The Carpenter’s Shop at Nazareth
The Carpenter’s Shop at Nazareth
Pursuing Excellence and Creativity at Work
“No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.”
(Dorothy L. Sayers)
INTRODUCTION
Anyone who got to spend a considerable time in law school knows that the joy of paying tuition follows closely on the heels of the opportunity to embarrass yourself in front of your peers through this little process we like to call the Socratic Method. (If you’re curious, a scene from the 1973 film The Paper Chase offers a fitting depiction of this process, notorious for scaring incoming first-years.) It is also perhaps no surprise that some students are less than thrilled in being “called on,” especially those who place a high-premium on being “right” in front of their peers.
A recent story in Reuters piqued my attention here, dealing with the question of whether the Socratic Method should be optional in law schools because of the high levels of anxiety and depression among law students. At the heart of this story was Adam Mortar (lead trial attorney for Students for Fair Admissions in the recent affirmative action decision) who took to Twitter to share something he witnessed at a law school involving a “three-sided name plate” used by students to signal to professors their level of preparedness to field questions. So, instead of the embarrassment of having to stand-up and announce to the entire class that you didn’t do the reading, you can just do it quietly by way of color cards!
Taking to X (formerly Twitter), Mortara asked: “Do law students demand to be treated like fragile children or do law faculty start treating them that way?” Rhetoric aside, it is an interesting question: are students the product of their education system or has the education system become a product of a consumer-based culture where students are constructively treated like customers and being accommodated at every turn?
In law school, those dynamics have been playing out quite a bit in the last few years. It’s been a story across the nation, recently in elite law schools like Yale and Stanford—both of which involved Federalist Society speakers that got constructively canceled (ADF’s Kristin Waggoner and Judge Duncan, respectively) by obnoxious protestors in the name of “harm, equity and inclusion.” Writing in his substack about the incident at Yale, David Lat noted wisely the consequences of failing to develop attorneys without the requisite capacity to listen to information they deem noxious:
When these law students become lawyers, and many of them have to go to court or a negotiating table, they will have to listen to the other side—whether they like it or not, and no matter how “offensive,” “triggering,” or “violent” they find the views of the other side to be. Shouting down opposing counsel, then claiming that you’re just engaging in your own form of “free speech” or “zealous advocacy,” will not fly in the world beyond Yale Law School.
Considering both stories, there is an interesting tension in play between pursuing vocational competence and ameliorating the rampant concerns we’ve seen surrounding mental health and substance abuse among attorneys. In other words: how do law schools develop excellent attorneys without exposing them to the type of elements that could render them incapable of true growth? In one sense, this is an impossible task because so many students develop their character way before law school and any cognitive distortions they pick up along the way will only come to light in an environment where the opportunity presents itself (e.g., forum where opposing views are presented). In that sense, the work of uprooting this psychology, which Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukioff so capably outlined in their books (here and here) and in various publications (here and here), needs to begin way before law school. It needs to begin in the home with more parents instilling a sense of risk and adventure in their children so that they can learn to develop not only genuine curiosity, but also what G.K. Chesterton called an “eternal appetite of infancy” whereby they learn to embrace the challenges of life, even during its mundane repetitiveness.[1]
But it is not just the home where remedy can be sought: college administrators are not off the hook. As noted by a number of recent panels on civility (this and this) and character development, they too have an immense role to play in cultivating the type of environment conducive for the development of vocational excellence and emotional intelligence. The kind of initiative demonstrated recently by Dean Heather Gerken in creating the program Crossing Divides at Yale Law School aimed at equipping law students with the skills to collaborate with individuals from different backgrounds.
And, finally, some of the responsibility also falls with employers (or perhaps more specifically managers), who need to create the type of environment that provides opportunities for challenge and growth, lest workers grow bored and uninspired in their work leading to restlessness and incompetence. Needless to say, character formation begins in the home and continues throughout a person’s life as they grow to face increasingly more difficult challenges. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “life is very long.” That means we must prepare our students for the long-haul.
At the heart of these challenge rests two interrelated disciplines for students approaching their legal careers. Two areas of improvement that I think need to be cultivated early in their minds as they uncover the means for how to apply them well to their daily work. And those two concepts are illustrated best by two films that recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.
