More on Benedict for families: Prayer, work, and study.

I'm totally buried in school planning this week, so blogging has gone to the back burner.

 Scratch that:  I'm immersed in school planning.  Planning is absolutely my favorite part of homeschooling.  It's summer, I only have to teach a little bit of "remedial" stuff (or let them teach themselves; for example, my 10-y-o's special summer subject is intensive typing practice with Mavis Beacon), and to top it all off, two of my kids are visiting Grandma and Grandpa for two or three weeks right now, so I have tons of time.  And I'm pouring most of it into lesson planning NOW so I won't wake up some morning in February 2012 and say "I don't know what I'm going to do today so I guess we'll just watch movies."

So speaking of being immersed in work, did any of you go and read Fr. Longenecker's Saint Benedict for Busy Parents that I recommended a few posts ago?*

I found myself unable to stop myself from creating a three-by-three matrix:

	Prayer	Work	Study
Obedience
Stability
Conversion of Life

...and trying to fill in all the cells, or at least some of them.  Do I practice obedience with regard to prayer, etc.

Because that's the kind of response a girl like me has to a piece of spiritual reading.  (You should have seen my notebook after I finished The Interior Castle.)

Of course, I immediately ran into another question, because while some of the stuff I do every day is undoubtedly prayer, and some of it is surely work, and some of it is arguably study, there's a lot of other stuff that isn't clearly any of them.   It's not hard to classify, for example, driving to the grocery store as "work."  What about going for a swim?  What about eating dinner?  And for that matter:  what about hanging out with friends or just sitting down with a cup of coffee in the morning getting ready to face the day?  I noticed a distinct lack of "just chillin'" in St. Benedict's trinity of how you spend your time.  And yet the monks were expected to have recreation time.   So do you suppose St. Benedict thought of the free time the monks had as part of prayer, part of work, part of study?  Or is free time some kind of fourth thing outside of prayer, work, and study?  Or is free time spent doing things that all can get classified as either prayer or work or study?  (If scrubbing the floor can be a form of prayer if it is done with love, I suppose finally getting that cup of coffee can be prayer if it is done with gratitude.  "If?"  Who isn't grateful for that cup of coffee?)    

Or maybe there really is no such thing as free time and the reality is that whatever we're doing, we are working, or studying, or praying, whether we realize it or not, and maybe we should sit up and pay attention to what it is we're making, or learning, or saying to God.

But anyway, I made a stab at classifying all the things I do as either "prayer," "work," or "study."  

Prayer wasn't too hard.  Attending Mass is prayer (even if I'm too busy attending to children to pay much attention to it, I decided).  Prayer is prayer.  Going to Confession or Adoration is prayer.  No problem.  

So you could say it was pretty easy to classify everything I do into "prayer" and "not-prayer."  (Subject to the caveat about all activities being a form of prayer if you do it in love, à la St. Thérèse.)  It was trickier to decide what to do with all the "not-prayer."   

In other forms of "what do you call what you do" classification, "work" is divided from other things, like "leisure," by monetary considerations.  Does it create wealth?  Can you get paid for it?  This won't work here.  It's more essential than that; it has to make sense whatever the context of economy.  And anyway, we're not distinguishing it from "leisure," but from "study."

So, in this system, "work" is something you do (I decided) that participates in creation:  remakes the physical world somehow.  It "co-operates with God in the redemption of the world," to quote Fr. Longenecker.  "Study" is something primarily interior that involves taking in the world as it is, and shaping it in the mind.   

With that in mind, I decided that teaching children is work; that preparing lessons is work.  That all the aspects of life that I could call "homemaking" is work.  For the purpose of dividing life up into this trinity, writing is work, even though I do it almost entirely for fun.  Traveling of all kinds is work, even driving to the grocery store.  Physically caring for other people, like nursing this child on my lap right now as I type, is work.  Physically caring for myself is work, too, and that includes getting the exercise I need and want.  And so having dinner with my family or friends is work.  Indeed, interacting with other people is almost always work, even just hanging out, because through our interactions with each other don't we remake the world in a small way?  Don't we have an opportunity to co-operate (if we are kind and prudent and open to the spirit) in redemption?

