With the release of our new report, More: The Problem with Productivity, Hannah Rich explores what might we learn about productivity from those who have committed their life to religious orders. 13/09/2024

“Being here feels somehow like childhood; the hours are so long and there is so much waiting, staring into space. Absolutely nothing is asked of me, nothing expected.”

This is how the unnamed protagonist of Charlotte Wood’s Booker–nominated novel Stone Yard Devotional describes the solitude and timelessness of retreating to a convent in the Australian outback. Middle–aged, frazzled and worn out by grief, she has fled to the tiny religious community, seemingly drawn by the chance to sit for a while outside the realm of the economy and its demands. When an activist nun arrives, impassioned by the climate emergency and working feverishly to address it, the narrator complains that she has “brought into our home, without apology, everything we so painstakingly left behind”.

It is a presentation of the religious life as deliberately slow, with its value in its opposition to the productivity–obsessed culture of the world beyond the convent doors. Wood’s narrator neither believes in God, nor grasps what prayer is, but equates escaping to the convent with a literal retreat from everyday life and its noise. It’s an attractive idea; indeed, I am a recent convert to the joys of a silent retreat and the lack of pressure or clamour that comes with a weekend spent quietly dipping a toe into the rhythm of prayer and stillness of a community of nuns.

But as Herman Melville wrote in his epic Moby Dick, “there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.” To truly enjoy bodily warmth, according to Melville, some small part of you must be cold. To enjoy the silence and absence of pressure to be productive, must you also have one foot in the world beyond? What happens when the ‘retreat’ from daily life becomes your daily life? At a moment when half the titles in the non–fiction bestseller list are self–help books aimed at making us more productive, more efficient, faster at every aspect of our daily lives, what might we learn about productivity from those – like nuns – who have committed their life to religious orders?

The radical choice to quit capitalism

A former journalist, Sister Liz Dodd is now three years into her formation as a Sister of St Joseph of Peace, based in Nottingham. By her own admission, she fits the trope of people entering the religious life right at the point that, in the world’s terms, they have the perfect career and life all set. (“Boringly, that probably applies to me!” she laughs when we chat over Zoom.) She was working as a travel writer for National Geographic and living in a London house share with her best friend when the idea of a religious vocation began to grow louder, as did the desire to leave behind the monthly grind of earning a salary and the ethical decisions it brought. First, she cycled the whole way round the world, then she came home and joined the convent.

“Part of the reason I became a sister was that I’ve thought for a long time that capitalist economics is inherently unfair. Someone is always scapegoated and that, to me, is not a picture of the kingdom of God… The idea that you could say, ‘I quit the whole thing’ and just not get paid anything felt great. It felt really radical to acknowledge how broken the whole system is, to kick back at that system and say, ‘you can advertise to me all you want but I haven’t got any money’.”

Going without a bank account or money of her own was the easy part of quitting the capitalist mindset. The transition to not earning was liberating. The idea that her worth lay in being busy and chasing the emotional hit of accomplishment proved harder to shake; three years in, Sister Liz says she still misses the dopamine high of feeling productive and pitching as a freelance journalist.

“It was the real struggle of my novitiate,” she says, talking about wrestling with the ‘unproductive’ nature of the intense initial period when you first join a religious community, prior to taking permanent vows; the engagement before the marriage, in a sense. “I think I still feel it now to some extent. As a journalist and especially one who’d worked freelance, I was so output orientated. As a journalist, your output is measured. You don’t just write for yourself or even for your editor.”

“Being a journalist, getting a pitch accepted is almost like a sugar hit. It’s a huge thing. Having that taken away was like going on a sugar detox. It was a chemical crash. I felt it physically. There were points where I felt like it was depression, the depth of it. I don’t know if that was a by–product of just having to sit with myself long enough to come into contact with harder emotions that I’d usually busy my way through, or if it really was like cracking a sugar addiction. Constant productivity, that constant grind and work, it’s like sugar.”

Sister Liz pauses here, and I can feel myself cringe inwardly, realising my brain has already raced ahead to what a great quote this will make and how much an editor will love it. I can taste the sugar already, but I also want to know the secret of not craving it anymore.

