Once upon a time, past the seeker on a prayer rug came the beggars and the broken and the beaten. Looking up to heaven, the seeker cried out, “Great and loving God, if you are a loving God, look at these and do something!” 

And the voice came back from heaven, “I did do something—I made you.”

We are taught at a very early age to work for ourselves alone: our money, our status, our security are what counts, not the quality of our society as a whole. The notion that individuals can have whatever individuals can get turns greed into virtue. We criticize welfare for the poor, which we call food stamps, but have no problem at all with welfare for the rich, which we call tax breaks. We use the poor of other countries to provide labor at slave wages. We export our jobs but not our wage scales. We use work to exploit people rather than to liberate them. 

For the monastic, Benedict says, work is altogether different. The sacred work of the monastic is the Divine Office and lectio divina. This work of God, the praise and practice of the will of God, is the monastic’s lifetime concentration. But then there is the manual work of taking in the harvest that will sustain both the community and the surrounding area. And just as important, there are the works of service needed to maintain the physical and familial needs of the community itself. Finally, Benedict cites the intellectual work and study required to deepen the monastic’s spiritual life and human understanding as the years go by.

Work, in other words, enriches and develops life on all levels. Work is the discipline that keeps us involved in every dimension of the communal life. Every monastic in the monastery—young and old—is to be given a task to help maintain it, one way or another. That work is a commitment to God’s service. Therefore, monks are to have specified periods of both manual labor and study. We all carry the monastery together, both its physical and its intellectual works or ministries.

In today’s world, the effect of whatever work each of us does— intellectual, artistic, social, communal, or individual—must be good for the globe as well as for the local area and the particular monastery.

The most telling indicator of the spiritual deterioration of the Western world may well be its distortion of the purpose of work. In this culture we work so that we can do something other than work as soon as possible. We work for personal profit, not for the good of the human race. And we routinely work at segmented tasks that have no overarching meaning to us. Without a sense of purpose in life and a sense of obligation to leave the world better than we found it, we can work in places that dump chemicals into lakes and rivers without a quiver of conscience.

A spirituality of work, the ancient Rule of Benedict implies, has five components. It sees work as your gift to the world. It builds the human community. It leads to self-fulfillment. It saves you from total self-centeredness and gives you a reason to exist that is larger than yourself. And it enables the Creator to go on creating. Clearly, work sanctifies you by calling you to save the globe for others and save others for the sake of the globe.

 A spirituality of work is that process by which you finally come to know that your work is God’s work, unfinished by God because God meant it to be finished by you.

Saturday, August 1: Anything worth doing is worth giving a lifetime to achieve.

Sunday, August 2: To be superficial is to do everything in life with an eye to collecting experiences rather than with the intention of developing expertise in anything.

Monday, August 3: To be profound means to go into a subject or an interest or a physical talent with such depth and constancy that we squeeze every last learning out of it. “Skill to do,” Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “comes of doing.” 

Tuesday, August 4: Everyone does something unusually well–if only they will give themselves to the joy of doing it rather than yearning for what they cannot do. “Most people would succeed in small things,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow teaches, “if they were not troubled with great ambitions.”

Wednesday, August 5: The demand of any work is the spiritual discipline of doing it over and over until we can do it well. It isn’t that practice makes perfect; it is that wanting to become perfect in something requires that we practice the discipline that will get us there.

Thursday, August 6: What we love to do in life is what will make life happy for us. Not “easy,” perhaps, but definitely happy. Easy does almost nothing well. But love does everything to the utmost and without counting the cost. “When love and skill work together,” John Ruskin writes, “expect a masterpiece.”

Friday, August 7: No one gets anywhere in life without a spiritual discipline, a way of reaching down into the soul in order to find the rest of ourselves. For some people, that discipline is walking or music or art. Whatever it is, it takes them beyond themselves in the service of something greater than themselves. But for everyone, in any and every arena, it’s about giving ourselves to the enterprise of total commitment.

Saturday, August 8: It is the willingness to keep trying when we are apparently getting nowhere in the process that determines not only the value of the work but the character of the worker. The central question is always, What am I doing with so much concentration that it is changing my life?

Sunday, August 9: What consumes our life creates our life. The point is to spend our lives on something worth spending a life for.

Monday, August 10: Every time we get good at something, that is a call to do even more of it. “It’s time again,” James Schuyler writes. “Tear up the violets and plant something more difficult to grow.”

Saturday, August 11: In most cases, it is not the practice itself that is difficult. It is going on when there seems to be no use in it. "If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair," Samuel Johnson wrote. "Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance."

Sunday, August 12: Some artists are cooks. Some of them are welders. Some of them are counselors. Some of them are technicians or accountants or teachers. "Just as writing can become calligraphy when it's creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed," H.E. Davey wrote, "so can all other activities become art."

Monday, August 13: Whatever we excel in by dint of hard work is the art we were born to bring into the world with us. The whole process is about finding what is meant to be our gift to the world—and then giving it as well as we possibly can.

