“Ora et Labora”, Prayer and Work. This is the motto of the Order of St Benedict and it tries to say something about the life of a Benedictine monastery. In recent years some have added to Ora et Labora, Lege, ‘holy reading’ and Recreatio, ‘Re-creation’. To me this is looking at life in the round rather than focusing on one aspect of it.
To be a Christian is to be a person whose life intention is to participate in the Opus Dei, that is ‘the work of God in the world’. First and foremost this is the work of prayer and worship, this takes place with others in church and in solitude in the quiet places we go to be with God. Prayer and worship are about our conversations with God, the offering of our love to God and simply being with God.
That relationship of prayer and worship extend outwards into our learning from and about the One we are in relationship with. And this is the purpose of Holy Reading. By Holy Reading I mean the reading not only of scripture but also the writings of those men and women who have also been in a relationship of prayer and worship with God throughout the centuries. It is not just about books, it is about people and indeed the whole of creation. So we can think about anything from reading books to our listening to the stories and journeys of people in our own time and place, this too is Holy Reading. Holy Reading is in essence about our listening to and attending to what God is saying through the words and witness of others in the journey of faith and life.
Work is prayer; most of us have some kind of work to do in our daily life, whether that is paid employment, work in the home or the garden, the care of children or of elderly relatives, all of it can be seen as prayer. There is an old monastic saying that ‘You can tell how a person prays by the way they sweep the cloister’. As Thomas Merton put it, it is about ‘doing ordinary things quietly and perfectly for the glory of God, which is the beauty of pure Benedictine life, a beautiful and simple zeal, which is the foundation stone of the Order’.
Finally but not in any way the least there is Recreation. As a children we would often go and play football or play on the swings and roundabouts at a place we called the rec.. The rec. was short for ‘The recreation ground’, a huge green space in the south east quarter of the town. This had been and is still set apart for recreation, a place with no obvious utility other than to be a place to play and relax. The Monty Python comedian and medieval historian Terry Jones worked out that with all of the Sundays and Holy days during the year, the medieval worker had more time off from work than the average worker today. The medievals knew what we seem to have forgotten, that we all need those sanctuaries in time to allow for our recreation, but more than that they understood that re-creation is what Christianity is about, ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.’ (2 Corinthians 5:17), A Christianity that is bereft of recreation is an impoverished Christianity. Our lives of Prayer and Worship, Holy Reading and of Work are oriented towards our recreation in Christ, and not just our recreation but that of all creation.
There is something about unity and therefore simplicity in all this. The one thing necessary in life is to continually move towards God, the simple goal and ground of our being and towards our re-creation in the Christ, the creator who became a creature for our re-creation. Our failure to recognise this is the cause of our disintegration and de-creation. To continue to drive wedges between our prayer and worship, holy reading, work, and re-creation is to continue to delay the fullness of that re-creation.
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