For the last two summers, I’ve had the pleasure of going home to my family. Now, my hometown, Green Bay, still sports a number of manufacturing plants. So, I, like many of my friends, worked for the summer in a factory. The life of a factory worker isn’t glamorous, and I won’t go into the various pains and struggles of building chairs and desks. I do, however, want to share a little bit of how I brought my faith into my work.
For a while, I wasn’t really sure how to fill the eight-hour shift. Sure, my body was always busy, but after the first few minutes of learning a new task, my mind was free to wander. My breakthrough came when I realized that the whir of the machines (not to mention the required earplugs) meant that I could sing quietly to myself and no one would notice. So, I’d pass the time on my shift by quietly singing. It kept me busy, but by the end of eight hours, I had run through basically every song I knew. Somehow, I had to keep myself sane.
To solve this problem, I turned to the old Benedictine maxim, Ora et Labora, “pray and work.” This became the blueprint for my day. I’d wake up at 5:20 A.M., grab some cereal, and then jump in my car. On the way, I’d listen to Morning Prayer. Once at the plant, my team would start with stretches, and the eight-hour timer would start. During my shift, I tried a few different ways to keep myself focused on prayer, some more effective than others. I found that a schedule helped the most. After a few days, I had it basically figured out. My day would start with a quick prayer to St. Joseph the Worker and “I Bind Unto Myself Today,” a musical setting of the Breastplate of St. Patrick, then I’d start on saying a Rosary. Throughout the shift, I had certain times to sing this or that hymn. The beauty of that structure was that I eventually didn’t really have to think about what I’d be doing; I could just fall into my routine.
All that was well and good, but it was all prayer sort of laid on top of what I was doing. What I was really striving to do was to make the work itself my prayer. It took me a while to figure out exactly what that meant. As the summer wore on, I realized that work like this was, in a way, a participation in the mystery of creation. I found the description of work by St. Josemaría Escriva illuminating: “[Work] is meant to fill out our days and make us sharers in God’s creative power.” My little action of building a chair was in some way a participation in God’s continual creation of the world.
The consequences of this were exciting to ponder. As Catholics, we see the world as sacramental. Each part of creation can mediate God’s grace. By building chairs, if I did it prayerfully, I could be building up the Kingdom. An exciting aspect of the unity of the Mystical Body is that you never really know the effects your prayer or your work will have, but we can have confidence that as long as we labor with God, we do not labor in vain.
A corollary of these realizations was that if work is this important, this much a part of the life of grace, it needs to be taken seriously. Being lax and lazy on the job isn’t as appealing when you view the labor as prayer. With this view in mind, St. Josemaría writes, “The work of each one of us, the activities that take up our time and energy, must be an offering worthy of our Creator. It must be operatio Dei, a work of God that is done for God: in short, a task that is complete and faultless.” It isn’t always an easy thing to remember, but I think it’s a powerful way to view our labors, both at the factory and in the classroom.
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