Refrain from constructive activities or things you like to do

I fell asleep at my desk at work. I drank too much--cheap wine, directly from a gallon jug. I laughed uncontrollably at inappropriate times. I sat on the roof of our triple-decker home in Dorchester (two twenty-something WASP gay boys gentrifying, as we thought--though for the most part the gentry never came--this tough Irish neighborhood) and stared across the rooftops of a thousand other triple-deckers to the Atlantic Ocean. The rector of the church--the priest who said the words Sunday after Sunday--had taken note. What are the most common money-related reasons for divorce today? Oft-cited candidates are women's freedom to leave marriage due to greater economic independence, and the stresses of limited family resources. But one of the most robust financial predictors of divorce appears to be husbands' lack of full-time employment. As we saw above, either spouse's job loss can spur divorce. But if husbands' underemployment has the strongest association to divorce, it's hard not to infer that conventional gender norms are alive and well, at least where men's breadwinning roles are concerned. This reflects less than brilliantly on our progress toward gender equality, but it does help account for men's acute suffering and women's anxious frustration when husbands don't work for sufficient pay, or at all. Wives can feel critical, even if they know it is unfair or uncompassionate. Husbands can feel inadequate or ashamed. Power shifts, and neither the men nor the women tend to be happy about this. Depressingly, men's unemployment correlates with sexual problems in a marriage, as well as physical violence. It may well be that today we have wider circles of friends because of the internet. And that might be a boon. But beware: there is nothing more ruinous of relationships than thinking they are something they are not - and friendship may be particularly prone to such blind spots as it is something people rarely analyse. It is still quality, not quantity that counts. Even on the internet, this is something that most people understand quite intuitively.

Research conducted by Ray Pahl, into the way people use Blackberrys, seems to capture the heart of it well. His evidence suggests that even the most wired and technophilic of individuals use PDAs to sustain a small core of really good friends, perhaps a dozen at most; and simultaneously use the technology to manage their wider circle of acquaintances - sometimes keeping them at bay, sometimes drawing them in closer. To put it another way, the online age is like any other in this respect: it needs a good understanding of the philosophy of friendship, of its rules and limitations, as well as its promise. A 120 The result, argued Kelly, is that when companies take the natural next step and ask for positive suggestions about making changes, the employees' answers once again focus exclusively on the environment, not the individual. Managers need to be trained in goal setting or Our executives need to be more effective in communicating our vision are typical responses. The company is essentially asking, What are we doing wrong? - and the employees are more than willing to oblige with a laundry list of the company's mistakes. There is nothing inherently evil or bad about passive questions. They can be a very useful tool for helping companies know what they can do to improve. On the other hand, they can produce a very negative unintended consequence. When asked exclusively, passive questions can be the natural enemy of taking personal responsibility and demonstrating accountability. They can give people the unearned permission to pass the buck to anyone and anything but themselves. Active questions are the alternative to passive questions. The Reverend John Ritchie Purnell (his name was on the sign in front of the church) had observed me. I later found out that he had been aware of me even on that very first Sunday. But how? Hadn't I hidden behind a pillar? I had no idea who this Father Purnell--this tuned-in guy--was.

Well, as it happens, he was someone. An ecclesiastical superstar, in fact. John Ritchie Purnell was one of the greatest Anglo-Catholic priests of his generation. One of his closest friends, a fellow priest, described him perfectly: He was six feet three, weighed between 250 pounds up to what he called his `fighting weight' at 280, had a brilliant mind for doctrine, a sidesplitting wit, and above all an enormous overflowing heart for Christ's poor. He had some family wealth, but he preferred to live and serve in his beloved `down-at-the-heel' cities. Women's feelings about men's unemployment take an even more negative turn when men renege on remunerative employment, especially when they persist in astonishing levels of finickiness as to what employment suits their talents. It is painful to sit with a woman on whom her partner's titanic disregard is slowly but inexorably dawning. It's not unusual for her to realize that her marriage closely traces her history of shouldering unfair burdens growing up. Yet facing the specter of living alone with her children, supporting the family, and relinquishing a husband (as he garners child support and takes up with an adoring young thing) fills her with dread. On the flip side, some women are not above an infuriating sense of entitlement about their husband's earnings. Sometimes it grows out of a true naivete about money, though maintaining oneself as a naif well into adulthood is its own kind of cop-out. One of the more painful situations is when a husband suffers a job loss and his wife seems alternately oblivious and blaming about the need to cut back on spending. For every husband who unilaterally decides to quit his job and become an indie-film director, there's a wife who says to her husband, You figure out how to pay for the kids' college. It's your problem, not mine. But women get more cultural cover for this kind of irresponsibility, whereas men confront more directly the shame of falling down on their masculine obligations. Friending Online good lesson to learn would be that the internet is not so much a new forum for friendship, though it certainly brings more people within our orbit; rather it's best application for amity is as a tool for sustaining friendship. Virtuality may feel liberating, as free as a planet whirling through space. But we are persons, and embodied persons too.

