Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure

by Nancy J. Nordenson

When we were young, they asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Those 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 about 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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

258 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2015

About the author

Nancy J. Nordenson is the author of Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure and Just Think: Nourish Your Mind to Feed Your Soul. Her writing has appeared in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Indiana Review, Comment, Under the Sun, Relief, and other publications and anthologies, including Becoming: What Makes a Woman (University of Nebraska Gender Studies) and The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God (Cascade). Her work has also earned multiple “notable” recognitions in the Best American Essays and Best Spiritual Writing anthologies and Pushcart Prize nominations.

Reviews

[Mark Oppenlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a confession to make: People give me books. Lots of books. I have a number of acquaintances who are writers, and they often send me copies of their books. Also, those friends and family members who know that I am an avid reader (i.e. almost all of them) sometimes send me books. And through my day job, which involves networking and community outreach, I meet more people who send me their novels and poetry and research and self-help tomes. These books often pile up, and it can take me a while to read them, despite my best intentions to honor those who gave them to me.

I don't know Nancy Nordenson personally, but we have some friends in common. Several years ago, as a fellow alum of Seattle Pacific University, she sent me a copy of her book Finding Livelihood which I placed on one of several bookshelves in my office, and left to gather dust. Recently, I decided it was time to make space in my reading schedule for this book. I wish I hadn't waited so long. Or, given the year we all had in 2020, perhaps the book came to the surface at just the right time. I don't know.

At a glance, you might think that Nordenson's book falls into that category of volumes designed to help people understand their career and calling. However, it's not a traditional book of vocational theology or a secular self-help book, although there are elements of both in the writing. Instead, Nordenson offers the reader a series of essays on the subjects of career, vocation, work, calling, leisure, and other related topics. She organizes these essays into a cycle, almost like an epic poem, where some sections recall ones that have gone before and others foreshadow things to come. The book also proves to be a personal memoir and reflection, with Nordenson using her own paid work as a medical writer to explore the various topics in question.

I found myself engrossed, not only by Nordenson's use of eclectic sources (the book has a number of end notes), or her lovely, reflective writing, but also by her willingness to ask the questions that don't often get posed. For example, she writes an entire chapter on who gets credit for work done and another chapter on dealing with divided attention. This is not your average vocational book, riffing lightly on Buechner's idea of "your great joy" and "the world's great pain" and offering the wide-eyed young person hope that their career will have meaning. No. Instead, Nordenson writes a volume for weary, middle-aged wage workers trying to understand the purpose and meaning behind the mundane day-to-day shit they have to do to survive. Her exploration derives from her personal experience of both loving and hating work, of wrestling with the midnight angel to get a better answer to the meaning of vocation.

Perhaps the best thing about the book is its candor. Nordenson lays bare her own struggles with work, but also the pain of watching her husband deal with layoffs and underemployment. These vignettes and field notes bring a level of authenticity to the more erudite thoughts, grounding the book in a flesh and blood reality, where flights of fancy mingle with the sweat of our brows.

