Book offers ways to incorporate faith and work

Intermountain Catholic

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SALT LAKE CITY – In "The Catholic Briefcase: Tools For Integrating Faith and Work," author Randy Hain has a lot of good advice about integrating faith and work.

But Hain makes an evident mistake: His entire book is aimed at the businessman. He doesn’t give the businesswoman credit at all. The cover shows a brown briefcase, half-opened, with a rosary atop the work. It’s obviously a man’s briefcase, and probably a man’s brown rosary. Although I am familiar with women who pray with wooden rosaries, particularly the olive woods of the Holy Land, the brown rosary does suggest a man.

Putting that aside, the book challenges the reader to pray at work. Thus it calls us to put our busy-ness aside and give a few minutes to God, something the pope and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops both encourage, as Hain points out.

"In The Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), the Second Vatican Council weighed in on this particular struggle, saying that we have grown to become erroneous in our ways by creating this dichotomy between a so-called professed faith and the practice of daily life," the bishops wrote. "One of the main points was to emphasize that a Christian who shirks his temporal duties does so to his neighbor, neglecting God and endangering his eternal salvation. In this declaration they called on Christians to follow Christ’s example – to be proud of the responsibility of earthly duties and to value them as religious duties, which are under God’s supreme direction. What we can learn from this declaration is far more than the convenience of simply ‘checking our faith at the door.’"

A former Baptist, Hain said no one might have believed he would write a book about integrating faith and work. But he has, and the book has some interesting things to say.

Hain offers five ideas that may help you integrate your Catholic faith with your work:

1. Pray. We will not succeed in this effort without a prayerful life.

2. See Christ in others and make sure they see Christ in you.

3. Join or start a ministry that promotes this effort. (I think that with the current adamant division between Church and state, this might seem a little difficult, but it is important.)

4. Know our faith. Hain points out that one obstacle to integrating faith in our lives is the fear that we will not be able to explain or defend our Catholicism to others.

5. Surrender and put God’s will before our own. Hain writes that by doing so it is his hope and belief that Catholic busy-ness will see a dramatic change in their lives if they embrace this idea.

I am not as crazy about this book as I have been about others. Hain proves to be a bit of a self-important man whose bits and pieces of his personal faith (not always truly Catholic) tend to be somewhat overwhelming. I can’t recommend this book as I have others, because the author’s own conversion story makes up the bulk of the book. While that is important, it shouldn’t make up so much of the book in the whole. I suspect Hain has much more to say. Perhaps he’s saving something for another book.

"The Catholic Briefcase: Tools for Integrating Faith and Work " by Randy Hain" Ligouri Press, Ligouri, Miss. Soft cover, 137 pages.