THE DIGNITY OF THE FIELD
The first comes from the German director Wim Wenders, who tells the story of a Japanese man named Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) who lives a simple and structured life cleaning public toilets of Tokyo. In case you didn’t know, Japan is renowned for having incredible public toilets that are reminiscent of works of art. Described on the project website hosting these creations, “[t]oilets are a symbol of Japan's world-renowned hospitality culture.” The project so far includes 17 installations from 16 different creators—all seeking to create a tapestry of related concepts to honor the culture and tradition of Japan. These installations are impressive, not only due to their aesthetic appeal, but what they come to represent about the culture at-large.
For examples, there is one installation by the architect Shigeru Ban with transparent outer walls that become opaque at the moment the lock is closed. This design evokes the ideals of privacy and safety, especially since it serves as a lantern to light up the park at night. Another installation from the architect Tomohito Ushiro includes a gigantic panel containing 7.9 billion different lighting patterns to commemorate the world’s population as a sign of solidarity and common remembrance. And another designed by architect Sou Fujimoto is built with a large concave center to simulate a washing station intended for a small community of people to gather and engage around water. Each toilet is unique and so in turn each requires a unique contribution from the sanitation workers of the city to sustain their beauty and cleanliness. Here enters Hirayama.
Content with a simple life, he rises at dawn to the sound of street sweepers. Gets dressed, nurtures his bonsai plants, puts on his Tokyo Toilets jumpsuit, and moves methodically downstairs to his van where he enjoys the same machine-bought canned coffee and plays one of his cherished cassettes that emanate the sounds of Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Otis Redding and others as he drives through the glimmering city “past the Skytree tower in whose shadow he lives.” He works diligently cleaning the toilets, radiating a stark contrast to his younger employee who find it difficult to arrive on time and to stay focused for the entire day—asking constantly for special accommodations and becoming distracted by screens and girlfriends.
But not Hirayama, which perhaps makes him an old soul, but also makes him the embodiment of excellence and a true vision of vocational competence. In fact, he is nothing like his young co-worker who never stops talking and tells a love interest at one point that he doesn’t think he’s ever heard Hirayama’s voice. In a world like ours where noise pollution is confused with value and life, here is a man who meticulously cleans, scrubs, and brushes every corner of a public facility and does it in near silence. When asked by one character why he does this when he knows the toilet will only get dirty again (“How can you put so much into a job like this?”), Hirayama stays silent. The job will speak for itself!
But not only this, Hirayama also finds joy in the smaller things. In the words of a Zach Bryan song, he “prefers things that are worth whilе.” During his lunch break, he takes photos of light breaking through the tops of trees, which he develops and keeps in boxes at home taken by an old camera he keeps close as an intimate tie to his daughter. After work, he eats at the same diner where the owner has come to appreciate his loyalty and routine. He also weekly visits a bookstore where he picks out discounted novels that he reads at home alone, beneath a single lamp, before heading to sleep on his platform bed surrounded by an ascetics’ calm.
Describing the film, Alissa Wilkinson (Vox) notes that it embodies an exploration in the “midst of chaos,” noting how “it’s not labor but the physical objects of beauty that we weave into our lives . . . that structure and give our days meaning.” In a prophetic sense, this beauty, embodied by the installation of seemingly crude items like public toilets, is made pure by the life of tradition and routine in the face of distraction and noise. But more than that, it is a film about the dignity of work, no matter how small or dirty. It is a film about living life backwards and refusing perhaps to fall into the patterns of a “burnout society” where we become discontent in the mundane repetitiveness of life.
In his Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller takes the reader through an excursion connecting temple and field. Chapter by chapter, he speaks through the language of work as the sanctifying center of life that springs from an individual's worldview and preliminary commitments that define his contribution to society. Keller speaks about this through the framework of the “ministry of competence,” noting how work becomes subjectively unfulfilling when removed from the mandate to love your neighbor.[2] He writes, “[t]o take up work that we can do well is like cultivating our selves as gardens filled with hidden potential[.]”[3]
Considering all this, there are two obvious errors to consider in mending our gardens. The first error is the anti-thesis to the life of Hirayama, which is our failure to see our work as an invitation to excellence for the glory of God. Failure to see this leads to professional stagnation whereby we render ourselves ineffective vessel for loving our neighbors. The second error, connected to the first, is failing to see that our work is an act of worship. Disconnected from worship, we have only our managers and the “performing self” to please; and it is much easier to live with the idea of letting down our neighbors than letting down our Savior.
