...No reputation for customer satisfaction is worth as much as the person who fills orders and endures complaints. Your pride in a job well done, or your anxiety, or your ego: none of those is worth as much as your dignity as a person.

 

Merchant asks me to recall the way the monks leave their choir stalls at the end of every prayer office. Each one bows to the altar, then to his brother opposite him. They repeat this action seven times a day. As Merchant sees it, it’s a way of saying, each monk to the other, “I am respecting your dignity and the presence of the Spirit in you.” Compared with an economic culture that demands you labor constantly to prove your value, it might be the most radical thing the monks do... - Jonathan Malesic, 2 February 2019, Commonweal