By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I recently cleaned and moved out of my office at the Salt Lake City law firm where I worked for thirty-seven years. As I labored, I thought of the great reaper from the Bible, the one who separates the wheat from the chaff.
I’ve heard the story often, of course, in church and Catholic school. The Gospel of Luke tells it with palpable intensity: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” (RSV Luke 3:17)
The story always puzzled a non-farmer like me. I know something about wheat, but what the heck was chaff? Why was it removed? Why was it there at all? Did it really deserve unquenchable fire? Why did I need to know all this?
My office cleaning proved enlightening on many of these questions.
I was moving out because after almost 150 years, the law firm (my beloved Jones Waldo) was closing its doors. Shifting legal market winds pushed the venerable institution in a different and unexpected trajectory instead of forward. I have joined another fine legacy Utah law firm (Parsons Behle & Latimer) along with many of my friends and law partners.
As I put my back into the task of reviewing four decades of accumulated and dusty legal paperwork, I realized there was a lot of old stuff. I feared that somehow, without realizing it, I’d slowly devolved into a legal hoarder.
Need some proof? How about my fastidious preservation of the 1992 law firm retreat agenda? Or my determined retention of a December 1989 article summarizing the top ten employment law developments of the soon-to-end year? What about hanging on to the 1995 newsletter from a local HR trade association?
With each file or paper I encountered, I had to make choices. Haul it across the street to Parsons or toss it? Wheat or chaff?
Some decisions were easy. My children visited the office often as they grew into young adults. They’d get chocolate milk or soda from our break room, nap on my couch, and sit on the floor drawing or playing while I worked. The collection of love notes and art work generated by these blissful moments? Wheat.
Another easy decision involved several accounting files—bursting at the seams—showing in detail and month-by-month the dollars collected and hours worked by each Jones Waldo lawyer from about 1994 to 2003. Chaff.
The tougher decisions pulled at my heart strings. For several years, some kind substitute leprechauns from our word processing support department had decorated my office for St. Patrick’s Day. For years, I had saved the decorations. Why?
They were amusing and thoughtful tokens of co-worker affection, fellowship, and friendship. Yet, they also were inexpensive trinkets that had deteriorated during the years I’d tried to preserve them and the happy memories they evoked. So I kept the memories—along with a few tangible trinkets—and gently released the rest. Wheat and chaff.
As I culled the piled-up evidence of my long legal career, suddenly I understood the meaning of chaff. I once had thought it bad or dangerous. After all, Luke’s Gospel condemns it not to just any fire, but to the unquenchable inferno.
Merriam-Webster, however, defines it quite differently. Chaff is “coverings and other debris separated from the seed in threshing grain.” Other online sources explained how chaff is a coating that shelters a seed from injury and protects it from drying out. Chaff also is an underlying layer of stored food that nourishes a growing seed.
Turns out chaff is important—even essential—to the germination and survival of the wheat grain. To borrow a line from an old Frank Sinatra song, you can’t have one without the other.
Similarly, the chaff we accumulate in daily life and hourly work transforms us into grain, into something more important and useful, into something life-giving. Here are a few examples.
In the days before Google, I needed hard copies of articles describing major employment law or media law developments so I could help guide the clients who trusted me.
Without PCs, I required paper reports about the finances of our firm—a professional corporation—so I could intelligently exercise my prerogatives as a shareholder of the organization that helped feed and shelter hundreds of men, women, and children.
The St. Patrick’s Day decorations showed me that man does not live by work alone; reminding me that people cared about me, and that I must care about them too.
Times change. What I needed once, I need no more, at least not in the same way. And so it is that many of my collected and stored workplace papers and artifacts now are chaff from which I have been separated on the threshing floor of life.
It’s easy to praise the value of the wheat stored in the granary. What about the chaff left behind?
In ancient times, some was scattered to the wind, perhaps left to biodegrade and enrich the soil that might grow future stalks of wheat. Ancients also used chaff for animal feed or to manufacture mud-bricks and pottery. And about that unquenchable fire? I like to think it warmed many a tired worker on chilly harvest moon evenings that foreshadowed winter.
As I cleaned and sorted out my workspace, I doubted my own chaff would find such benevolent future uses, beyond shredding and recycling. I was certain, however, that much of what I discarded had fueled my thirty-seven years of professional evolution and personal growth.
Respect was in order.
I walked out of my office for the final time, closed the door, shed a small tear, and whispered a quiet tribute: “If I am wheat, credit the chaff too.”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
