ORA ET LABORA

Ora et labora is a Latin expression used mostly among professed religious – the Benedictines, for example – that said (actually commanded) pray and work. The religious orders all had specific times during the day set aside for prayer. When the monks were not praying, they were working at jobs assigned to each. Yes, there were also times set aside for eating, resting and reflection. But their daily lives centered on prayer and work.

The truth is that prayer and work are really one entity. The monks took scheduled times to pray, usually eight different occasions. When the time came, they set down their tools, headed off to chapel and prayed part of the Daily Office: Morning Prayer, Noonday Prayer, Evening Prayer (called Vespers), Compline (see The Book of Common Prayer). Their minds and hearts, their total being, when at prayer was to be focused on prayer.

The same is true when the monks were engaged in their daily labors. They were to be focused on the task at hand, whatever that task, that job, was. They were to give it their full attention so as not to be distracted by thoughts of what might be served at their next meal. The command was “Pray when at prayer and work when at work” … and rest when at rest and enjoy the meal when in the dining hall.

Again, work and prayer are almost, if not, one and the same. Prayer is work and work is prayer. When we pray, when we truly pray, it is work, often hard work. Yes, perhaps more often than not, when we pray, we have a routine. We rattle off a set formula of prayers, often hardly thinking about what we are saying. Yes, we are praying, but – and this is the point about the command to the monks to pray when they were praying – it is work to truly focus our hearts and minds, our whole being on our prayer.

It takes work not to be distracted by what is around us, by who might be nearby, by what we have just finished doing before we came to pray, by what we have left undone and what we will be need to attend to when our prayer is concluded. Prayer, focused prayer, is indeed hard work. Perhaps that is why we do not pray as often and as fully as we could and as we should. It just takes too much effort, too much work.

In the same way work is prayer. We are praying when we are working. Prayer is not simply about laying our wants and needs before God. Prayer is that but it is much more. Prayer is about giving thanks for blessings received, about asking forgiveness for what we have done or left undone, and more. In fact, when we are at work, what we are doing is God’s work here on earth. God created us, gave us life, to be God’s partner in bringing in God’s Kingdom in this world. God promises us that if we will do our part, meaning if we fulfill the vocation, the job, in which we are engaged, God will do God’s part.

Pray and work. Work and pray. In so many ways they are one and the same. Perhaps if we were more aware of that truth, perhaps if we lived more fully each day, perhaps our lives would be more fulfilling. Perhaps if we would, we might be much closer to bringing into its fullness the Kingdom of God on earth. In truth, there is no “perhaps” about it. We would. We would indeed.

IT’S NOT DIRECTED TOWARD ME

Church attendance is down all over the world. That is obvious, the megachurches notwithstanding whose members exit the back door as quickly as they enter the front.  There are, no doubt, many reasons for this, much of it the fault of the church itself. Perhaps it is cyclical. Perhaps we are in one of those downturns in the outward observance of religious practices. Perhaps we are awaiting the next Great Awakening to revive church life. Perhaps. Only time will tell.

In the meantime it is always good to explore why less and less people are attending church, especially in the West, the “sophisticated and educated” part of the world. Are we in the West so wise not to be so foolish to think that organized religion is all that important in our daily lives? Have we not found meaning and fulfillment outside the church structure and found guidance for our lives outside of church dogma? Many seem to think so.

Many people these days, according to the poll-takers, claim that while they are not religious, meaning they do not belong to or attend a church, assert that they are indeed spiritual people: spiritual but not religious. Perhaps they are. They claim to get more out of sitting on a bank of a creek soaking in all of God’s creation than they do going to a worship service at some church. They assert that a quiet Sunday at home, reading the paper, drinking a latte they hurried down to the nearest Starbucks to purchase, conversing with their spouse is more fulfilling than formal worship. Besides, they say, “I don’t get anything out of worship.”