“What helps is that I live in a community with asylum seekers and homeless people and because of that ministry, I’m often living alongside people who society would say are unproductive. Asylum seekers can’t work because the system cripples what they can and can’t do. If I, inside myself, still believe that to have worth, you have to have a job, and work 9–5, and bring home a salary, then I would have to believe the same thing of them. Being in that world helped.”

“If I really mean that everyone has equal worth and dignity, whether they’re asylum seekers or street homeless, then I have equal dignity too and it’s nothing to do with how productive I am. Funnily enough, it’s the ‘I’ bit that’s hardest to accept.”

The intergenerational nature of the community, Sister Liz says, also turned on their head some of her assumptions about productivity. When you are in your thirties, sharing a home with asylum–seeking teenagers and ninety–something nuns, who are all a vital part of the household, then the marker of value is different. Similarly, living alongside a homeless person with little or no material assets accumulated from their lifetime makes you question what counts economically.

The sisters in Sister Liz’s community are ‘active religious’, working in the community with asylum seekers and homeless people, and still very much engaged in life outside of their bubble albeit with an underlying rhythm of prayer. Sister Liz is still ‘busy’ in a conventional way, even if there is no salary and little tangible to show for it in an economic sense. There is always work to be done, whether it’s the book she is writing – the advance payment and profits of which, naturally, will be shared with the whole community – making breakfast for a teenage housemate, or running errands for an elderly sister. She continues to write a regular column for Catholic newspaper The Tablet.

“I would love to say that I get up in the morning and just pray, but I don’t. I get up at 110 miles per hour. Some mornings I find half an hour for yoga in the middle of it all.”

“I couldn’t be a contemplative. It takes real guts to say, ‘my productivity is in praying seven times a day and gardening’. I don’t think I could do that.”

Contemplative Simplicity: A nun’s perspective on productivity and self–sufficiency

For Sister Gabriel Davison, a Franciscan nun from the Poor Clares, however, contemplative prayer and gardening are the bedrocks of life. When I ask her about the notion of productivity, her thoughts turn not to time or efficiency, but to material produce and being self–sufficient. The monastery where she lives in Sussex has a large garden where the sisters grow their own fruit and vegetables, along with a small shop where they sell some of the goods. The goal, though, is never to turn a profit. The sisters give away or share anything they consider to be a surplus.

“I think we would always share whatever we have,” says Sister Gabriel over Zoom. “When we have more than enough, in terms of fruit and vegetables, because we live a very simple life, it’s what’s there. Even it’s not exactly surplus, we would always make everything stretch so that everyone’s welcome. Whatever we have, we’d share with anyone who comes. As Franciscans, that’s part of our charism. In fact, our charism is such that we never quite earn enough money ever. We are always in need and always relying on the goodness of other people.” The ‘charism’ is the particular gift or defining character of a specific religious community; few outside the religious life would understand “never earning enough” as a spiritual gift, less still one to celebrate.

For Sister Gabriel, the religious life – even the contemplative one – is not one of withdrawing from work altogether but of reimagining its value. The sisters in Arundel are industrious in tending their land, which is quite literally productive in the goods it yields, but there are limits too. In highlighting the community’s self–sufficiency, Sister Gabriel always returns to the value of sufficiency within that.

“I think productivity, for me, is about saying yes to God and letting him take it wherever he wants… For us as contemplatives, our work is to lead us to God. It’s not about the amount you can produce or the speed at which you can produce it. It’s about enabling us to be one with our work and find God in it. It’s not about making money or making more and more; it’s about having enough, not being consumers. It’s working in harmony with rather than grasping for.” 

As the sisters have aged, without newer younger members joining them, this perspective has served them well. Over time, the vegetable patch and orchard have grown smaller in line with their sisters’ capacity to manage it. With fewer, frailer hands between them, Sister Gabriel says, the work of their hands has reduced. There might be a quicker way of picking fruit with a machine, she acknowledges, but that would defeat the idea of picking it by hand, being outside in nature, which is itself part of the simple work of contemplation for the sisters.

“I think one of the things that’s key to our spirituality is that St Clare talks about the ‘grace of working’. She calls it a grace, which I think is so important. The grace of working. It’s the lot of every human person, I think, but we see it as a grace. For us, work isn’t a burden, it’s a way to seek God. It’s about being in solidarity with people.”