I told you that I don't know Nancy Nordenson, but after reading this book, I kind of feel like I do. The best memoirs and essays do that, I suppose. They offer us a glimpse of a real human being, while opening up something beautiful and universal about them, creating a sense of connection. Such is the nature of Finding Livelihood. Rather than a hopeful, youthful look at work, or the reflections of a wildly successful individual offering smug advice, Nordenson offers a thoughtful exploration of work in the middle ages of a middle-class life. If you sometimes struggle to find meaning in the day-to-day tasks of your job, this book might be for you.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I decided to write a review of Nancy J. Nordenson's Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure, the first word that came to mind was "impressionist". And indeed, her book on calling and vocation does not so much state her perspective directly as it leaves the reader, through vignettes of her own life and through other illustrations, with a distinct impression of what she is conveying. So subtle can the distinctions between her stories be, often interweaving two or more in a chapter, that it can be easy to miss the point she is trying to make. In this sense, her work is distinctly artistic.
But on other, I would have to say that her book is also iconic. Not only does her book, through the use of personal stories and reflections on art and literature, reflect the way in which the Divine shines through and is mediated by the natural world, as icons do, but she also at one point quotes from Russian Orthodox thinker and priest, Pavel Florensky, when she borrows the phrase, "a beholding that ascends". Florensky was specifically describing the religious impact of icons in that phrase.
There is another sense in which her theology of vocation is iconic. It comes through in the way in which she perceives and writes about one's calling. Where it has become popular in certain evangelical circles to cite Frederick Buechner's "the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet", Nancy Nordenson takes a different approach or, at the very least, a different emphasis. Buechner's quote is one I have often found inspiring myself, but I have to admit it can be a tad idealistic, being actualized very seldomly in a reality tainted by sin and the effects of the Fall. Thus, Nordenson takes the tack that much of our calling is lived out in places of necessity and pragmatism. She writes that "work, even good work for which we are grateful and love, has a shadow side." And her own life illustrates this. Much of the book, especially later on, is taken up with reflections during her time having to work after her husband lost his job. She had planned to reduce her work schedule while going through graduate school, but found herself adjusting to the reality of what was.
The book itself is presented in three "acts". The first act reflects on the limitations of life, "where we encounter ground level and metaphysical realities...idealistic work experts and criteria for 'good work'; hiddenness and exhaustion; and a longing for meaning and a will to be satisfied." The second act is primarily on learning to rest and paying attention to what is unfolding before us in our life and work. It is in this act that one reads Florensky's quote and sees how she applies the concept of beholding to one's vocation. It is also at the end of this part that she writes the chapter about her husband coming home after losing his job. Prior to this, her reflections were based on earlier memories of past work experiences, but with the last chapter of Act II, the readers is segued into Act III, "where we encounter love, devotion, and guidance; the sacrament of the present moment and every moment;...patience and transformation; and a blessing of countenance."
For me, one of the joys of this book was her interaction with other writers and thinkers that I am fond of. These include quotes from Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis, Julian of Norwich and The Cloud of Unknowing, T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But as one might guess from the quote above regarding Act III, she quotes from that French mystic, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in his book The Sacrament of the Present Moment. And this reinforces the iconographic nature of her writing. For, in attending to the moments of her life and her work as present realities which mediate God's grace, she is able to write, "On one level we make our livelihood; on another level we keep our eyes open and find it." Nancy Nordenson's book is a testament to what revelations can result when we open our eyes to what is in front of us and receive it as grace. Truly, in the reading of this book one is engaging in a beholding that ascends.

To read additional thoughts on calling, vocation, and spiritual formation, go to stadtmenschblog.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful, thoughtful, quiet book. It reminds me of poetry and meditation. Of the writings of Kathleen Norris and Richard Rohr. And it contains references to my favorite T. S. Eliot poems and Julia if Norwich, whose book I am also meandering through. It was recommended by a friend from Seattle Pacific University and, after reading the acknowledgements, I realized Nancy Nordenson did her MFA at our alma mater. Go SPU.

Nancy Nordenson makes no claims to have answers to the challenges of life and faith and work and their constant intersections, but I appreciated how she asked thoughtful questions and invited readers to breathe. Consider. Pray. Reflect. Sometimes when I was reading, I felt like I was only grasping small bits of the message she was trying to convey, when I wanted to devour the whole. I have the same experience when reading the Psalms, so perhaps repetition is the answer, letting the language flow over me until it become a familiar friend.

[Elizabeth Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelously crafted lyrical essays on the search for meaning, satisfaction, and joy in the gritty realities of work.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The number of books telling you how to find your dream job, how to break the code to find the work you were made to do, are many. This is not one of those books. It is for those who have moved beyond their late teens and twenties and have found that work is far more complicated than they realized. Nordenson’s writing reminds me of Annie Dillards—she weaves in metaphors and images from “the sciences”, literature, and Christianity, respecting the mystery that remains while grasping towards more understanding. If you are in your thirties or beyond, discouraged by the unmet expectations of employment that fulfills, frustrated by the thorns and thistles that meet you every step of the way, this book is for you. I was encouraged by it, as this is also where I am at.

