Work Is Prayer
An analogy for life at work recently occurred to me: Work is like a battery. It both absorbs and releases energy. Our work is suffused with our anger, our joy, our attention (and distraction), our anxiety, and our drive.
The Bible’s wisdom literature describes work this way. Our worry motivates us; workers “rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil” (Psalm 127:2 ESV). Basic bodily feelings also come into play: “The appetite of laborers works for them; their hunger drives them on” (Proverbs 16:26 NIV). Work takes in our feelings and energies, and then puts them out into the world.
Just think about what it’s like to “work out” a feeling. I remember the day I was laid off from the mortgage company, I had a prodigious chunk of concrete sitting in the backyard. It had secured an ancient laundry pole before my dad and I dug it up some weeks earlier. I found I had plenty of nervous energy the afternoon of the layoff, and busted the thing up pretty good.
Our energy is not only released through our work; it also fuels our work. Have you ever met someone who runs their work on rage? Anger is a powerful engine. It can supercharge productivity. It can goad people into action. It can keep someone fighting to the bitter end.
But if work is a battery, it’s a leaky one. The way we fuel our work spills over and affects the people around us. If you’re running on rage, your coworkers will feel the heat of it in your tone of voice, your body language, and the tenor of your emails. The same goes for a work life filled with joy and gratitude: it overflows to others.
So perhaps a more fitting analogy for work is the humble kitchen sponge. It absorbs things and then releases them. The process can be a little messy, even when you’re doing it well. Whatever saturates your work is going to come out. You can dunk your kitchen sponge into milk and still get the dishes done, but they’re going to stink later.
This spongy quality of work raises an interesting question: Is there something that work is meant to absorb and release? Something we can immerse our work in that works better than anything else? The pure water and fresh dish soap that will run through the sponge and leave everything it touches better off?
To conclude our Monastic Wisdom for the Marketplace series, I’d like to reflect on how the Benedictine tradition helps us answer this question. We’ve explored the classic Benedictine motto Ora et Labora—Pray and Work—before. But at some point along the way, another iteration of this phrase cropped up: Laborare est Orare—to Work is to Pray. Or, more simply: Work is Prayer.
This turn of phrase points us to the deepest meaning of working life. Prayer and work are not just a good pair, like milk and cookies or PB&J, distinct but complementary experiences. Prayer intertwines with and completes our work, crowning it with beauty in a way that nothing else can. That’s no accident; it’s the way God intended our work to function. At its simplest, prayer is welcoming the presence of God. That’s why it is so necessary to our labors. Work only becomes what it was always meant to be when it overflows with the presence of God to the world around us.
[Thanks for reading. This post concludes our series Monastic Wisdom for the Marketplace. Check out our other posts on faith and work and spiritual growth for more resources on living an integrated Christian life. Subscribe to get the next post in the series in your inbox.]
Laborare Est Orare, Or Is It?
In reading to prepare this post, I stumbled upon a minor controversy in the Benedictine world. Laborare est Orare is not an original motto of the monastics. It appears to have hit the scene as recently as the nineteenth century, in Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle’s book Past and Present, where he translates it as “Work is Worship.” Carlyle attributes the phrase to monks of yore, but it’s possible there was an error of transcription here. Ora et Labora (Pray and Work) could easily be paraphrased as Laborare et Orare (Labor and Pray). The Latin et (and) becomes “is” by the (accidental?) addition of a single letter, and a new phrase is born: Laborare est Orare.
I owe this historical detail to worship minister and YWAM missionary Kevin Norris, who has taken it upon himself to research the possible origins of the phrase. But Norris’s concerns are not just academic; he believes that saying “Work is Prayer” is not only a mistranslation, but also a destructive misunderstanding of the Benedictine tradition. He cites a number of Benedictines who also make this case. Dom Cyprian Smith, OSB, of Ampleforth Abbey in York contends “it is not true,” while Dom Benedict Hardy, OSB, Prior of Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland, calls the phrase “nonsense.”
What lies behind this harsh critique is a legitimate concern about the need for set-aside times for prayer. If by “work is prayer” we mean that we don’t need silence and solitude and rest, because our work is worship enough, then Prior Hardy rightly concludes that “we deceive ourselves.” Father Smith qualifies the phrase by saying, “Certainly work can be prayer; but that depends upon the attitude and frame of mind with which we approach it.”
