Meaningful Work

A QUEST TO DO GREAT BUSINESS, FIND YOUR CALLING, AND FEED YOUR SOUL

BY SHAWN AND LAWREN ASKINOSIE

(Below you can find my selected extended quotes from the book, which you can get here. Quotes are often edited for readability due to lack of context and bolded to help give structure to the notes).

Service can be your bridge to your true vocation. The sustained work at the hospital, week after week, gave me moments of not thinking about myself. It was the true bridge to my vocation because of what happened in the next step. 

After a few weeks, it’s okay to have expectations. But suspending expectations for even a few seconds will be tough. My technique was to take a few minutes before visiting patients to go to the hospital chapel to center myself. I prayed briefly for the group I was about to visit and for myself; that I could suspend my ego and what Buddhist thinkers often refer to as “monkey mind”—that constant “What’s in it for me?”

I carry a sorrow around connected to my grandma and grandpa, and working with cocoa farmers gives me a pathway to joy.

This is how I found my elusive passion, the inspiration for my current chocolate vocation. It’s like trying to grab smoke. The harder I tried, the more difficult the process. Once I focused on true service—not myself—it seemed easier to stand in the smoke and let it rest on me without me having to grab it so desperately. That’s my best attempt to explain an unexplainable mystery … internal dignity is often manifested by outward joy.

We constantly ask, Is this enough? We define growth more broadly than the traditional business world. A changed heart, interior peace, higher-quality products, reduced debt, more efficient work flow, higher pay for staff, and the like will transform us little by little and that’s the kind of growth we hope never ceases.

They (benedict monks) balance life with daily work, prayer, and biblical reading: ora, labora et lectio. He told me what I already know: that the abbey only needs to make “enough” income. how many fruitcakes the abbey makes per year? Enough. Enough for the abbey to survive. This is true for Benedictine Rule monasteries and convents around the world.

“We are not brewers. We are monks. We brew beer to be able to afford being monks.”

What is enough for you? Enough of what? It’s not our goal to be the biggest chocolate company in the world. We’ll leave that to others. It will be enough for us that we’re known as the best-tasting direct trade chocolate available.

We strive for a workplace where the pursuit of interior peace is possible. For example, we intentionally have very few people who work over forty hours per week. We have some overtime, but it’s limited. It’s not that we don’t want to pay it, but that we want people to rest and have time with family. We do everything we can to have an orderly workflow without big swings of hurry-up-and-wait. It’s something that we talk about every week.

Jean says that Philippe and Raphael did not care very much about what he could do or what they could learn from him. They needed “my heart and my being.” They wanted a friend.

His messages of love, service, hope, and compassion inspired my own ideas about vocation.

The blanked of hospitality: we were engulfed in a sea of students clapping and singing in English, “We are happy, we are happy to be together,” over and over. I was the last one to depart the coaster and I took a quick thirty-second video. I stopped videoing, though, because I wanted to be part of it, wanted to be engulfed, and so I did. There was not a dry eye among our group. Not me, the seasoned traveler, or Lawren, nobody. We were all simply overwhelmed with hospitality that we couldn’t handle. Most people have never experienced a blanket of hospitality; it can be difficult to process. Plain and simple, that much love, warmth, and joy makes you emotional.

Rhythm is very important to this life. The heart of the Benedictine Rule is summed up by ora et labora—prayer and work. They wanted me to experience this as a brother, not as a guest. I was expected to attend the prayer services of the Divine Hours, also called the Divine Office or Daily Office. These seven communal services are divided throughout the day to be balanced by work and individual prayer and study. There is a rhythm to the day, balancing work and prayer, that has been undisturbed for monasteries following the Rule for over fifteen centuries.

“It will be important while you are here (in the monastery) to focus on a contemplative orientation, trying for a deepening of ‘being’.

One of my goals of the discipline was greater manifestation of the “fruits of the Spirit” in my own life as outlined in scripture: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness.

The paradox: if my objective of the Rule was to become a “better person,” I would fail, but if my objective was to love God, then the qualities I wanted to develop as a person would naturally follow.

At the monastery we live a schedule that gives a clear rhythm of being and doing, not doing with inserted being. Therefore a good discipline for you is to translate from your preamble a concrete schedule to which you can be held accountable.

Indicate when you will rise, do what upon rising, spiritual activities (how long) before leaving for work; any spiritual activities through the day (and when); what will you do to close the day. Also how much reading per week, frequency of church attendance, any need for disciplined promises regarding diet, exercise, etc.

“Shawn, we would like for you to find a state of being inserted by doing and not a state of doing inserted by being,

Have I mentioned retreats and agendas are fairly incompatible? This is an important point that has probably been clear to most people seeking respite through retreats, but it took me a while to figure it out. The monks call retreats “time apart from the busy world.”

If there is a goal of the retreat—and I am not really in favor of having “goals” for retreats—it is that I rest in God’s presence and later the fruit of that rest will manifest itself in the details of my relationships and my business. It’s kind of like planting a garden. When you plant seed, it doesn’t immediately produce food. We till, plant, tend, water, and weed and then one day we see that there is something

“Silence and solitude are the supreme luxuries of life!” Merton posits that you don’t actually have to go on a retreat to find this luxury. “Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundaries of your dwelling, as by staying within. Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.”

Retreats have not necessarily been about receiving answers, even though I have often attempted to make them about that. Now I have come to believe that they are about resting in God’s presence, via contemplative prayer (for some, another way of defining solitude). The idea is to empty yourself so that God can fill that space. Sometimes, when rest is not possible, then it’s about practicing resting.

“Contemplative prayer” is the term for a variety of methods, in a variety of monastic faith traditions, which can result in divine union with God.

Being inserted by doing. Meaning that I need to simply be. It’s not relaxation, but a state of existence wherein I am calm, I am at peace, I breathe, I am intentional, mindful.