[Ruth Everhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finding Livelihood is a book of essays for people in midlife who are grappling with their livelihood. The essays are both lyrical and gritty -- lyrical in language and gritty in context. The essays are not chronological, but overlapping. Certain metaphors reappear. For instance, airplanes are prominent, as are plants and soil and earth. The world of medical terminology is almost constantly present because that is how the author makes HER livelihood. How often do we see inside the reality of another person's livelihood? Not the social media version, but the felt experience? Nancy Nordenson is generous about allowing us that glimpse -- her lilting language lifting up the curtain.

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found Nancy's witness to what work means and its implications for livelihood inspiring and thoughtful. I work in the human resources field in recruiting. I have a great impact on the lives of others through this work. Nancy helped me consider the many facets of work in our lives-- to satisfy basic needs for sustenance, and to fill a deeper longing for meaning. Nancy makes known her personal struggle with many of these issues surrounding work. The career path is definitely not straight, and it can take surprising turns and detours. I love the word progress in the title, because work is never an end-all, be-all place. But rather a journey of transformation.

[Karen Miedrich-Luo · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptionally well-written meditation on work with an eye on both the ideals and realities of what we do. Nordenson's reflections pull from her life and her research to draw out the reader's own contemplation of why we do what we do and how we are defined by our work, or the loss of it.

I read it almost devotionally, meditatively, searchingly; it elevated work to its proper place as a spiritual practice which daily affects us all.

[Thomas]

Frederick Buechner, in his book, Wishful Thinking (1973), says, “The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” This must be the most quoted definition of vocation in contemporary literature on calling and work, the only problem being that it isn’t really true. It’s a good line, and it sounds good when you’re 19 (it did to me), but easy acceptance of this phrase is quickly challenged by the question of “what happens when the world’s hunger requires something of me I am not glad to give?��� A glance at scripture, at history, at your own life and the lives of those around you, reveals that it is a matter of when, not if, you will be asked to give something that hurts rather than provides gladness if you are to follow God’s calling in a broken world. When you’re 19 this reality is perhaps less clear (and not particularly welcome as you plot your glorious plan for your life).

Since I love Buechner, I should note that less frequently referenced is his “Memoir of Vocation,” Now and Then (1983), a book that offers a more nuanced exploration of calling and the lived experience of work. In Now and Then Buechner doesn’t describe the easy convergence of personal gladness and worldly need, but instead describes a journey of wrong turns, of frustration, of set backs, of confusion, of minor victories, in the pursuit of his calling. The most famous quote of that book suggests that in listening to our life the “boredom and pain” of life is no less holy, no less a gift of grace, than its “gladness.” And many find as they grow older that boredom and pain may be the defining features of their working lives, rather than deep gladness.

Nancy Nordenson’s Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure speaks to this reality as she explores what meaning can be drawn from the “shadow side” of work, its boredom and frustrations, of trying to navigate the “tension of your planned life and your given life.” It’s less about finding work that will fulfill our deepest desires and more a meditation on searching for “signs of transcendent reality and participating in that reality, even when work fails to satisfy.” It is a book about work and vocation "for grown-ups, "as the promotional copy puts it, for “who but a very small minority” Nordenson asks “can find the exact intersection [of deep gladness and deep hunger] and feed a family? Or at that sweet spot sustain their position for a lifetime?”

In a series of “lyric” essays, Nordenson enters into the details of a working life (she earns her living as a freelance medical writer) that often get glossed over in more abstract and theoretical descriptions of work: meeting deadlines, the pain of being laid off, the frustrations of the job search, of doing work that seems disconnected from “my calling,” of the bills that show up in the mailbox every month and the alarm clock that rings every day. The figures Nordenson references are not the latest productivity gurus, nor the latest behavioral economics studies, but figures like Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Josef Pieper.

