this:

“When I sing, I feel my soul taking flight. I feel high above the world as if nothing else matters. I feel as if singing is my purpose just as a fish’s purpose is to swim. I feel my soul freeing up, letting go of all the bad and making way for the good.”

There are many more, of course:

“When I sing, I feel alive and inspired.”

“When I sing, I feel free and happy.”

“When I sing, I can just breathe and focus on the now.”

“When I sing, my worries disappear, I am happy and in my place, my body relaxes, and the words just flow out. I feel it is my passion, my future, and my destiny.”

These kids are for real. And truly, they are not quite kids anymore; we might be reminded that in many ancient and indigenous cultures, when an individual is old enough to get this glimpse of their own soul, they are then initiated into adulthood. To be clear, I am not saying that we should go back to fifteen-year-olds getting married and having babies. However, I do think we as a culture lose something when we delay the invitation for a young person to participate in the adult world, and furthermore, when we fail to create a cultural container to acknowledge and honor the emerging inner life that a young person is carrying.

So I tried to impress upon them, that if they followed the calling of their inner self (and put that before trying to get rich and famous), then the work they do in the world is likely to take on a life of its own and make an impact on the people who lives they were meant to touch. Had we more time that day (and had I thought of it then), I might have told them the story of the Elves and the Shoemaker. In this tale we have shoemaker, who is faithful to his vocation right down to his last penny. When he demonstrates this fidelity, something magical happens: the Elves come and make beautiful shoes out of his last piece of leather. In other words, the shoemaker’s work has taken on a life of its own, and it isn’t long before recognition and financial abundance come to him (even though he wasn’t really looking for either).

If we take a closer look, we might see the story of the Shoemaker and the Elves echoed (in subtle ways) in the real-life story of a composer who happens to be connected to one of the songs the festival participants sang that day. The song’s title is “How Can I Keep from Singing?”, and the version we did on the festival was a contemporary gospel song using a text made popular by an old hymn. I was familiar with the hymn, and while the words were mostly the same, this arrangement had little in common with the hymn when it came to the music. The sheet music also had discrepancies in the attribution. The byline said it was based on an old Quaker hymn, but the editor’s note mentioned that the song came from the Shaker tradition. I looked into it and found that the hymn tune had actually been written by a Baptist pastor, Robert Lowry, who wrote it as a setting of a Christian poem, for which the only know attribution is Pauline T., the name under which it was published in the The New York Observer.  

Today, Lowry is remembered primary for the hymns he wrote, the best-known being “How Can I Keep from Singing?”, “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus”, and “Shall We Gather at the River?”, this last one, interestingly enough, was written during an epidemic. But during his lifetime (he lived from 1826 to 1899), he maintained that preaching was his primary vocation, and that hymn-writing amounted to little more than a side project… a side project that resulted in the publication of twenty-five collections of hymns (both alone and with others) over the course of his life.

Like the faithful shoemaker, Lowry kept cutting out the melodies to hymns; and like the elves, his work as a hymn-writer took on a life of its own with his songs earning him great renown even overseas. Indeed, “How Can I Keep from Singing?” has had quite the life of its own after Lowry’s death: becoming an anthem for the civil rights and labor movements, having an additional verse written, being adopted by contemporary Quakers after it was incorrectly attributed to their tradition, and eventually travelling all the way to this choral festival in the form of a gospel rendition.

One way to define one’s destiny is that which results from an individual’s life regardless of whether or not the individual was trying to make it happen. There is, of course, a discussion to be had about our ability to actively participate in and/or ignore our destiny, but that is a matter for another time. In Lowry’s case, we have what I image to be his daimon constantly generating melodies and lyrics, so that he might became the venerable hymn-writer we know him as today (despite his belief that preaching was the more noble or even more desirable vocation). After all, one of his best-known hymns (the one we been talking about here) is called “How Can I Keep from Singing?”. While Lowry did not write these words, he was undoubtedly moved by them, and the symbolic coincidence seems too significant to overlook; he simply couldn’t keep himself from composing, even if he thought it secondary to other pursuits.

When people use the expression ‘honest work,’ often it’s meant to suggest working 40 hours a week at a job that is seen as useful to society for the purpose of earning money to pay for life’s necessities. This work is, indeed, noble (so long as it still allows room for the calling towards which the daimon is pointing us… not all callings have to do with traditional employment). Today, though, I use the expression ‘honest work’ as the title of this episode to propose an additional meaning. Being honest means telling the truth, and so we might see ‘honest work’ as work that tells the truth about our soul’s calling – whether that’s paid work, work in the home, or even inner work. Regardless of whether it produces money, such work is almost certain to bring with it the riches of the soul.

I’d like to end with a passage from “On Work” from Kahlil Gibran’s exquisite book, The Prophet, and an excerpt of an improvisation on Lowry’s melody for “How Can I Keep from Singing?” follows. The full excerpt is available to members of the MeadowSong Podcast Listeners Club. To learn more about becoming a member, go to patreon.com/meadowsongpodcast. If you liked this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend and writing a review wherever you listen.

Here's Gibran:

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.

For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and in proud submission towards the infinite.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.

Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labor a misfortune.

But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,

And in keeping yourself with labor you are in truth loving life,

And to love life through labor is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.

And what is it to work with love?

It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.

It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house. It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.

It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,

And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.

Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, “He who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler than he who ploughs the soil.

And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet.”

But I say, not in sleep but in the over-wakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass;

And {they] alone [are] great who [turn] the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by [their] own loving.