He Prepares My Heart for the Harvest

As I walk out of St. Mary’s chapel and down the middle of Linden Lane on a mid-September afternoon, I watch a few leaves drift and turn, fluttering and falling from the canopy above. The sun, low in the sky, slips behind the trees, its rays streaking through the branches. The air is bright and warm but withholding, suggesting the coming chill. Summer lingers like a snake reluctant to shed its skin, and my heart yearns for another season; for autumn leaves, blue jeans, and a crisp breeze; for a drive up north, acoustic music, and romance.

Summer has overstayed its welcome. This season of my life — a season of work — has as well. This work is tedious and tiresome. Far from the exciting, illuminating play of schoolwork – reading Aristotle, Cicero, or Dostoevsky – I wrestle with the drone of endless spreadsheets, emails, and networking calls. As the school year began, I transitioned from interning in finance to recruitment for a postgraduate job. For months, I have felt no respite from a looming, momentous call, or the weight of being evaluated like a lab rat by large corporations who will decide my future based on a resume, an IQ test, and a few business cases. Despite being back at school, these tasks have consumed my mind and being, like squeezing all the extra air out of an empty water bottle.

The Lord has revealed three lessons, and three corresponding images, through this difficult season of work: 1. The practical value of discipline, 2. The goodness inherent in work and 3. The necessity of suffering to grow close to Jesus. I’d like to share these here.

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Each morning this summer, before logging onto my work computer, I formed the habit of saying a quiet prayer to St. Joseph the Worker. The father of Jesus and a simple craftsman, St. Joseph worked much and spoke little. He was a man of great virtue and discipline. At my desk, I picture him at work, and I pray:

“St. Joseph, by the work of your hands and the sweat of your brow, you supported Jesus and Mary, and had the Son of God as your fellow worker. Teach me to work as you did, with patience and perseverance, for God and for those whom God has given me to support.”

Each night, I look at the image of sleeping St. Joseph on the prayer card I use as a bookmark. He rests on the ground, his tools hanging on the wall behind him and a lamb slumbering nearby. He too is exhausted from a strenuous day of work. By the offering of his mind and body to the Lord in his labors, St. Joseph attained the discipline and virtue to protect and lead Jesus and Mary in the great trials of daily life. God prepares me too through my work, disciplining my mind and body to emulate St. Joseph and give ever more of myself to God and those whom God has given me to support.

Secondly, the Lord revealed this simple fact: work can be an act of loving prayer. I had always segmented my life into equal parts – work is one thing, prayer another, rest a third. However, as Simone Weil wrote in her illuminative essay on the topic, “the key to a Christian conception of [work] is the realization that prayer consists in attention.” In prayer, imagining Jesus at work with Joseph, I am given the image of His eyes, fixed with steadfast attention on the task at hand and a determination to do it rightly. Jesus loved his father by focusing his will on work. This prayer of attention may mean listening intently during a lecture, warding off logismoi in contemplation, or devoting oneself to a task at work. In this way, even tediously filling out a spreadsheet can be an act of love.

The third result of this season of work is being drawn closer to Christ by means of voluntary suffering. To pick up my cross and to bear it joyfully and unceasingly is the task of daily life. The image I see here is the wood of my desk, to which I must allow myself to be nailed each morning, and in so doing “fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (Colossians 1:24). How great a gift, oh Lord, is this wood of the cross which stokes the fire of Divine Love in my heart.

I am glad to have learned these lessons of work. However, as this season grows long, I find that my heart longs for the next. In the seasons of nature and the seasons of my life, God builds constancy amidst change. When autumn returns, it meets me with both an enthralling novelty and a soothing familiarity. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters, “God has balanced the love of change with a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.”

And yet, Lord, you do not intend for me to remain in a perpetual cycle of seasons, but rather to ascend an upward spiral; To be as a sapling which, by continual repetition of the crucible of winter, the bliss of spring, the toil of summer and the harvest of fall grows imperceptibly into a towering oak. To be drawn up into the heavenly sphere, where time and eternity, change and constancy, intersect, and where You dwell.