This is not a how-to guide, or a book stuffed with answers to the dilemmas many (most, if the statistics concerning work satisfaction are any guide) people face with regard to work. The lyric style Nordenson uses relies on a “nonlinear structure, white space, metaphor and a slant-angle perspective. It is a way of exploring, not a way of explaining.” It requires and rewards patience, and leaves the reader with plenty of work to do on her own. It is this style that lets Nordenson explore some areas of work that other more “explanatory” books do not, even if my one complaint with the book is that I did feel as though some of the essays lost a certain amount of momentum and direction. My favorite essays were likely the “Summa Laborum” chapters, modeled on the rhetorical structure of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. The structure of those particular chapters gives shape to Nordenson’s reflections as she starts with questions like “Should money be excluded from a discussion about the meaning of work?” and works through reasons to answer yes, or no.

Finding Livelihood is a vulnerable book, a book that displays its doubts and bewilderment in a way theological reflections are not often willing to risk. It is a book that is honest about the wrestling that occurs as we try and find our way in the world of work with its many kinds: “the work of earning a living, creating, serving; the work of looking for work. The work of marriage. Raising children. … The work of play. The work of the church. Laundry. The preparing of food. What should we call the work happening inside of us?” A reader who is living in the “tension between passion and need, between aspiration and limits, between the planned life and the given life” may find Nordenson’s contemplative essays a welcome companion along the way.

[Cyd Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nancy Nordenson is a powerful, intelligent and poetic writer. This is not a how-to book or a manual with advice on resume writing. It's reflective and I find everything she writes worthwhile; nothing is wasted because each sentence has it's own beauty. I find encouragement and joy here.

[Tamara Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted this book to tell me -- artfully -- what to do when I grow up. I am in a floundering season and this title looked promising. Instead Nancy Nordenson validated -- artfully -- the pain of not quite knowing one's own vocation. And, if suspecting, trudging up hill to make one's livelihood from that vocation. Each chapter works together, but can also stand alone as an essay, tying together seemingly mundane daily observations into themes of desire, doubt and calling. Woven throughout are the threads of Nordenson's own story with her husband, a painful struggle with unemployment and underemployment and goodhearted faithfulness. As a writer who makes a living writing medical reports (her BA is in biology) while simultaneously pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing, Nordenson's prose manages to be both pragmatic and poetic, a tone which I thoroughly enjoyed. If you prefer linear storytelling or bullet lists of tips, this book is not for you.

I want to write more about this book. Hold me to it, please?

A couple of excerpts:
" 'And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.' I know this is the bottom line, the question worth the most points on the final vocational exam, yet the corollary questions remain: how, when, and where? The acting and loving and walking can't be in the abstract, but must be anchored in time and place -- moving arms and legs, fingertips and brain. And hopefully a paycheck is earned in the process."
.....
"I have been collecting images, lifting layers, switching between depths of field to catch glimpses of what's really going on here. How does work become more than what it is, and how do we become ourselves in the process? How do we find livelihood even as we are making it? How can an individual body of work contribute to a corporate body of work to participate in a universal, eternal, world-without-end body of work?"
.....
"Years ago I copied out words from a Lenten book into my journal, 'Pray to remember that upon you rest both the favor of God and the power of the Spirit.' This is how I think of God's grace coming to us. And these words, 'dedicate with faith your personal lifelong pilgrimage -- regardless of how insignificant it may seem to you -- as an important part of God's liberation of the world!' ...I have felt bread on the tongue and water on the flesh, but I crave signs of grace outside the cloister of the sanctuary and so am drawn to a teacher's recent suggestion to try living all of life as a sacrament, as a physical participation in the flow of grace from God to people and among people and back again. ...The surface view of grace isn't synonymous with the good life; history bears that out. Sometimes the favor and power of God, the share in God's liberation of the world looks like sweaty hard work, failed work even. I have to wonder about my willingness to live sacramentally, my willingness to have headaches and high blood pressure, frustration and exhaustion be visible signs of invisible grace as God works in me and through me."
.....
"I returned to work begin again. Breath and blood, flesh and brain, heart and bones. The weeks are holy."

