A Spirituality of Work
The sacred work of the monastic is the Divine Office or Opus Dei—the work of God and lectio. 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.
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. Indeed, we need new ideals of work.
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.
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.”
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.
—from The Monastic Heart by Joan Chittister (Convergent)