If work is a grace, perhaps it is easier to hold it lightly. Grace, after all, is given rather than earned and is not something we ever control the flow of. It does not work like a commodity.

“Our primary work is always prayer, not gardening. We pray several times a day and that’s the work of God, but we’ve also got to live and so we’ve got the work of our hands too. But if the work of our hands made our life so pressured or stressed or we were missing praying the office because we had to get something done, that wouldn’t be a good balance.”

“St Clare spoke a lot about that. It doesn’t mean not working at all, but it’s about not being so preoccupied with work that we lose touch with God.”

More recently, the sisters in Arundel have dipped their toes into a creative project that has proved more conventionally ‘productive’ or successful. During the pandemic they were invited to record an album of themselves singing the psalms and daily office. Unexpectedly for the sisters, it was a big hit and reached number five in the UK Album Chart in 2020. The goal was never to make money – indeed, they have given away all the profits, much to the record label’s bemusement – but the album’s success has still touched the sisters.

“We don’t measure it by how much we sold or how much money it made. I think the record label were surprised by that. We measure our success by the number of people who wrote to us and said, ‘that music saved me in lockdown’ or ‘my husband has Alzheimer’s and whenever I play your music, it calms him’. That to us is success, but it’s a very different way of measuring productivity, isn’t it? The people we’ve been in contact with and the lives we’ve touched. People with no faith at all, who we’d never have met in a million years, who we’ve touched. In some ways you can’t measure that, because ten of those people isn’t worth the same as twice five of them. It’s about the richness and the depth, not the number. I suppose that’s true of everything we do, really.”

Fruitfulness over productivity

If life in a convent/monastery has lots to teach us about rethinking productivity, what about applying it to life outside? Members of some religious orders live in that intersection.

Father Thomas Sharp is an Anglican priest and third order Franciscan, which means living out the principles of the Franciscan community, but without the context of a monastery. He arrives slightly later than planned for our Zoom conversation and begins by apologising and saying, “I think if you’re only five minutes late by 11am, your day is going well!” Long hours of waiting, staring into space without expectations, this is not.

The third order rule of the Franciscans, he says, revolves around three forms of service: work, study and prayer. The balance between the three is contextual, changing depending on individual gifts and seasons of life, but the principle that ‘fruitfulness’ rather than mere productivity is the core purpose is a constant. Life is evaluated against the question of whether it is fruitful.

“All our work has love at the core. That is really important in terms of overwork in my life. When I lose my capacity to love because I’m working 16 hour days, that’s where things start to go wrong. Simplicity isn’t about avoiding all good things. It’s about providing for our dependents and enjoying life, but avoiding luxury and waste. That frees us up from that sense of needing to earn more and more and be more and more productive.”

The fact that Father Thomas’s ‘day job’ is as a parish priest shapes the contextual balance between work, study and prayer, but in other ways it is almost incidental to the rule of life; most members of the third order are lay people. The notion is that a third order Franciscan, whatever sphere they find themselves working in, ought to see work and productivity in this same way. Regular meetings with a spiritual guardian and other members of the order keep this in check, spotting the ‘canary in the coal mine’ of an off–kilter emphasis on work.

“I think having a rule and a rhythm of prayer that I’m returning to and people I’m accountable to in love is particularly valuable. There’s a purpose to that and that purpose is love. It’s not just ‘how can we make your life manageable so you’re more productive in your work?’ Sometimes the aims come into conflict with the demands of a church job, or any job.”

“Sometimes ‘increasing my productivity’ in terms of my religious life,” Father Thomas says, miming air quotes, “means decreasing the productivity of my work life, and that’s fine. I’m a Christian first, a Franciscan second and I have my employment contract with the diocese third. I think all clergy and all workers should be able to say no to unreasonable demands. But being able to say that my rule of life requires me to be at something or not at something else, people get that and value that.”

There are myriad ways to live this out, but whether as a banker, a priest, a teacher or a stay–at–home parent, the core question of the third order religious life is the same. The purpose of fruitfulness, in all phases of life, is consistent. Father Thomas talks about older parishioners in his congregation who have struggled with “falling off the cliff of work” when they have retired, finding that their worth and purpose was tied up with their work and the transition is difficult.