Point taken. Not all labora is ora. (Readers who actually know Latin grammar, forgive me.) But isn’t it encouraging to know that work can be prayer if we approach it as such?
My Work Runneth Over
Throughout the Scriptures, one of the qualities ascribed to God’s blessing is super-abundance. God not only gives enough, but much more than enough. In the memorable KJV rendering of Psalm 23:5, David testifies that “my cup runneth over.” The one who honors the Lord with wealth will find their barns “filled to overflowing, and [their] vats will brim over with new wine” (Proverbs 3:10 NIV). When the prophet Joel promises God’s deliverance of his people from their enemies, he proclaims:
Be glad, people of Zion,
rejoice in the Lord your God,
for he has given you the autumn rains
because he is faithful.
He sends you abundant showers,
both autumn and spring rains, as before.
The threshing floors will be filled with grain;
the vats will overflow with new wine and oil.
Joel 2:23-24 NIV
It might be easy to miss that these passages are about work. Barns, vats, and threshing floors are the work settings of the agrarian society that received these Scriptures. God is not so much promising to make food and wine appear without our effort, as to make our efforts fruitful beyond what we could expect or deserve. God’s blessing makes our work work.
Everyday Wonders
We’ve explored in many other posts how often work doesn’t work. Like the rest of life, work is shot through with sin and suffering. But like the rest of life, that means work can be redeemed. It is God’s redemptive presence that makes the difference. Even though we still apply effort, God does the heavy lifting to transform our work into something beautiful. In that same passage of the prophet Joel, he uses the word “wonders” to describe God’s provision through the people’s farmwork:
You will have plenty to eat, until you are full,
?and you will praise the name of the Lord your God,
????who has worked wonders for you
Joel 2:26 NIV
God’s generosity is so easy to disregard. It shows up in everyday things: our work accomplished, the daily bread on the table, a full stomach. We are constantly tempted to secularize our experience, failing to see how God’s presence is manifest in it. As Moses warned the Israelites, when things go well, we may say to ourselves, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me,” forgetting God’s many kindnesses to us (Deuteronomy 8:17 NIV).
In a word, the way we remember God’s kindness is prayer. In prayer, we attend to God’s presence with us rather than ignoring it in the hustle and bustle of life. We invite God to journey with us through our days, and discover how close at hand he is when we do.
As Henri Nouwen reminds us, “Praying is living. It is eating and drinking, acting and resting, teaching and learning, playing and working. Praying pervades every aspect of our lives. It is the unceasing recognition that God is wherever we are, always inviting us to come closer” to him. Prayer opens our eyes so that we can see the everyday wonders God has worked for us for what they are.
Through Each Labor, Like a Thread of Gold
This vision of everyday, prayerful work is not incidental or accidental. It is essential. The Bible presents the action of God within our daily work, and our attention to it, as his original intention:
You care for the land and water it;
????you enrich it abundantly.
The streams of God are filled with water
????to provide the people with grain,
????for so you have ordained it.
Psalm 65:9 NIV
When we welcome God’s presence in our work, our work becomes what it was always meant to be. Our prayer makes it possible for our work to abound with life—even God’s life—to those around us. Not because our work is particularly impressive, but because of what it holds. Without prayer, our work is a dry sponge, and we exhaust ourselves trying to make up for the lack of water with more forcefulness. But with prayer, the life of God pervades our work and makes it better than it could ever otherwise be. Even when we feel wrung out, depleted, spent—his life flows through our efforts.
This is the meaning of Laborare est Orare. When work becomes prayer, it becomes its truest self.
To draw this post and this series to a close, I’d like to share these stanzas from Susan Coolidge, a nineteenth-century children’s author and poet. They come from her poem Laborare Est Orare:
And I should fear, but lo! amid the press,
??The whirl and hum and pressure of my day,
I hear Thy garment's sweep, Thy seamless dress,
And close beside my work and weariness
??Discern Thy gracious form, not far away,
But very near, O Lord, to help and bless.
?
The busy fingers fly, the eyes may see
??Only the glancing needle which they hold,
But all my life it, blossoming inwardly,
And every breath is like a litany,
??While through each labor, like a thread of gold,
Is woven the sweet consciousness of Thee.
Reflect and Practice
Take a moment to consider your own mind and heart.
Series photo by Bs0u10e01 on Wikimedia Commons, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Post photo by Pille R. Priske on Unsplash.
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