I have a friend who embodied both errors. In speaking with him, I’ve noticed he’s embraced a common modern luxury of separating his work from his faith, in essence allowing his week to develop through a bifurcated structure of commitments. Work is there for earning wages, family is there for leisure and self-propagation, and church is there to steer the ship of moral practice. Each kept separate like estranged siblings, never to reunite under a common roof or meant to serve some common purpose toward an integrated design. In essence, he is able to serve people in various contexts, but his family, work, and religious life evidences little signs of holistic worship.
This practice is rooted in a shallow theology regarding how God designed us for work and how he designed work for us. My friend misses a key ingredient in how work is made dignified in the “creation of culture.”[4] It is the garden of our final measure that takes our stewardship and applies its harvest to the essence of culture. We are the gardeners who operate through the lenses of creativity and assertiveness—how we contribute to the working field will have an indelible effect on the culture at large and the people therein. As Keller writes, “[t]hrough our work, we bring order out of chaos, create new entities, exploit the patterns of creation, and interweave the human community.”[5] By missing the integrative elements of workmanship, we leave to rot our full capacity to love our neighbors outside of work.
Our posture toward our labor serves to magnify the character of the gods we worship. For Christians, our character at work becomes the “mask of God” we wear before the seeing public. It is our contribution to the development of the beloved community and our opportunity to spread the aroma of Christ (2 Cor. 2:15). Without this intentional process of surrendering your vocation to the glory of God, my friend is letting a substantial element of his character be deprived of the mental energy that comes with loving God with all our mind (Matt. 22:37), in all that we do. Consequently, he then deprives himself of the subsequent growth that comes with those sanctifying moments of reflection, which he would otherwise be able to invest in his family and friends.
This intimate connection is not only a call to us to renew our minds in the way we see our vocation as a consequence of the Fall that brought labor, but also a mandate that brings redemptive purpose to the minutiae of our everyday routine. To appropriate the wisdom of C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory, I am reminded that there are no ordinary jobs. You have never worked in a mere vocation. We must work, but our work must of be of a kind that exists between people who have taken each other seriously. Echoing Hirayama, Keller writes how “[w]e were built for work and the dignity it gives us as human beings, regardless of its status or pay.”[6] It is a call to truly understand that work is the natural exercise and function of man and without it we are living in a state of functional atheism. As Dorothy Sayers poignantly explained, it is a matter of great urgency. She writes:
[I]t is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people, and particularly perhaps the Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work. . . . It is not right for Her to acquiesce in the notion that a man’s life is divided into the time he spends on his work and the time he spends in serving God. He must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation.
This is a marvelous truth, linking our hands to our hearts, souls, and minds in a performative labor of love. A due diligence linked to the understanding of our fallen state and the work that God accomplished on the Cross. It is a temporal affair with a timeless destination matched only by its anticipation to hear the voice of the master saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matt. 25:21)
Perfect Days to me is the single best illustration in cinema about the meticulous cultivation of habit and the embrace of a counter-liturgical appreciation for nuance in life. I have a friend who teaches me daily about the philosophy of pace and how the morning is a time for slow, calm reflection. I, of course, resist that tutelage to my own peril being caught in the web of neoliberal design and wanting to maximize my later mornings having already successfully utilized my snooze alarm at dawn. But when I take her advice, I find it sets in positive motion the rest of my day; like a watch that needs a little vibration to arrange its gears for the functioning of a perfect day. It is in that morning pause where we invite the Holy Spirit to go before us and prepare the way for our capacity to labor with a mindset of excellence. For there is nothing glorious about the work of cleaning toilets, for the glory rests entirely in the competence of our ministry to serve the Glorious One in everything we do (Col. 3:23-24).
AN ETERNAL APPETITE
With our first film, I addressed the importance of the dignity of work and the corresponding excellence required, even in the mundane and routine tasks. With my second feature, I want to talk about the importance of creative vigilance.
When I was practicing on the employment side, I found a lot of attorneys grew complacent with the pace of work. Every new client was processed through ready-made boxes and all of their grievances had to fit therein in order to survive our intake attorneys. Sometimes this worked well to remove bad clients, but sometimes this also dismissed claims that on the surface looked “unwinnable” but might provide an opportunity to change the law to advance a more perfect justice. Creativity and risk was required, and those attorneys who preferred to operate based on a model of business-as-usual didn’t develop the creative vigilance necessary to see when opportunity presented itself.
