01-05-2013 - Traces, n. 5

Work, the recession,
and a gaze that makes you see

by Alessandra Stoppa

Marie-Agnès was listening to a reading of Miguel Mañara by Oscar Milosz and she understood: realization is the key moment. “Don Giovanni first of all had to realize that the women he conquered left him unsatisfied. I, instead, was trying to solve the problem of my company before looking at it,” she recounts. It was not that she failed to work hard, but that she failed to see.

When her husband  Raphaël was fired from his job at a waste incineration company, he decided to start his own firm specializing in renewable energy, called E2S, in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, in southern France. Marie-Agnès worked with him too, in the midst of wood burning boilers, solar panels, and photovoltaic cells. Every day, she worked hard trying to satisfy everyone without foundering, economizing on bills, supplies, and salaries. All these efforts were necessary, but proved insufficient. This fact was thrown in her face when unexpected problems cropped up, like a client’s failure to pay, blocked conduits, and late deliveries. “I remained bogged down about how things should be going; I complained and was irritated, but really, I was afraid,” she said. “What freed me was recognizing what I am called to do: embrace reality”—not battle against it.

She understood this when the situation of the company became more critical and the bank presented the bill, in red. Her first reaction was to minimize the gravity of the situation. “I was dreaming that things would go better, that the client would pay…”. But, even so, she could not sleep at night. She did not admit the problem and was suffocating. “Then, at a certain point, a friend asked me to send him our balance sheet weekly.” Slowly she began to see everything anew, from the relationship with clients to requests to extend payments. “The change of perspective and the broadened outlook are not the fruit of an effort, but of a discovery. My friend did not balk at my errors or my limits, nor did he give me solutions; he enabled me to look at the reality of my work.”

When she found herself forced to fire one of her employees, after trying every other alternative, she surprised herself. “I was in front of that woman and I told her, ‘We must have the courage to risk ourselves on the certainty that reality is positive. Take what is happening as an opportunity to look at what you desire.” One could think it unrealistic to say such a thing, but it was the one true certainty. Today, she is working in a field that has always interested her and in which she can express her talent even more.” Now Marie-Agnès loves to talk about her work, within the relationships with her six colleagues and their clients, as “a place of life.” “In living daily life, I discover what is inside me and inside the other person, and I rediscover the source that nourishes my life, the gaze of Christ upon me.” In fact, she sees all the difference between the days when spends 15 minutes in Adoration at church before going to work and those when she does not. “Faith is what gives me the strength, the kind Saint Paul speaks of when he says, ‘When I am weak, then I am strong,’ because  I begin again with asking.