Continual Prayer, Swimming and the Spirituality of Washing Dishes

“Pray always and never cease.” (1Thes 5:17)
“This order is a monastic institute wholly ordered to contemplation.” (Const.2)
 
In our daily life we have time set aside for prayer, both personal and communal.  We have time for lectio and spiritual reading and study.  But is this enough?  If we are called to ‘pray always,’ then how could any number of hours of explicit prayer possibly satisfy if there comes a time when we have to stop and do something else? – like eating or sleeping or making a living, for example.  Christians have been asking this question since the early days of the Church.  The development of the Divine Office was one answer to the question, supplemented by rumination on Scripture or short ejaculatory prayers during other activities.  We know though, don’t we, that it’s possible to sing the whole Office, repeat a verse of Scripture ad nauseam or punch out ejaculations all day, without having a sense that we’re really praying.  Augustine sought an answer to this unsatisfactory situation by speaking of the prayer of desire: when desire for prayer is continual, then prayer can be considered continual even if it doesn’t feel like it.  Origen offered another answer by teaching that good works are an implicit form of prayer.  Evagrius took it further when he spoke of the possibility of reaching katastasis, a state of implicit prayer always ready to become explicit, a permanent dwelling at rest in one’s natural habitat.
 
In his seventh Conference, John Cassian considers a question that has surely crossed all our minds at some point, when we have applied our zealous efforts only to be rebuffed by apparent failure: is continual prayer in fact beyond our frail human capacity; is attaining to a mind quiet enough to hear God habitually just pie in the sky?  The subtext here is: should we even bother trying?  Cassian answers using an analogy to the experience of learning to swim.  One who is unable to swim finds it hard to believe that water can bear up the weight of one’s body.  Do you remember days long ago spent paddling in the shallows, with a longing gaze cast toward older children and adults fully immersed in deep water?  Do you remember the hand of your father supporting your stomach from below as you thrashed wildly but ineffectually with arms and legs?  Do you remember pretending to swim like the big kids but with your foot secretly touching the bottom of the pool?  Do you remember the day when, without knowing how it happened, you launched out across the water and for the first time found yourself borne up as if by some miracle?  Swimming then became as simple and natural as walking, or even more so.  Perhaps you too felt that you had been born for this, that never in your life had you felt so at home as when gliding through the water or floating on top of it.
 
The call to ‘pray always’ is more than a mandate; it is no command from on high that imposes a duty on us arbitrarily, obliging us to something that goes beyond our nature, not to say beyond common sense.  No, I believe God’s commands always contain within them an expression of our deep-down identity as creatures.  Augustine cried out to God in prayer: “Grant what you command!” – and he does, though he often waits to see us manifest our desire for it by our struggle.  If God commands something, it’s because he has already granted it by writing it into our nature; he made us for this: to find our deepest happiness and completeness in him.  We possess an infinite urge for oneness with God that can be satisfied by nothing except continual prayer.  That is why in the monastery our whole life is given to prayer, not just the seven hours of the Divine Office which symbolize totality, and not just those times when we are free for explicitly spiritual activities.  Ours is a life wholly ordered to contemplation.  Ours is a human nature wholly ordered to knowing God.  Ours is a material world wholly ordered to revealing God’s presence.  There is prayer waiting to emerge from every situation we experience, every person we encounter, every material object we touch.
 
As Cistercians, one of the central elements of our life is work, especially manual work done in common and in silence.  This is a time of year when we are called to give more of ourselves to work in the common endeavor of our candy season, whether we are assigned to candy or are giving of ourselves elsewhere.  This is also a time when we are more likely to feel busy, hurried, pressed for time, since our intervals are shortened, and most departments are managing with less help than they would like.  It is a good time to remind ourselves of why we work.  We work to do our part in the community’s effort for self-support, yes, and in this we accept solidarity with all laborers, especially the poor.  But more fundamentally, I think, we work because doing so feeds our search for God, our insatiable desire to follow Christ and be conformed to him.  Work is about prayer.  This doesn’t mean I just write down ‘work=prayer’ in my notebook and dismiss the question of whether I am fulfilling my vocation.  Neither do I drown my work in vocal prayers as if to camouflage it.  If I am in touch with my deeper desire, neither of these counterfeits will satisfy me for long.  Ultimately, work has to reveal its inner face to me if I am to persevere in it happily several hours a day for the rest of my life.
 
I’d like to unpack a little of why we prefer manual work done in common and in silence.  We know that not all our work is manual, not all is done in common, and not all can be done in silence, though I would say that most of the time we get two out of three.  But one form of work most of us engage in every day combines all three of these qualities.  For this reason, I will take as a case study the daily chore of washing dishes.  What is the inner face of washing dishes?
As a manual work, it is simple, humble, ordinary, a basic service, a daily necessity; it is tactile, putting me in touch with water, soap, towels, plates, bowls, silverware and food; it calls for physical effort and movement of my body.
As a common work, it brings us together from our various responsibilities to something that involves us all, that requires us all, that calls for cooperation and care, patience and flexibility; it allows for lighthearted enjoyment of one another.
As a silent work, it does not require planning or discussion, it can help to calm and refocus us, it is conducive to a quiet mind and an unhurried pace, it allows for pondering.
Each of these qualities of work helps to draw us into reverent attention to reality, to the silent presence of God in people and things.
 
Jean Vanier wrote of his experience in L’Arche communities that most of life is spent “dirtying things and cleaning them up again.”  The need to wash dishes multiple times every day is a good example of this.  There are two ways to respond to this unavoidable facet of human existence: either I resent being condemned to a continual cycle of meaningless toil, or I receive inevitability as an invitation to find meaning and enjoyment in what I do every day.  The author of the book of Ecclesiastes seems to be preoccupied with just this dilemma; the word ‘toil’ is used no fewer than thirty-two times in his book.  He expresses the two perspectives on work in his own way.
1) Work as drudgery: “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.” (Eccl 2:11)
2) Work as enjoyment: “This is what I have seen to be good: it is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us; for this is our lot.” (Eccl 5:18)
 
It is easy to fall into a ‘work as drudgery’ mindset, and then we find ourselves rushing, cutting corners, malingering, or mindlessly getting through it to reach the promised land of what we would rather be doing.  Our asceticism often consists in resisting the marauding thoughts that threaten to take over our mind with what I could be doing instead of this, what I need to do next, and what I would like to do after that.  When we start getting on to next week, things are pretty bad.  This is all so much harder for those responsible for advance planning.  We recognize, as our Community Guidelines put it, that we are subject to “poverty of time.”  This is a fact.  And I am not advocating that we should deliberately work at a slow pace, oblivious to the objective needs of the situation.  There is nothing wrong with working briskly, being efficient and using time well.  But just as poverty does not have to lead to want, so poverty of time does not have to lead to mindlessness and haste.  What do I mean by that?  Poverty doesn’t lead to want when we know how to make do and be happy with less.  Likewise, poverty of time doesn’t lead to mindless haste when we have the gift of acceptance.  Another word used by St Benedict in his sixth step of humility is contentment.  The word used in the book of Ecclesiastes is all the more challenging: enjoyment.
 
Can I enjoy being simply here doing just this?
Can I find my natural habitat in whatever I may be called to do at this moment?
How would I describe the inner face of work?
Do I find God’s presence in reverent attention to reality?
Have I learned how to swim?