Benedictine spirituality sees work as a kind of prayer. The rule of Benedict teaches that, through daily, mundane work, we can achieve holiness. Like so many holy orders of so many other religions, Benedictines from the beginning understood the beauty of the simple life. Theirs is an asceticism not only of the body but of the mind as well.
I thought of these things this evening as I was puttering about the kitchen, cleaning up after K went to bed, emptying the dishwasher, wiping off the counters, drying the remaining dishes that had been sitting in the sink drying rack. I continued wondering how work might be prayer as I went upstairs and, on an odd whim, pulled out the ironing board and iron. K earlier in the evening had expressed a certain frustration at how things in the house tend to build up: our to-do list seems always to be expanding, rarely if ever contracting. But if work is somehow prayer, I thought, that means we have paths to holiness all around us.
Yet that helped very little: how exactly is pressing a heated piece of metal against fabric to steam out the wrinkles in any way prayer? It occurred to me that it might be a question of re-framing what “prayer” means. Growing up in a decidedly non-Catholic home, I always had a very strict and limiting view of what prayer was or could be, and it make the Catholic notion of prayer seem somehow foreign. Marian devotion and prayers to saints were most decidedly and perversely wrong. But the Protestant notion of prayer might be closer to the Catholic notion of worship, and so Catholics through the centuries have had a broader view of what prayer is than Protestants.
Yet that still didn’t help me understand how work might be prayer until I began thinking about motivation. I’d purposely put most of K’s clothes on the top of the to-iron pile because I was doing it for her, to help her feel a little less behind, and it seemed somehow silly to be ironing my own clothes. “I helped you out by ironing my shirts and pants.” It just seems somehow unseemly, arrogant.
Work in some sense then can be prayer through having a selfless motivation for work. Perhaps that’s a first step in understanding Benedictine spirituality. Or perhaps it’s just late night rambling of someone who should have been in bed some time ago.