Tag: Work

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Minute Meditation – Deep Work Can be Prayer

When you are in a flow state or doing deep work, you have given yourself fully to what you are doing. You’re not checking email or texts or your social media feeds. You’re not browsing streaming services for new content. You’re not snagging the best deal on Amazon. You’re simply doing one thing, whether that is performing a piano concerto, writing a fine paragraph, helping your third-grader with her math, or getting the ignition timing properly set. You have, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Merton, forgotten yourself on purpose. Like Mary, you are truly and fully attentive to the one thing needful, rather than busy with the ten thousand things, like Martha. If approached with intention, such states can indeed be forms of prayer: deep, open attentiveness to the present moment, in which our own egos are emptied out so we have room to be filled with the divine.

— from the book Making Room: Soul-Deep Satisfaction through Simple Living
by Kyle Kramer

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Good Work is Like a Prayer

It is in work that we find the test of our relationship to the creation because work is the question of how we will use the creation. For Wendell Berry, work done well brings us into a wholeness and cooperation with the creation in which we can find health. Bad work destroys the connections that make life possible. For Berry good work is like a prayer—it is an act of both gratitude and return. Good work accepts the gifts of creation and uses those gifts to further their givenness. There are seeds that lie for decades in the soil, waiting for the right conditions before springing to life. Good work is that which creates the conditions for such life to burst forth from the whole of the creation.

— from the book Wendell Berry and the Given Life 
by Ragan Sutterfield

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Is Your Work a Vocation?

It doesn’t take much looking in our economy to see that in fact there is a great deal of work that doesn’t pray, work that disconnects us from our sources of life rather than moves us toward wholeness. For work to pray, it must have a sense of vocation attached to it—we must feel some calling toward that work and the wholeness of which it is a part, that there is something holy in good work. Vocation is a calling and prayer is a call and response, deep calling to deep. For work to pray, to be vocation, it must be brought into a larger conversation. “The idea of vocation attaches to work a cluster of other ideas, including devotion, skill, pride, pleasure, the good stewardship of means and materials,” Wendell Berry writes. It is these “intangibles of economic value” that keep us from viewing work as “something good only to escape: ‘Thank God it’s Friday.’”

— from the book Wendell Berry and the Given Life 
by Ragan Sutterfield

//Franciscan Media//

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I Heard God Laugh – The Third Shift

We have the chance to give ourselves to lots of things. We can devote ourselves to our work. Pour ourselves into a workout regimen. Maintain a commitment to our family or our friends. But what about prayer? Can we say that we “give ourselves” to prayer? 

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Minute Meditations – The Work That is Ours to Do

“Work is part of God’s loving plan, we are called to cultivate and care for all the goods of creation and in this way share in the work of creation! Work is fundamental to the dignity of a person. Work anoints us with dignity, fills us with dignity, makes us similar to God, who has worked and still works, who always acts.”—Pope Francis

As Jesus responds to those who question his identity as the Son of God, he puts it in terms of the work that God does in the world. From the beginning of creation, it is God’s work that keeps all the universe in existence. Jesus shares in that work. Pope Francis shows us by his deeds and occasionally by his words that his work as pope is to lead God’s people in the way of the Gospel. In any religious organization the foibles and weaknesses of human society can become more visible and at times more important than the underlying good work that’s being done. It’s part of the pope’s responsibility—any pope in history—to rise above the controversy and the squabbling to focus on doing God’s work in the world. We know that in our own lives—at home, at work, in school, in various organizations—that the less admirable behaviors can distract from the work at hand. We spend more time complaining about what other people are doing or not doing than we spend doing the work that is ours to do.

Reflect today on the work that you do, whatever that might be. Ask yourself how focusing on that work can keep you from falling into the various snares that Pope Francis often talks about— gossip, backbiting, jealousy, despair. How can your work help you to further the way of God in the world? When you feel disillusioned, remind yourself that it’s all about the work. With Jesus, you can say, “The Father is at work and I work, too.”

— from the book The Hope of Lent: Daily Reflections from Pope Francis 

by Diane M. Houdek

//Franciscan Media//

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Morning Offering – His First Rule

“What was the first rule of our dear Savior’s life? You know it was to do His Father’s will. Well, then, the first end I propose in our daily work is to do the will of God; secondly to do it in the manner He wills; and thirdly, to do it because it is His will.”
— St. Elizabeth Ann Seton