Many places around the Northern Hemisphere celebrated Opening Day yesterday (and/or had prayers/blessings of the fishing fleets and remembrances of those lost during the past year). Here was fabulously sunny weekend, too. Which means that people were out and about getting their boats ready for the season: sanding, scrubbing, polishing, waxing, painting, varnishing, changing oil, running engines, overhauling halyards, checking out sails and batteries .... The lists seem endless. But these activities can also be opportunities for prayer. And while one might be tempted to move into the cursing type, that's not exactly what I had in mind.
Turning manual labor into prayer is especially true with the repetitiveness of some of the above work. While we have to concentrate on what we are doing with our bodies, the repetitiveness means we can also pay attention to what our mind is doing. Rather than letting it run feral, we can focus the mind upon doing one thing at a time, and invite God into our work. Then the brush, sandpaper, polish wheel become instruments of prayer.
Listen to Mary Margaret Funk:
To have a pure heart is to have a single desire (no mixture) in our heart, with no defilement or contaminants. Purity of heart is about a quality of clear light and translucent effulgence. Our heart is chaste. But it also means to be one, single, not divided or double in our intention as in duplicity. The practice of doing one thing at a time is a first step. It is not easy to be mindful of what you are doing when you do it. To have a single intention while doing something is a practice toward single-mindedness. So, the first step is to do one thing, the second step is to be mindful of the doing of it, and the third step is to shift your intention to do it for/with/in Christ Jesus. Manuel labor becomes an outward sign of inner spiritual work.As you work, may you be invited into silence, your work turned into ritual, and find yourself surrounded by Presence.
The desert tradition recommends doing ceaseless prayer as we work so that when we work this very work becomes our prayer and our prayer becomes our work. This is a reversal of the movement of thoughts that cycle and recycle back upon us over and over again so that work becomes really about "self."
When we want our work to be our prayer, doing repetitive work is easier because disciplining our mind is very difficult. When we don't have to think about how we are doing our work, we can be stable and centered.
Once we bring our mind to our work and to the doing of one thing at a time, the next step is to attend to our intentions. This is a natural flow. Since we have offered to do all for the glory and honor of God, our motivation and reason for work is all God. The guest is God, the food is Eucharist, the broom is sacred, and the computer is gift. The radical tool here, though, is not just to have "an attitude" of praising God, but an actual thought about God just as we have a thought about our work. I've had some argue that to think about God again is another thought and usually ego and not God. that's a different path, bringing god to the work. The practice of manual labor is when each touch of the hand to the device of labor is single-minded and God springs up and there's Presence. Then all is God. There is not mental overlay. Holiness emerges from underneath and we see it as it is. God is in us.
This is why we need the practice of ceaseless prayer in order to do manual labor well because, when thoughts arise and take us away from doing one thing at a time and from our attention to our work, we can return to ceaseless prayer or redirect our thoughts to the mindfulness of the work at hand.*
Blessed Be,
Joel
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* Funk, Mary Margaret. Tools Matter for Practicing the Spiritual Life. Continuum, 2002. 67-68.
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