labor

It is fascinating how manual labor can be so refreshing, and so rewarding, in the midst of a life of study, and mental abuse.

Grad school is like boot camp for the mind. In boot camp they push you to physical limits and break you down in order to build you up, here in grad school I find that they beat your brain to a pulp with a large amount of complicated and extremely taxing mental labor, plus I sometimes believe that grad profs find profound glee in tormenting grad students and giving grades like 65/170 and calling that a B+.

In the midst of this tremendous difficulty, and new mental landscape I find myself not finding comfort where I once did. In undergrad where I had mental power left after doing school work for reading and writing, I find that my mind cannot contemplate anything after the extreme stress of my work and therefore I find myself in need of a new method of maintaining sanity. And surprisingly manual labor has risen as an answer.

Well I should probably realize that it is not surprising given my studies and my predilection to monasticism. 'Ora et labora' The cry of the Benedictine order, work and prayer. The Benedictine's follow a rule of balance, a rule of simplicity. They pray, study, and work; a life which most of us can't imagine, believing it drab and dull, or difficult. Yet I continually find myself returning with joy to patterns of life that I had while living among the Benedictines. Prayer, maual labor, study: It seems that when all these things come into balance life is slightly less crazy, and my sanity is more well maintained. Maybe there is something deeply ingrained in human nature that requires all three, without which there is dissonance.

And yet also the Benedictines teach us that while these three seem separate, they are in fact, and should be inter related. It is not just ora et labora but also labora cum ora. Not just work and prayer, but work as prayer. We were not meant to live a disjointed unbalanced lives, instead God created us in such a way that we should live in harmony with ourselves and with one another. But this harmony isnt just a balance, or a hermenutical meeting of otherness, but a realiztion of the ways that the other express the self and vice versa. We work and pray, yet also we pray by working. What a joyful comforting realization! That when we strip away all the brokeness and imbalance we can find a place in which working becomes a prayer and a restoration. Coming home to do laundry after having gone to class, taught and graded no longer has to be a stressful and painful thing, instead in the quiet mundaity of laundry, in which I am not thinking of physics or of grades I can begin to simply pray and give thanks for the things God gives me: for clothes, and shelter, clean water, and a way to wash clothes. I find that all the small little things of life become an opportunity of praising God while also finding refreshment and renewal of a grad school weary spirit.

Lord let me always remember you in the little things. Amen