They are probably right. To get something out of worship we have to put something in to it. And what we have to put into worship is ourselves. Even more, and the main point of all this, is that worship is not directed toward the worshipper. It is directed to the one we gather to worship in the first place: God. We come to church to worship God, not to be entertained, not to be calmed by the rippling sounds of the creek or the soothing taste of that latte in our hands. Worship was never meant to be entertaining or even soothing.

We call our worship service liturgy. The root meaning of that word in Greek is “public service”. In other words, it means work. Liturgy is truly the work of the people. Worship is to be work, our work of worshipping our God. In fact, when we have concluded our worship, we should be tired, even exhausted because we have put so much of ourselves into that service. Worship is not so much about getting something out of what we are doing as it is about putting all of ourselves into what we are doing. It is indeed work.

It is easy to be spiritual. It is a walk in the park, literally and figuratively. Being spiritual is centering on the self and is all about oneself. It is directed inward. It is difficult, hard work, to be religious, to do what is necessary to be the person God created us to be. Why? Because being religious means being centered outside ourselves: on God and on others. That does not mean that one cannot be religious and spiritual at the same time. In fact, when we are living out our faith, when we are worshipping our God, it is indeed, in word and in deed, a deeply religious and spiritual experience.

BEING GRATEFUL

We all have so much for which we should be thankful, so very, very much. Perhaps so much so that we do not realize just have blessed we really are. One of the reasons, I suspect, that we fail to grasp our blessedness is that often we find ourselves comparing our blessings with those who we deem to be more blessed than we are instead of those who are obviously so much less blessed than we are.

Doing so may be human nature. It may also be the product of the world in which we now live and especially in this great country of ours. We are blessed to live in this country and because of that we are so much more blessed than those who live in other parts of this world, parts of the world sociologists call The Third World or the Three-Fourths World. We take our blessings for granted and only, rarely, if ever, it often seems, pause to give thanks for them.

Truly, because we have so much for which to be thankful, gratitude should be a way of life for us. The word itself, gratitude, comes from the Latin word gratus meaning “thankful”. Gratus is close to gratia which means “grace” – which gives us a clue as to why we should be thankful in the first place, which is why we should never, ever take our blessings for granted.

We are graced people, you and I. We have done nothing to deserve that grace, nothing at all. Why we are so graced and why so many others are not is something we can neither understand nor explain. All we can do, all we should do, is be thankful to God for so gracing us and not, not even once, compare our gifts, our blessings, to those of others or, worse yet, somehow begin to believe we deserve those blessings. We do not.

Gratitude should be like a fuel that gives power to our lives. It should propel us to be the person God created us to be, endowed with the gift’s God graced us with, so that we can become a source of grace and blessing to those who are not so blessed, while not judging them for their lack of blessings but, rather, being thankful that we are so abundantly and undeservedly blessed.

One can only wonder what this world would be like if we, each and every one of us, lived a life of gratitude. Instead of being envious of those we deem more blessed, we would share some of our blessings, some of our time and talents and financial resources, to help bless those who do not have what we have in abundance. Instead of hoarding our blessings, we should share them with those in need. To live more simply so that other may simply live is living a life of gratitude.

Good people that we are, and we are good people, we sometimes can find ourselves not doing what we know deep in our hearts we should be doing. It is so easy to get so caught up in our own little world that we forget about those who are not part of our world. Living a life of gratitude not only makes those with whom we share our blessing more blessed, it make our live even more so. We know that when we have done that. We just need to make gratitude a way of life and not simply an occasional part of it.

LEST WE FORGET

If the truth were told, we clergy would reluctantly admit that when the church is not full or as full as we would like it to be, we take it personally. There seems to be this defective gene in us that somehow believes that people come to church just to hear us preach and celebrate. Thus, when there is low attendance, we take it as a personal affront. It’s an ego thing, you see.

Now I will grant, as I have always maintained when Vestry conversations get around to talking about evangelism, as they do on a regular basis, and how we can get more people to join our church, that I point out that I cannot – no priest can – bring people to church. However, I can drive them away. Even more, and probably even worse, if some join a church because of the priest, the clergy person, they are joining for the wrong reason, a very wrong reason.

