Benedict Us

(The photos here depict the transformation of one end of our screened-in porch into a "pellet shed," where the three tons of wood pellets required for a winter are stored.)

The Order of Saint Benedict seeks peace through prayer and work. The Prologue to the Rule of Saint Benedict says, "Receive willingly and carry out effectively your loving father's advice, that by the labor or obedience you may return to him from whom you had departed by the sloth of disobedience." By this phrase we may understand that there is a holy obedience in work, and there is a nefarious disobedience in the failure to work. Labor is good.

I work in a profession where many, if not most, of my tasks are cerebral. My hands and feet do the work of getting me to the chair and typing (or web surfing), but on a daily basis I use only a small fraction of their physical capacity. They are underused, subjected by my choice of profession to a certain enforced sloth, a subtle disobedience to the purposes for which they were created.

Refreshment of purpose, then, comes from the chores that I must do at home. Keeping a house and physical property requires that my hands and feet, and all of the seven hundred muscles in my body, use their gifts and talents. The projects do require thought and figuring, but the most redeeming part of them is the physical labor.

In work we discover that we need to pray. We humans are physical beings: our existence is wrapped up in our physicality. If we were not physical, we would not be who we are. Our thoughts, dreams, goals, perception of time, and understandings of God are led by the fact that we are beings in three-space. Labor, physical labor, by its nature requires us to engage three-space and therefore requires us to come to terms with who we are.

I have to get my hands dirty when I work. I need to exert force, break a sweat, and get splinters. I move sawhorses, lay out boards, paint them, and wait for the unhurried progress of moisture evaporating. I thrust a shovel into the turf and wrench against stones that have been there since long before I was born. My teeth scratch against the end of screws, the metal for which was scraped from under mountains and coated with distilled soil. My hand grips handles that were doubly or triply refined from subterranean pools of petroleum. I measure (twice on the better days) and cut the long-dead skeletons of towering pines.

To work the soil, the wood, and the metal of this earth is to be confronted with the question, Why am I working? Every task I undertake contributes in the short term to a re-ordering of the world, and contributes in the long term to a breakdown of the world. I will have a pellet shed this year; but it will decay with the rest of the house, and many trees, pounds of earth, and plant and animal material were harvested and refined to provide my tools and supplies. I become aware that I need to consume in order to survive: to get food, heat, and shelter.

Yet this is not selfish work, for others depend on my labor. Our household needs heat in order to keep me, my wife, and my new daughter warm. Our lives depend on such work. So it is a labor of love. Yet it also differs from the gratuitous labor of gifts; this work comes in strokes of obedience, obedience to the love that commands sustenance for others. I have been placed in relationship with others for a lifetime, and to love them means to work for their welfare. It means less TV and more sawing; less reading and more nailing; less sleeping and more hefting.

But I cannot do it all; I cannot provide it all, no matter how much or how hard I work. So I must pray. I must seek the source of all provision, whose work is sufficient to provide what we need. Prayer becomes a labor of love, as well: an appeal to the one who loves first, so that those I love with labor will have all that my labor cannot give. I become obedient to the deficiencies of my three-space self: I who cannot see the future; I who can only do one thing at a time; and I who cannot grow but only construct.

Labor and obedience; labor in obedience; labor obedient to love. To labor as an act of loving obedience is to seek peace in this world: a real, three-space, human peace. I will find not the peace of my design--for that would be a different kind of work--but an indirect peace that comes from the discipline of labor. Here could be the genius of Saint Benedict: not that he discovered how to work, how to obey, or how to make peace, but that he understood some relationship between the three.

Labor, obedience, peace. With every breath I must crumble the world; but with my hands I may obey the needs of those I have been given to love, and may build peace. Every pellet shed, every garden bed, every shade of red is a step toward peace. And I discover that which I cannot do with labor, and am driven to prayer.

~emrys