Coincidentally, I saw a movie this year in Telluride that embodies the very essence of risk and imagination. A movie about the culinary arts and about the romance of life that may not fall within our accustomed patterns. The film is by a Vietnamese and French director named Trần Anh Hùng. It tells the story of the eminent cook Eugénie (Juliete Binoche) and her boss Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) who work together in a village cottage preparing famed dishes renowned across France. The two are a dynamite pairing—cooking ingredients with the subtlety and beauty of Abraham-Louis Breguet matched only by a spirit of perfectionism that could rival Leonardo Da Vinci (fortunately most of their dishes were finished). Everything was made fresh-to-order from their garden or local distributors, with the sense and attention to detail that demands the discipleship of vigilance and grace. In the words of one reviewer, the two have “an instinctive, creative appreciation of the taste, texture, composition and fragrance of food, the drama and poetry inherent in the way it should be presented and consumed, and its central importance to civilised existence[.]” Their work complimented one another and their movements in the kitchen felt at times like synchronized performers delivering flawless routines. As the line spoke by Dodin goes, “I read a recipe, and she worked magic on the stove.”
Here, inside the walls of the Segré-en-Anjou Bleu, The Taste of Things delivers an astounding feat of guiding prowess. In one of its post impressive scenes, the director explains the intricacies of both timing and process:
“For a dish, you have 30 seconds to film it, because after 30 seconds, the sauce is not the same—it doesn’t look as it should,” Trần says. “And we didn’t have so much time for the shooting. It was very short, so everything needed to be done quickly.” In one sequence, we observe the preparation of a Baked Alaska. Trần was terrified that, without time to shoot it again, the ice cream would be liquid inside when cut in half. Fortunately: “It didn’t melt.”
But while the audience is captivated by the characters’ attention to detail and innovative spirit of creating a menu that nourishes the mind as much as the palate, we also see a parallel storyline developing in Dodin’s hope to win the heart of Eugénie, who remains uneasy with the prospect of marriage and seems content, perhaps to the very end, to give herself to the work and no one else. There is an immense lesson in the food and in the romance of the virtue of patience and time—both combined to weave a tapestry of imagination and novelty. Here, in the culinary spectacle of something I was utterly a foreigner to, I found a longing kinship for the creative arts and how my own vocation can be made more . . . heavenly. But, alas, there is also a lesson I learned in the dynamics of human relationships, which sometimes gets lost when we become consumed with the labor of our hand.
So, why this movie? Why is creativity so important? The answer is multifold, but a single story I think captures an interesting dimension of all this. Writing for Fortune, Michelle P. King notes a recent trend among Gen. Z is their inability to thrive in an environment defined by ambiguity. She writes,
Younger people are used to getting instant, decisive answers to questions with a quick Google search rather than grappling with the unknown and making decisions with limited information or learning through trial and error like previous generations. Consequently, graduates’ ability to manage ambiguity is decreasing at a time when workplaces are becoming more informal.
The inability to manage ambiguity is part and parcel connected to our inability to embrace the tensions of uncertainty. Very often, those within the legal profession feign knowledge when knowledge is wanting. Students do the same; and smart students especially, finding their core identity in knowing more than others. Here, we have a problem of imagination just as much as a problem of complacency. We have a problem, as the joke goes, of seeking lost keys in the only places where light shines.
In his new book, Matthew Lee Anderson offers an antidote to these problems. Perhaps not a full-blown solution, but a start to one that could be incorporated into the didactical approaches of parents, professors, and managers alike. His solution is simple but elegant and perhaps a tad difficult in an age of reactionism and self-interest. And it is this: embrace a questioning life! Embrace the challenge of pursuing truth through good faith inquiry. Allow yourself to question preconceptions and develop a capacity for being proven wrong.
But more than that, Anderson offers a challenge to those who steward over students distinctly responsive to the current dilemma of “getting instant, decisive answers to questions.” He notes how the immediate satisfaction that comes from the attainment of easy answers does not increase our thirst for understanding. “The longer we sit with our perplexity,” he goes on, “the more our eagerness to understand will grow.”[7] By living “interrogatively” or maybe “inquisitively,” we are returned to the mind of a child fostering the awesome cognitive processes of an adult.