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this book! Here it is on the morning of Christmas Eve when I need to start some cinnamon rolls and run to the drug store before family arrives with a toddler whom I love and whom will keep me very busy, but I've sat down to reread parts and a new chapter and I feel myself newly inspired to plunge into my work of cooking and tidying with zest. Before you read further, It is a book for adults who have already experienced the world of work. It is a book for those who love the beauty of language and wish to enter into a reflective journey. It's not for those who want to taker personality assessments or be told what to do in a serious of steps (that don't work for the many anyways). It takes you far beyond the books What Color is Your Parachute or Work (Stud Terkel) and deftly disassembles Buechner's assertion that God calls us to a place where our deep joy and the world's deep hunger meet. If you haven't found that true for you and are wondering why or what to do about it, reading this book.

I love how these reflections take seriously the complexity and mystery of where work and love meet. I appreciate the book's real-life anecdotes about the intersections between real life on the job (not star-studded promise) and the dreams we drew on in setting our course; the intersections it ponders regarding God's help and grace over and around us and the actuality of tedious, back-breaking work and deep disappointments encountered within it-- realities such as teenager (an the author's son) beginning his summer job and plunging nine-feet from a scaffold to a concrete floor and needing three surgeries thereafter.

The author extraordinary pondering of her topic makes the book a unique contribution to the question of how work can become infused with meaning, of how we can quest on the job to experience "a transcendent and God-filled reality." She brings to bear her medical background as a writer in that field and her reading of other contemporary books exploring work, but - unlike so many authors - always keeps one foot grounded in the real world. A few quotes from the prologue: "This book is about wrestling with work as with any large and powerful force that wants to have its way with you while you simultaneously want to have your way with it...this book adds...a meddling and contemplative voice, a voice trying to speak into the tension between passion and need, between aspiration and limits, between the planned life and the given life."

Though I highly regard this book, I shy away from giving it five stars because it's not a book for every person. Some sections move a bit too slowly. It's book I don't pick up at bedtime because its requires my after-caffeine, morning-time kind of concentration. A wise reader will skip over parts that don't hold their particular interest and savor, again and again, the parts that do.

[Carrie Lahain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Work as necessity.

Work as vocation.

Work as expression of our deepest selves.

In a series of lyrical essays, author Nancy J. Nordenson explores the nature of work as a place of intersection between the practical and the spiritual. She does this in language so gorgeous, it’s tempting to linger over each image and turn of phrase. Luckily the subject matter pulls the reader through.

“Work” in Nordenson’s view, is a mutable concept, a series of competing imperatives that exert a constant push-pull between the life we want and the one we end up with. Responsibility vs. freedom. The individual vs. the collective. Creativity vs. practicality. There’s no escape from this whirl of duality, only an ever-shifting accommodation. So much of the meaning of what we do is in the DOING, the figuring things out, the balancing of our needs and our desires.

Nordenson grounds her spiritual and philosophical exploration firmly in the practical using stories from her own work life and that of her husband–the ups and the downs–to demonstrate that one still must make a life even as they are “making do,” and how so much of our day-to-day contentment is a matter of knowing what is in our control and what it not. Negotiating where we can. Accepting what cannot be negotiated. Sometimes acceptance might mean getting on with an imperfect situation, or it might mean cutting our losses.

On a personal level, the concept that most resonated for me was that when it comes to human effort value and compensation often have very little to do with one another. This is a pretty radical assertion in a culture that places so much emphasis the bottom line and too readily confuses a person’s worth with their annual income even as the notion job security goes the way of the dinosaurs.

Finding Livelihood argues that we–and our work–are so much more than the amount of our pay check.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a book I obtained for free from goodreads giveaway. It makes you look I side your inner self to decipher what truly is good for you and fulfilling, making one weigh physical and spiritual side of decisions.