ORA ET LABORA: The heart of our calling

We call it "The Angelus," the simply beautiful window into the integral relationship of worship to work by Jean-Francois Millet, who first titled it "Prayer for the Potato Crop," artfully remembering the inarticulate longing in every heart, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve we are, that at the end-of-the-day our labor is not in vain.

As his work made its way through 19th-century Europe, finally finding its home in the Louvre, it was read and reread by many who for reasons of their own hearts could not make sense of its sacramental simplicity, sure it was about "this" or about "that," deconstructing its meaning for the world without windows to the transcendent.

On this Labor Day weekend, it seems right to ponder what we pray and why we pray-- perhaps, especially in these perplexing days of the pandemic. While we are working differently, we are working, still working, and hoping-- some of us for potatoes, some for a new school year, some for the wisdom to keep a business alive, some for a more just society, some for the grace to love our families more fully, some for the skill to build a good house, some for the insight to understand diseases of heart and mind, soul and strength, and perhaps some for the gift to paint in a way that will remind generations to come that our vocations can be sacramental signposts of the world that is and someday shall be.

For people all over the face of the earth, for Everyman and Everywoman, called into being to steward the earth full as it was and is of complexity and magnificence, of intricacy and splendor, a world to be known and to be loved, the heart of our common calling is to a daily rhythm of ora et labora, as Benedict taught us 1500 years ago. Not one or the other, but together, a holy seamlessness of prayer and work, day after day after day.

And because vocation is written into the very meaning of being human, our vocations are therefore integral to who we are, to why we are, and to what we do with our lives— even as they are integral to the work of God himself. Disposed to dualism as we are, we often stumble over this, imagining that work has always been and will be a curse; the biblical vision offers something far richer, far truer. To say it simply: vocation is integral, not incidental, to the missio Dei.

That does not mean that heaven and earth fully meet in the workplace. Too many know too well the reason-for-there-being a song like, “Take this job and shove it, I ain’t working here no more!” Created for good work, good work is hard to do. Wounded people in a wounded world, even our work is wounded— with economic, historical, and political injustices born of skewed hearts and skewed societies bringing grief and sorrow that makes work feel more curse than a blessing. But that reality makes it all the more important to hold onto what work is, and why it matters for our flourishing.

I often think of a conversation with a man who had longed for something more, and yet had been embedded in a church culture which diminished the ordinary work of ordinary people. We talked at the end of a weekend retreat where I had argued for a vision of vocation that was rooted in the story of God’s work in history, from creation to consummation, and yes, central to both being human and being holy. A Brit, he told me that he was 50 years old, had come to an honest faith as an undergraduate many years earlier, and had worked for most of 30 years in the business of technology. “But for all these years I have been sure that what I did with my life was ‘second-class,’ a bit less than what a serious Christian would do with his life. I only had a job, not a calling from God.” I could hear the longing in his voice, but then, by God’s great grace, he brightened, saying, “This weekend a wound in my heart has been healed.”

If that was only one conversation it would be sad; that it is one of the countless conversations is tragic. We have not done well in the Church— the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Protestant —teaching the people of God what the word of God honestly understands about the meaning of work. Too often we offer a compartmentalized faith that has nothing to do with the lives and labors of real human beings, too often failing to even pray for the work of our hands to be blessed by God, to be nourished by God, to be sustained by God. We fail to see that work is a signpost for us, a reminder of who God is and who we are, living as we are stretched taut between this heaven and earth, and the new heaven and new earth, praying “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

And that is why “The Angelus” is a gift, if we have eyes to see, teaching us that work matters— to God and to the world.

(If you are drawn in by the first image on top (man and woman) and wondering what it might mean to pray for the work of our hands, then this "Prayer for Vocations" is a gift to you.

Click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn-raGdENTU

This article was first written for Labor Day in the US (2020)