Pray and work. ~Saint Benedict

A decade ago, if you had told me that I would begin to crave the feeling of dirt between my fingers in late winter, I would have laughed out loud. Gardening was never my thing. It was Nathan’s thing, my mother’s thing, my mother~in~law’s thing, but not my thing. I was firmly a house person, an indoor sort. I was not a gardener. Until I was.

A line in the General Thanksgiving, a prayer toward the end of an Episcopal eucharistic service, says: “We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life.” I have found that the more I garden and want to garden, the more I understand specific prayers and passages of Scriptures. Standing in my living room, reading The General Thanksgiving out loud, windows open, birds chirping, dining room table covered with seed pots and rooster crowing in the yard, I realize that the words are filled with a deeper meaning now that I work to preserve the lives of animals, gardens, trees and children in my care, now that I am harvesting blessing after blessing of fresh eggs, herbs, flowers and copious amounts of vegetables, each of which always comes to me as a sort of miracle. That we plant a seed tinier than a freckle into a mound of dirt, and months later, we are eating an endless meal of tomato sandwiches, so fresh and ripe that the juices run down my chin, is a miracle every time.

This is one of the ways Saint Benedict’s motto of ora et labora—pray and work—has been made real to me. Work and prayer come together as co~creators in the goodness of creation, in the miracle of planting, tending and harvesting tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and okra.

For Reflection

What does “pray and work” mean to you?

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