Our Real Work

Yogi Berra played a game in which the score was tied with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. The batter from the opposing team stepped up and made the sign of the cross on home plate with his bat. Berra was a Catholic, too, but he wiped out the plate with his glove and said to the pious batter, “Why don’t we let God just watch this game?”

Letting God just watch. That’s good theology when applied to the outcome of a baseball game. It’s terrible theology when applied to the way we live our lives and carry out the work of the church.

But too often that’s precisely the outlook we bring to our vocation as pastors. God attends the game, but only as an honored spectator. Our prayers are merely ceremonial functions, like asking the President of the United States to throw out the first baseball at the beginning of baseball season.

Our work in the church calls for practical things: committees, not prayer calls; talking, writing, telephoning, spending, budgeting, mobilizing, organizing, and mailing. And those things take time. So prayer gets preempted. It’s a pleasant luxury that would be wonderful to spend more time on, if only we had the time to spend. But necessity presses in. After all, we have the budget to complete, the policies to formulate, and the proposals from the fellowship committee to act upon. Why don’t we believe we’re getting anything done when we pray?

We could learn from St. Benedict of Nursia, who founded his Benedictine order as a reaction to the worldliness of the sixth- century church. His slogan was Ora Labora, from the Latin ora, “Pray,” and labora, “work.” He taught his followers that to pray was to work, and to work was to pray. Following that rule, the Benedictine order broke down the artificial dichotomy between work and prayer. From there they also bridged the gap between the manual arts and the liberal arts, the physical and the intellectual, and the empirical and the speculative. A great tradition developed in which learning, science, agriculture, architecture, and art flourished.

We must learn that prayer is our chief work. Only then can our work become prayer: real service, real satisfaction, real worship, praise, adoration, and sacrifice. The classical postures of prayer, arms stretched out and hands open, or head bowed and hands folded, are gestures of openness and submission to God. They express perhaps the greatest paradox of prayer: that only when we give up on our human efforts can God’s work begin and, mysteriously, human effort can come to fulfillment. As Ole Hallesby puts it in his book Prayer, “Wherever we touch his Almighty arm, some of his omnipotence streams in upon us, into our souls and into our bodies. And not only that, but through us, it streams out to others.”

Ora Labora.

Ben Patterson is dean of the chapel at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and author of Deepening Your Conversation with God. To reply, write: Newsletter@LeadershipJournal.net