That leaves a number of things that can be called "study."  Scripture study and spiritual reading seem like they could be either "study" or "prayer," but fortunately, St. Benedict himself called them "study," and that is a bit of a guide to help us define the category.  All kinds of scholarship and research are "study."

Now, if you work as an academic, or a scientist, or a teacher in or out of the home, the distinction between "work" and "study" may be a little difficult to pinpoint; I, personally, make the classification based on whether I am remaking my own mind or something outside my own mind at the time.  When I skim through a stack of history books to decide what I will teach the children, I am studying.  When I put pen to paper to make a list of points I plan to teach, I am working.  

I have worked in laboratories, and I think I can figure out how I would classify as work or as study the various tasks: planning experiments, building apparatus, running experiments, collecting and analyzing data, writing up results and presenting them.  There is some prayer, of course, too:  I suspect that even if you include all the atheists, it's a rare researcher who hasn't uttered "OH PLEASE LET THIS THING WORK" at least once.  

Much leisure is study.  All reading for pleasure, and by extension all media consumption of any kind (this includes reading Facebook -- but not updating your status, which would be work, since you are creating content for others).   Developing skills of your own through reading or watching others  is study (although practicing them may be work).  Self-examination is study, even when prompted by prayer.

+ + +

Speaking of self-examination:  here is where I explain something about myself, because I can hear a voice asking "What's the point?"  The point is, I find a peculiar entertainment in continually examining my life, interior and exterior.  I find a meditative peace in the act of simplifying and filtering it.  Creating a blank table in a spreadsheet, all crisscross black lines, and empty  -- like the one above, before I started filling in the cells -- rakes the sand in my little mental Zen garden.

And I like the exercise of "What if I thought of --say-- getting to the gym as part of my work?  How would that change my attitude toward it?  Would it affect how I see it interrelating with the other things that are part of my work?"

Actually, the bit that felt most satisfying when it clicked into place was the concept that for me, hanging out with my friends, insofar as I am capable of "hanging out"  -- being with other people in general -- what I called "Fellowship" in my spreadsheet -- was to classify that as "work."  Because really, I am a classic introvert, and even though I enjoy other people, it wears me out.  Calling "fellowship" "work" lifted a bit of weight from my shoulders. 

The most useful insight for me, though, is that when you classify everything as either prayer, work, or study, no time is wasted.  It's either spent for good, or spent for ill.  

When I attend Mass, or pick up the breviary, or stand in line for confession, or even utter a voiceless "please!", I'm praying.  Am I referring to God or to myself?  Am I aligning my will with God's or against it?  Am I a channel for grace or an obstruction?  Am I opening my heart or trying to conceal it?

When I watch a video, or check comments on a news story, or listen to music, or read a book, I'm learning something.  Did I learn something true or something false?

When I write a blog post, or clean up a mess, or assign work to the children, or go for a run, or go to sleep, or spend time chatting with my friends, I'm participating in the creation and redemption of the world.  Did I help it or hinder it?

 

 

________________

* I forgot to mention on that post that I owe a hat-tip to Rich Leonardi for linking to it.

Comments

[MrsDarwin]

I too am immersed in school planning, as much as I can be with the distractions of the internet ("Ooh, new notification on FB!") and the kids tromping in and out every five minutes, which definitely makes work. I do not have your solid engineering mindset, and I don't enjoy process for process's sake, which makes this a bit of an arduous and distractable time for me. When I start flipping through a book, I find myself reading it. When I research information online, I find myself clicking related links to read up more on certain methods or booklists -- turning "work" into "study", perhaps.

Anyway, I enjoyed your diagram and your analysis of the Rule of St. B for Busy Families (which I did read and enjoy -- thanks!) and have been chewing on how to apply it to my own, and my family's, life.