Tuesday, August 14: Dilettantes move lightly through life doing a little bit of this and even less of that. They taste small tidbits of life but they never swallow it whole. They collect the remnants of life but they never really live it. "To understand one thing well," Johann Wolfgang von Goethe writes, "is better than understanding many things by halves."

Wednesday, August 15: To go through life without a discipline that demands the most, the best of us, is to go through life with only a sail and not a rudder.

Thursday, August 16: The discipline of commitment to something we love saves us from the anomie of listlessness. It gives us something worth getting up for every morning.

Friday, August 17: To succeed, every beginner must have a goal. Then, whether they meet that particular goal or not, they will succeed in learning more about themselves and more about what they are really meant to do as they go.

Saturday, August 18: The secret of life does not lie in refusing to change life disciplines. It lies in knowing when—and when not—to change disciplines so that we may really discover what is missing in the self.

Sunday, August 19: Practice is what leads to skill, to artistry, to expertise when we expect it least. Or, as R. Buckminster Fuller said once, "There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly." Until one day, suddenly, it is.

Monday, August 20: Expertise comes when passion, purpose and study come together in one place at one time.

Tuesday, August 21: It is the willingness to undergo the daily practice a skill requires that makes us masters of art. The cooks who practice boiling an egg easy, medium or hard every day of their lives become chefs. Everyone else just cooks.

Wednesday, August 22: A real craftsman is the person who comes to every work, not as an expert, but as a student prepared and willing to learn more today about their task and themselves than they knew yesterday.

Thursday, August 23: No one has ever become great at anything mental, physical or spiritual who did not practice the basics of it every day.

Friday, August 24: There is more to any discipline than repetition. It is the concerted effort to do more of it well today than we did yesterday.

Saturday, August 25: Discipline is the shaper of the soul. What we do not practice rigorously and regularly, we cannot become.

Sunday, August 26: Nothing we attempt to do well is lost. It is always a sign of either the possible or the desirable to someone else. "Although only a small fraction of those who try to scale the heights of human achievement arrive anywhere close to the summit," Chardin wrote, "it is imperative that there be a multitude of climbers. Otherwise the summit may not be reached by anybody."

Monday, August 27: Desire drives us but only commitment to excellence in any given field really guarantees success.

Tuesday, August 28: Without love for what we do, we work in vain, however faithful we are to the rules of it. That's why it's so important to find what we love in life.

Wednesday, August 29: Genius is the ability to go on trying to succeed even when we have the sense to be disappointed in what we have achieved so far. "Genius," Thomas Edison wrote, "is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." If you want to excel at anything, don't just sit there and hope for it. Get back to work.

Thursday, August 30: They asked Duke Ellington how he learned to play such soulful music and he told them, “I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” Point: It’s learning to let what’s in us out that is the key to becoming the fullness of the self.

Friday, August 31: You want to know what it means to keep on trying, to go on practicing, to continue to pursue what in us only exists when heart and practice come together? It means what Oscar Wilde meant when he wrote, "I was working on a proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back in again." That's discipline.

Discussion Questions

1. Joan Chittister emphasizes our responsibility to do work that matters for the world. Have you considered your work’s impact on society over the course of your life? How have your labors–whether or not you were paid for them–contributed to the world?

2. Which daily quote in The Monastic Way is most meaningful to you? Why? Do you agree with it? Disagree? Did it inspire you? Challenge you? Raise questions for you?

3. After reading The Monastic Way, what is one way that you can put Sister Joan’s teachings into practice in your own life?

4. Joan Chittister uses other literature to reinforce and expand her writing. Find another quote, poem, story, song, art piece, novel that echoes the theme of this month’s Monastic Way.

5.  What helped you to develop discipline in your work, to persist with tasks that were not interesting or satisfying for you? Do you remember a person or an experience that taught you the kind of discipline Sister Joan describes? Share this memory, or your ideas about discipline, with someone in your life.

Scripture 

God has made everything beautiful in its time. God has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. There is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live, that each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. –Ecclesiastes 3:11-13

Journal Prompts

1. Here are a few statements from this month’s Monastic Way. Choose one that is most helpful to you and journal with it. 

• It isn’t that practice makes perfect; it is that wanting to become perfect in something requires that we practice the discipline that will get us there.

• To go through life without a discipline that demands the most, the best of us, is to go through life with only a sail and not a rudder.

• Without love for what we do, we work in vain, however faithful we are to the rules of it.

2. Spend a few minutes with this photograph and journal about its relationship to this month’s Monastic Way. You can do that with prose or a poem or a song or....


Prayer

May I have the grace
to work conscientiously,
setting devotion to duty
in preference to my own whims;
to work with thankfulness and joy,
deeming it an honor to employ
and to develop by my labor
the gifts I have received from God;
to work with order, peace,
moderation, and patience,
without ever shrinking
from weariness and difficulties;
to work above all with a pure intention
and with detachment from self,
having always before my eyes
the hour of death
and the accounting which I must then render
of time ill spent,
of talents wasted,
of good omitted,
and of vain complacency in success,
which is so fatal to the work of God.

Amen.
–from Prayer to Saint Joseph the Worker 

The Monastic Way Vol. 35 No. 8 Free online subscriptions at www.joanchittister.org

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