Reflection on Words We Work With

Early Monday morning, I was thinking about something that I doubt ever crosses the minds of the gainfully employed.

I was thinking not just about work, but also about language at work, especially language as it is used in different settings. 

I think this started with what I was hearing in church. I was thinking that as the people I know there who hear the same words in that setting every weekend go out again for the week to their different jobs, they, we, must all be subjected to other, different sets of words. Since my friends work at jobs different from mine, the key words they hear must be quite different from what I hear as my daily routine. How those words shape the working worlds we all inhabit is mostly invisible. But they also must be powerful in defining for us some of the fundamental ways we think.

The Words of My Job

This is not to fall into the usual sacred/secular tirade. Most of what I have to say here has to do with a certain kind of workplace idealism. I can only give examples of what I am talking about from my own life. As I am a teacher of English, I have the benefit that I often am asked to stop and think about the words. One of them I often hear at my job is the word “passion.” Most students use it. Some faculty do. Administrators use it. It is a term shaped by our workplace. 

Usually it is used to describe a teacher or a student who “gets passionate” about a subject. The word seems to be a synonym for “getting excited” or “really getting into something” more than is normal. 

The word comes from the Latin word for suffering. This is what it means to speak of "the passion of Christ." And this gives sense to a word like compassion, which means “to suffer with.”

As I said, the word doesn’t mean that now. I’ve even been on job interviews where I was asked “What are your passions?” or “What makes you passionate?” And understanding what these interviewers were really asking for, to pass the interview, I would shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, there are certain subjects that I get talking about, and I can’t stop. Students tell me I'm passionate about it. Writing is like that. I get passionate talking about writing.”

That is usually what they want to hear.

Old and New Passions

When I used to work at a group home for the developmentally disabled, I would often hear the term “mainstream.” When I first heard it, right after being hired, I was curious about it. I realized that the group home represents a kind of transitional space for its residents between their parents' homes and independence, a space that most of the severely developmentally disabled adults I would work with would never move beyond. Even so, our staff meetings were caught up in the mission of mainstreaming, of implementing behavioral programs to help guide our residents' progress. 

Mainstreaming often works. But I admit I found it difficult to be passionate about this, at least, that is, excited about it. Most of our residents would not move beyond our help. But perhaps in another sense, the older sense, as in “the passion of Christ,” I had to be passionate all the time because I was suffering with them, with people struggling with their limitations and wanting to be someone better than they were but never quite making it. 

We aides could be seen suffering with them. It wasn’t any kind of sentimentality that we were involved in. We were simply there to help, support, make sure that no one got hurt or abused, and then clean up afterward. 

Connecting to the Other Words

Today, in education, as I said, I often hear about passion. But I also regularly hear people going on, sometimes “passionately,” about "excellence" or "greatness." This leads me to recognize that this is all the talk of the self-esteem movement, which seems increasingly like a movement that wants to deny limitations. But what if there does come a point where, like many of the adults I worked with in group homes, we can go no further?

We don't usually think this far with the words that guide and govern our working lives, The question is, will we as a society understand our passions enough to be compassionate? We currently have a politician campaigning to “ make America great again.” Fearful of what he really means by this, if anything, I wonder: When this fails, will those who are passionate about this greatness become compassionate?

After all, we are all limited. As much as we want to see our dreams of the workplace and our dreams of a society in which all that we hoped for comes true, it is much more likely that we will be expected to simply adjust when things don’t turn out. 

Adjustment is another key word, but it is one we don't like to hear quite so much as the others. 

But my deepest concern at present is this: If we no longer get that passion is really about suffering, then we may no longer understand what it means to be compassionate. To those who suffer, we can only offer sentimentality. We can't see that we are called to enter into their suffering with them. This is not just the loss of a word. Our culture looses something more important in the process.