Intimacy ultimately depends for its flourishing on contact in the real world, face-to-face. Given this negative assessment of friendship, the question arises as to the correct way for Christians to love one another as, after all, God's law requires. The answer, Kierkegaard says, is the diametric opposite of friendship, namely, to love your neighbour. Neighbour-love is wholly different from friendship because it is unconditional and selfless:Christian love teaches love of all men, unconditionally all', and any exception to this unconditionality is a compromise. This means that there is no way, according to Kierkegaard, to integrate a notion of friendship into neighbour-love. There's a difference between Do you have clear goals? and Did you do your best to set clear goals for yourself? The former is trying to determine the employee's state of mind; the latter challenges the employee to describe or defend a course of action. Kelly was pointing out that passive questions were almost always being asked while active questions were being ignored. To the untrained eye this was a geeky discussion about semantics between a father and daughter who are overinvested in the intricacies of organizational behavior. But this was a watershed moment for me. We were talking about employee engagement, a cherished and loaded concept among human resources professionals, who happen to be one of my major client constituencies. In management circles, engagement is one of those mystically idealized conditions for employees, the equivalent of an athlete being in the zone or an artist being in a state of creative flow. To human resources professionals, employee engagement is not quite the naive vision of Whistle While You Work in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - but it's close. Just so. As I have said, when I met him, Father Purnell was quietly presiding over the Parish of All Saints in my very own poor neighborhood of Boston. Purnell was a handsome, imposing man, with neatly cut salt-and-pepper hair; a round, intelligent face; and big, black glasses.

He was always dressed in full High Church regalia--black cassock or suit, Roman collar, black cape, and biretta. On liturgical occasions he appeared in richly colored silk stoles and albs that you might expect to see in an ancient Eastern Orthodox church. (At twenty-eight, I didn't know the name for most parts of this exotic costume--having grown up in the Presbyterian Church, where ministers dressed in a plain black robe any run-of-the mill high school choir member might wear. ) Over the weeks I picked up gossip about Purnell in the neighborhood. Such displays of selfishness exist on a continuum with more extreme marital money scenarios, where compulsive spending by one family member imperils the group, or ostensibly self-sufficient middle-aged adults feed off the green umbilical cord of parental support. Unsavory class dynamics reverberate through people's psycho-fiscal arrangements as well. We all know, as one friend put it, that some people marry resumes, houses, and teak chairs. People keep tabs on whether they are marrying up or marrying down and harbor strong identifications with their family of origin as sources of pride or shame. People have been known to subtly torment each other with family fortunes that feather one partner's nest but not the other's or end up failing to materialize at all. A husband from a lower-middle-class family worked hard while his wife drew on her sizable family wealth and complained that he was boring because he was never around. A wife worked two jobs and paid the price physically, while her husband, addicted to pot, waited to receive a windfall he'd spent his whole life expecting. (Turned out, he didn't get it. ) Lives are built on assumptions that are never spelled out in black and white, money being for many people an unspeakable topic. In the less dramatic middle, where most people live, money can be a chronic source of rough-patch discord, and a lot of it has to do with the kids. It may be thought that loving one's neighbour begins with loving one's friends. Wrong, says Kierkegaard, because to love one's friend is to practise selfishness not selflessness. Or some Christians might claim that Christian love is like classical love but for the fact that it is stronger, loving unto death. Another question that comes to mind is who is your neighbour if they are not your friends? Kierkegaard comes up with an disarmingly simple answer.