Monastic Work

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The material foundation which supports our personal and communal life of prayer is mutual service. Mutual service, that is, monastic work, includes every personal contribution made by each individual in service of the other members of the community. There is building maintenance, energy supply and housekeeping. The monks also need to be clothed and fed. Their intellectual needs must be met by keeping a library and providing lectures. The common liturgy must be prepared. There must be accountants and administrators, counselors and teachers. We must earn enough money to pay our bills and so there is a basic need to farm and to sell our produce. Again, the sick must be cared for and someone must also provide for our guests. All these, and many other needs must be met if the monk is to have the freedom and peace requisite for engaging in a life of constant personal and communal prayer.

Monastic Work is the mutual service by which monks love each other effectively. By work we create the material substratum and the physical conditions which make the prayer-life possible for our brothers and sisters individually and as a community. Work can be a source of joy in accomplishment, refreshment in diversion, exhilaration in physical activity, excitement on work's challenge. But these intrinsic rewards are not the basic motives for our engaging in work. Very often, our work is dull and boring, insignificant and menial, routine, distasteful, and exhausting. But we work for motives deeper than these delights and disgusts involved in work. We work because the work we do is the most effective way we can love and serve our brothers and sisters here and now. The presence or absence of intrinsic rewards in work are secondary considerations. We work for our brothers and sisters because that is the best way we can love them and serve their best interests. If some work is unnecessary or un-helpful to the personal and communal contemplative life, it has no value and ought not be engaged in by those living the monastic life.

We love our fellow monks. Therefore, we work to make their life of personal and communal prayer possible. For this we exert our energy and we use our talents. In monastic language, we speak of "manual labor." The meaning of this expression must not be taken in an exclusively literal sense, as if the work has to be done "by hand." Manual labor means that monks support themselves by mutually fulfilling one another's material needs. One cuts grass, someone else writes, another makes garments, a fourth cooks, another answers the phone, yet another teaches, etc. All these service functions are the "manual labor" of monks.

Work done for the sake of prayer is itself more prayer than work. We should never let work become the end in and of itself. It must always remain a means of loving and serving others. We should work at a speed natural to our personal rhythm. In the secular world, employers or unions demand that workers accomplish a certain quantity of work per hour or day. No regard is given to individual differences of personality and temperament. Maximization of material and standardization of output are the absolute laws. It must not be so with monastic work. Let every monk give themselves wholeheartedly to the work they undertake. Then let them move at the pace which most fully allows them to remain in possession of themselves. Work must not become feverish. Calm presence to oneself, to others, and to God must not be sacrificed in favor of overexertion in one's work. And people must be allowed to be different. Some naturally work faster than others. In the world, the faster worker is considered the better one. Not so with us. The one who works best is the one whose work speed is personally most conducive to awareness: awareness of what the individual self is doing, awareness of oneself, awareness of the people around in their wholeness, awareness of God, awareness of the "whole" formed by all these. Work in this spirit not only provides the material-economic foundation for the contemplative life: it is already the contemplative life at work.

Although, as said above, work is a means towards prayer and not the absolute end in itself, still work is a relative-end. That is to say, although it serves a higher purpose, namely, prayer, still it must be taken seriously in itself. Work is the means which becomes the relative end of our endeavor while we are engaged in it. Therefore, we should work well. For the most part, we are not under obligation to accomplish maximum quantity. That is all the more reason why we should turn out the finest work we are capable of. We enjoy the luxury of being free to give each job the time it takes for us to do our best. Besides being the right way of working, this is also the most rewarding and, in the long run, the most productive.

There are only a fixed number of hours in each day and only a certain few of these can be allotted to work. Our first obligation is to limit our work to what we can do well in the time we have to give to it. Nevertheless, at times we will have to hurry. Perhaps all the windows must be closed before the rain storm lets loose. Or the harvest must be completed before the impending frost destroys the crops. There are ever so many other possible circumstances in which the contemplative will be pressured by an objective time limit. A contemplative individual remains only a human. One will have to undergo all the natural stresses that are an inevitable part of human life. But, as peaceful and peace-making people, let us not invent or imagine unnatural or unnecessary time limit stresses. Sufficient for the day are its natural and inescapable time limits. Let us not add to them, arbitrarily, by trying to do more than we can peacefully accomplish. Nor in this monastic environment, let us impose on others or allow them to impose on us human-made, unnecessary, arbitrary needs to rush. Sometimes the most responsible and loving thing we can do in response to a person or a circumstance is to move as fast as we reasonably can. Even at those times, let us try to remain self-possessed, tranquil, aware, fully present.