When attendance is low, especially on those occasions when it should not be because of the religious and liturgical significance of the service – Holy Week, for instance – there is always a feeling of discouragement on the part of the clergy. We know the religious and theological – and even and especially the personal – import of those days and occasions. We are thus somewhat at a loss as to why most of our parishioners do not, or at least do not take them as important as we do.

We clergy do have to keep in mind that we, as clergy, come to Holy Week, for example, from a different mindset than that of the people we serve. Were we to ask ourselves that if the shoe on the other foot, were we laypeople, parishioners, would our feet take us to church or take us somewhere else? We honestly do not know the answer to that question. “Church” is part of who we are and it is impossible for us to disconnect that part of us in order to understand those for whom it is not such a part, certainly not as much a part of their being as it is a part of ours. This is in no way a judgment. It is simply a fact.

That said, it is still discouraging when the services on Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil are so sparse that one wants to ask, “Why bother?” But, then, we must lest we forget. It is akin to asking why I have to tell my wife that I love her on a regular basis when she already knows that I do. I say it lest I forget even though I mean it in no less a way. I say it not out of obligation but simply because I must.

I think that is why we will never cease celebrating the days of Holy Week even were we clergy the only ones present. We would do so not out of any obligation but simply because we must. We would do so lest the people forget if we do not. We do so always with the hope that more and more of our parishioners would come to understand the meaning and personal importance of these days and not because it would make us feel better because the church is fuller, even as it certainly would.

Maybe next year’s Holy Week services will be better attended. Maybe not. But they will be observed lest we forget why they are so very important in our personal life of faith and in the life of the church as well.

THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO GO

Jesus’ last words on the cross were his most important not only for us but even more so for himself. “Father, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing.” There are two parts to that sentence, both important as they are two parts of the same coin, if you will. They go together. We do not and cannot have one without the other.

Take the second half of that statement first: “because they do not know what they are doing.” The people who were putting Jesus to death truly did not know what they were doing. By that I mean that they did not know who Jesus was. But it was more than that. They did not understand the implication of what they were doing because their actions would have far-reaching consequences and effects.

So do ours. We, too, when we do something we know we should not be doing, truly do not know what we are doing. Yes, we know that when we say something to hurt another person, we know what we are doing. And when we deliberately hurt another person, we know what we are doing. However, as with the case with those who were putting Jesus to death, so with us: we truly do not know the ramifications of our deliberate hurt. The always go far beyond the one we have hurt.

No sin is ever relegated to one other person even if that person is ourselves. When we do something to hurt ourselves, we also hurt those who love us because they have to deal with what we have done, with the consequences of our actions. The same is true when we hurt another. Those who love the one we have hurt have to deal with the one who has now been hurt, to minister to that person in love. And while they are ministering to the one we hurt, those others who are dependent on their time and talent will have to put their needs on hold. And those who are now on hold will have to put those waiting on them on hold as well, and so on down the line.

Thus, we really never truly and fully know what we are doing when we sin. If we did, if we could somehow in some way fathom the consequences of that sin, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant that sin is, we would never walk down that path. We would avoid it at all costs.

But we do walk down that path. That is why those who unjustly, and knowing that they were doing an injustice, put Jesus to death needed to be forgiven not only for their sake but for Jesus’ own sake as well. Jesus would not allow himself to die with an unforgiving heart. Whether his words of forgiveness healed or helped heal those who were putting him to death, whether those words transformed them, we do not know. But they were transforming to Jesus and allowed him to go from this life to the next in peace.

Forgiveness is the only way to go in this life as well. We have to forgive those who hurt us and we have to forgive others for hurting us and we have to forgive ourselves for hurting ourselves if we want to fully and faithfully live in this life. There is no other way than the way of forgiveness as difficult as that way is all too often, in fact, all of the time. Forgiveness is akin to being crucified: it is painful but it is the only way to go.