More Ways to Pray Through Our Work - Part 2

We continue to look for ways to pray through our work, guided by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski's superb Working Your Way into Heaven. Last time we learned one way, practicing asceticism at work, and gave some examples of this. We saw that self-discipline - the essence of asceticism - can become a form of prayer. As we exert greater control over our self-indulgent behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, we open ourselves to God. There's space for Him when we're not so full of ourselves.

In freeing ourselves from ourselves with this ascetic approach to our work, the work itself becomes a form of prayer. We can continue to consider our job and its rewards as a means advance our own agenda (personal recognition, career advancement, making more money to build wealth, etc.) of course. But we also want to unite our work life with our prayer life. Cardinal Wyszynski urges us to take our prayer life and

"...transfer it to the field of our work: it must 'come out of the chapel' and go with us to our daily occupations."

As we learned last time, we ought not separate our prayer life and our work life. If we keep our prayer life and our work life separate, our daily efforts lack a fundamental balance:

"All that the day brings us has to be balanced by prayer..."

Uniting our work life with our prayer life further becomes a form of expression of our love for God. It's not something we must do, but something we want to do. In this way, our work itself expresses our love of God. Cardinal Wyszynski tells us the love of God in our work has four consequences:

• "...if we love God in work, it is impossible not to tell Him so..."
• "...if we love God we long to please Him by yielding to His will...in work there is also great humility, compliance, and love."
• "if we love God, interiorly we want to submit our life to Him completely."
• "if we love God, we wish to have the same intention in our work as He has...Not mine, by Thy will be done. This intention of our work becomes its moral core. It give to it its supernatural value..."

You may want to re-read these four consequences such that you thoroughly understand them and are completely convinced of the value they bring to your daily work. When I have difficult stretches in my own work, the idea that even in those difficult moments I can express my love for God provides not only a degree of comfort, but also an inspiring boost that helps me work my way through those moments.

Uniting our work with our prayer life will be the key to our being able to express our love for God in our work. If ever there was a virtuous circle, this would be it:

• "...every loving work is prayer."
• "The greater the love we have for God the more spontaneous prayer in work becomes."
• "...to raise the level of love in work means to raise the level of prayer.

And if we're humble, i.e. honest with ourselves, we understand that this uniting of prayer with our work is necessary:

 "The necessity of prayer in work is linked with the consciousness of our insufficiency..."

In addition, it will provide us with the fortitude we need to produce great work even in the face of the greatest difficulties:

"...we brace ourselves with Christian courage for the conquest of all opposition and hardship. It is not possible to do lasting, versatile, fruitful, and effective work without linking it with prayer."

While most of us no longer do heavy manual labor, some of us face - at least from time to time - extraordinary demands on our time and energy that can both challenge us and drain us. In this sense, the more difficult our daily labor, the better:

"The raising up of the thought, will, and heart to God in heavy daily work - this is the most noble form of adoring God."

Circling back to the practice of asceticism at work, Cardinal Wyszynski considers it the glue that holds everything we've discussed together:

"All these thoughts go to create a whole system of the asceticism of work."

There's no "one size fits all" way to bring our work and prayer life together as an expression of our love for God.

"Every man can create, against the background of his own life, his own world of prayer in work; every one solves this problem in a different way."

Over time, by the grace of God, as we pray through our work, our day will be imbued with this wonderful sense of balance:

"Prayer transform our work inwardly, and sanctifies it; and work widens the frontiers of prayer."

It's a great combination, isn't it?