“I think the most important lesson that the religious life has is asking the question of when you invest in your wellness, to use popular language, to what end are you doing that? If it’s to increase your productivity, that’s great for your capitalist overlords but is it actually great for you? What is often happening to you, and I’ve seen family members in that trap, is that you’re being enlisted to do more work under the guise of your own wellness to improve your boss’s profit margin. Doing all these things in order to increase your resilience isn’t life. It’s not living life to all its fullness,”

Using ancient spirituality to escape modern busyness

This proliferation of books and programmes promising to build resilience, increase efficiency or improve ‘wellness’ often draw on sources of spiritual wisdom. Given this, says Father Sam Cross, it is surprising that no one has yet mined the tradition of Benedictine spirituality and packaged it into a self–help book. Father Sam is the vicar of St Thomas Kensal Town in London and also a postulant (the first stage of joining the order) in the Anglican order of Cistercians, who follow the rule of St Benedict. Like that of Father Thomas, this is a ‘dispersed’ religious community, living in the wider world and interpreting the rule of life there.

He points to the practicalities of the religious life, as much as its spiritual wisdom, as useful in considering how we see productivity. The routine provided by praying five times a day, for example, acts as a helpful way to split the day into blocks. The most basic of principles in many self–help books is to split your time into manageable chunks, with a view to focussing the mind for shorter periods of time. The pattern of prayer means this occurs naturally, with a spiritual focus and greater purpose than just efficiency. The Benedictine principles of work being prayer and prayer being work is helpful; even the most tedious task (typing up a risk assessment document for the church hall, for example) becomes productive in a spiritual sense when it is reimagined as a prayer.

Work is prayer and prayer is work, but in the cloistered religious life, there is a still a clear delineation between the two in terms of the physical space they occupy, with all thoughts of work left at the door of the chapel or the refectory. Father Sam points out how instructive this might be for boundaries in life outside the monastery.

“When the bell rings for chapel, you put down everything you’re doing and go to prayer. Nothing is more important than prayer. Nothing else comes into that space of prayer and chapel. It’s a healthy boundary, I think. You have to detach altogether from work tasks and pray, or eat lunch, rather than working through until you’re finished. I often think when I see people on the tube doing emails on their way home from work, how much St Benedict would hate that.”

Again, I cringe at this point, thinking about how often I congratulate myself for using the ‘dead time’ of travelling to tick something off my email to–do list. My mind goes back to how proud I was the week before when I found a quiet corner of a railway station to sit on the floor for a Zoom meeting in between changing trains. I conducted one of the interviews for this piece balancing my laptop on a window ledge in a corridor outside a public toilet, on a day where I had an hour to fill between meetings away from my desk. I feel equally seen a moment later when Father Sam talks about how the world treats busyness almost as a virtue. He says he deliberately avoids using the word ‘busy’, however easily it rolls off the tongue when asked about how you are or how your week is going. (“It’s cancerous, that word ‘busy’. I hate it.”)

Redefining Efficiency: Learning to embrace single–tasking

The first time I spent a few days on retreat with the sisters, it wasn’t the silence but the discipline of doing just one thing at once I found hardest, and the lack of busyness.

We are conditioned to listen to podcasts while washing up, read books on the commute and dash out emails while drinking a morning coffee. I can’t even ‘just’ watch a Netflix show without needing something else to do, so resort to doing cross stitch in front of the TV in order to put my phone down. This is the efficiency for which we congratulate ourselves, getting more done in the same time. I draw the line at the growing trend for listening to podcasts at double speed to inhale the same information more efficiently, less fruitfully.

When I first raised the idea of writing this piece, and put out the rather niche call for nuns, priests and monks willing to be interviewed about productivity culture, I was struck by the number of responses from people desperate to read it. The desire for wisdom about life and work that isn’t geared just towards increasing the latter is real.

There were points in every one of the conversations I had with Sister Liz, Sister Gabriel, Father Thomas and Father Sam, in the middle of my working day, that felt like a mirror being held up, both gently and painfully, to the busyness and imbalance of my own life. If Melville was right that nothing is what it is except for contrast, then the lessons of the religious life for those of us grappling with the need to be ‘productive’ are surely our greatest example.

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