But not just curiosity, questioning enhances our capacity for appreciation and (dare I say) love. Anderson writes that “there is no more basic form of love than the self-disclosure and affirmation that happen in speaking and listening.”[8] This back-and-forth entanglement of ideas and struggles with concepts is for me a core feature of good friendship and perhaps what Solomon meant when he wrote that “as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (Prov. 27:17). I might be an enemy to small talk, but it is only because I believe so strongly in our capacity for big talk. A kind of exchange of ideas and questions that surfaces new methods for seeing and processing unknowns and vulnerabilities. “God calls us into the questioning life through questioning us; His questions liberate us to question Him.”[9]
And, so, when one embraces the beauty of competent and creative work as The Taste of Things embodies, you become a vessel in the potter’s hand that’s capable of sanctifying not only your workplace, but also your friendships through an embodied sense of togetherness and the exchange of ideas in the practice of breaking bread.
CONCLUSION
Returning to the incident at Stanford (noted above), Dean Jenny Martinez, in response to the disruptive students who shouted down Judge Duncan, issued a public statement where she offered a fitting analogy for the importance of overcoming the sensitivities of future attorneys. In her words, she wrote about the high calling that accompanies the legal profession, reproving any notion that certain arguments are beyond the pale of conversation and that students can avoid responding to them by an appeal to outrage. She calls this attitude “incompatible with the training that must be delivered in a law school,” indicating the importance of the legal profession and the lives of clients that accompany said stewardship. She then makes a statement that illustrates the argument I’ve been making throughout this essay:
Just as doctors in training must learn to face suffering and death and respond in their professional role, lawyers in training must learn to confront injustice or views they don’t agree with and respond as attorneys.
Law is a mediating device for difference. It therefore reflects all the heat of controversy, all the pain and suffering, and all the deeply felt moral urgency of our differences in position, power, and cherished principles.
That is a remarkable insight, emphasizing the violence of the legal profession in combatting injustice and the vigilance that comes with the “moral urgency of our differences.” This awesome profession is why the pillars of excellence and imagination must accompany you wherever you go. But you must first cultivate the mindset to embrace this call for the dignity of work and continue developing an innovative spirit for using the law to confront a growing sense of injustice in our world.
Yes, we will disagree on many things and sometimes those difference will render us incapable of friendship. Yes, our communities will often create boundaries where the dignity of some will find it difficult to take a deep breath in its truest form. But we must strive to respect one another as common people struggling together with the forces of light and darkness. To borrow from Reinhold Niebuhr, the “conflict between love and self-love is in every soul.”[10]
Before I leave you, I wanted to pass along a prayer delivered at a recent event hosted by our friends from the Kirby Laing Centre in partnership with the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship. The prayer was delivered in the context of a liturgical service held to mark the start of the legal year. I hope it gives you encouragement and strength to pursue your own vocation with excellence and creativity.
Lord, we bring to you our work as lawyers. We bring to you the hours spent staring at screens or poring through books looking for the right answer. We bring to you the time spent drafting documents to protect and promote our clients’ interests. We bring to you our conversations with colleagues, our interactions with other legal professionals and court staff, and with all those others with whom we come into contact. May we treat them with respect and show the love of Christ to them.
Lord, we bring our clients to you. May our service to them be a faithful witness to Christ. Give us wisdom by your Holy Spirit in all our dealings with others. May we speak truth in the places you have called us to serve.
Lord, we bring to you the structures of authority within which we work. We ask that you might grant wisdom, a commitment to truth, and a heart of justice to the senior partners and managers in our firms, to the Heads of Chambers, to the academic administrators and managers, to the Heads of Legal Departments and others running universities, to judges, to civil servants and to politicians. We pray that there might be a greater sense of the importance of justice and of the rule of law in our land.
Lord, we bring our families, friends and churches to you. May we honour you as we love and serve them.
Keep us free from a love of money. Deliver us from finding our sense of worth in our work. Equip us to know how to balance the responsibilities to which you have called us. Breathe on us by your Holy Spirit, renewing the flame of our first love. Grant that all we do may be an act of worship to you.
We pray all this, not trusting in our own strength, but wholly dependent on the love of God the Father, the grace we have received through Jesus Christ, and the renewing, sustaining power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
[1] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 51 (2007).
[2] See Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work 67-71 (2012).
[3] Id. at 103.
[4] Id. at 43.
[5] Id. at 50.
[6] Id. at 41.
[7] Matthew Lee Anderson, Called Into Questions: Cultivating the Life of Learning Within the Life of Faith 85 (2023).
[8] Id. at 48.
[9] Id. at 22.
[10] Reinhold Niebuhr, Augustine’s Political Realism, in Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses 135 (1987).