The goal of prayer is to practice it without ceasing.
Focusing on the prayer lives of the laity, this book includes stories of individuals seeking to connect their faith with their work in the world. The goal of this connection is to affirm that prayer is both a quiet act of reverence and an active dynamic expressed in daily life situations at work and home.

Through the stories of people at work and prayer, the book seeks to encourage an understanding of prayer as that dimension of our relationship with God equally alive at work and at play, in public and at home.

You Are Already Praying

Church Publishing Incorporated

Contents

Chapter One

WHATEVER OUR LIFE'S work, opportunities exist for us to be instruments of grace in the lives of those we live and work with. Pushing my cart full of groceries towards the exit door, I stop to show my receipt to the man at the threshold. Each time I have seen him I have noticed a tiny picture of Jesus with a flaming heart at the corner of his name badge. He reviews my receipt, eyeing the items in my cart, and as he hands it back to me I point to Jesus on his badge and smile. He says: "He is the best friend you can have. I take him to work!"

Work done in gratitude, Kindly, and well, is prayer.

—Wendell Berry

Maude is a patient services manager in the food services department of a large urban hospital. A day does not go by without an opportunity to put her prayer into action in her work. When the hospital conducted contract reviews for five departments, food service, Maude's department, was the only one that kept its contract. Maude attributes this to putting her prayer to action. "I am a child of God and I realized I cannot let anything happen to the job security of those who work for me." She met day after day with her supervisors, and those who worked for her, coming up with compromises and solutions to present to the review board. "Right there in the middle of our meeting, I said: God is not going to shut one door and not open another. They seemed to listen to me!" Maude said with a smile.

As new contracts were signed across the hospital's departments, Maude watched people she worked with for years lose their jobs, with nothing to show for their years of work. "I think the way we treat each other at work matters. I am kind to everyone I work with, not just when I feel like it, or when I like someone, or when they can do something good for me. No, because God is watching and God is with me. You know, it blesses me right back. God's blessed me with this job, and with two kids and two grandkids. I have to bless others for all that is given to me." And she does.

Maude was raised in the Caribbean; her mother, father, and 11 brothers and sisters grew up in the Anglican Church. "You didn't go to church if you felt like it, you went to church, every single Sunday, no matter what. How you treated people, how you behaved, how you spoke, it all mattered. In fact my mother would give us the evil eye at church if we were not in her good graces because we did something wrong that week. When it came time for communion, she'd say, 'Oh no you don't' and hold you back in the pew if you had done something wrong." Maude laughed just picturing her mother's arm going out in front of her brothers and sisters as they were told to sit back down in the pew. "We were taught that life is about loving and serving God, all the time, in all you do. I cannot go away from that teaching," Maude says. "If I try to hold back and not bring my faith in God to work every day, something tells me, 'Maude, you've left something behind, go get it.'"

I met Maude when I came to her parish in the inner city. She was an usher and a member of the vestry. Once we became acquainted, the second year of my term in her parish, she invited me to an awards ceremony at the hospital where she worked. Along with two doctors from her hospital, Maude was there to receive the M. L. King Jr. service award at a ceremony in the hospital auditorium. She stood at the podium, 5 feet 11 inches tall in a beautiful cranberry dress with a corsage pinned at the neckline. Before she was given the award, her supervisor told the story of her dedication to the patients she served.

A young female patient suffering with cancer came to Maude's attention on floor rounds. She refused to eat and was losing weight. Maude knew the young woman was from the islands and talked to her about foods from home: curried goat and stewed chicken, fried fish, rice, black-eyed peas, and beef pies. Day after day Maude went to the kitchen and found food she knew the young woman would eat and had it sent up to her. The young woman died, and Maude attended her funeral to extend her sympathy to the young woman's family. When she met the woman's father, he told her he was looking for a "lady from the islands" his daughter spoke about on the telephone from the hospital. "She worked in food services and was always there for my daughter. I want to thank her."

I knew why Maude invited me to the awards ceremony that day. As her priest, I represented her faith community. She wanted the people she worked with to know that the source of this award, the impetus behind the kind of employee she was, came from her faith in God, from her decision to bring her prayer to work with her. I sat in the audience in the hospital auditorium feeling proud of Maude. Maude was invited forward to receive her award. She moved to the podium, thanked people from the hospital staff, and congratulated the two physicians who were her fellow recipients. Then she did something I was unprepared for: she introduced me and asked me to come forward and speak.

I was honored to be there; those words came easily. I thanked Maude and the two doctors being honored for the inspiration their work was to me. One further comment came to my mind and I shared it before sitting down. Heads all across the audience nodded "yes" as I spoke. "This is where God goes to work, here in this hospital, through your hands, and your skills, your patience and determination and compassion. When God's love is expressed in the world as we have heard it is today in the lives of the three people you have honored, representing the work of so many others, then we know God is alive. How we choose to do the work we do is how we pray back our thanks to God for all we have been given."

Maude and I walked out together into the hospital corridor, where she introduced me to the person who nominated her for the award. "I was a young mother when I met Maude," she said. "I worked as a dietician and handed Maude my resignation the day my day care fell through. She told me to come to her office and 'sit down.' She called one place after another until she found day care for my daughter close enough to the hospital for me to keep my job." Maude smiled and said "and she got one promotion after another and now she supervises the nutrition department." Nodding her head yes, the young woman exclaimed with a wide smile on her face, "And now I am your boss!"

* * *

David is a pediatric neurologist whose prayer accompanies him to work:

I majored in French literature in college and went to France to study. By what I then called chance, I met a French neurologist who was looking for an American to check the accuracy of translation of a standard clinical language test from English into French, to make certain the colloquial elements had been done justice. I did the work. Afterwards, he offered to let me come to his office as he field-tested the new instrument. I was thoroughly hooked. I fell on the study of the brain with passion, delight, devotion. It gave what had felt like a rudderless course direction and purpose. I changed my entire track, I repented in the oldest sense of the word and came back to the U.S. intending to become not only a physician, but more specifically a neurologist.

This trajectory certainly distinguished me from many of my medical school peers in those days, particularly the absence of any significant laboratory science background. Science drawing a person to the medical field is a well-worn path; following a clinical passion was a bit less usual. I arrived to become a neurologist because I had somehow fallen in love with the whole clinical spectrum of neurology. Like most love affairs, it would be difficult to explain to someone who was not as infatuated as I was: to explain the object of my affection, the why and the how and the when.

I eventually found myself taking an elective hardly anyone else ever signed on for: outpatient neurology clinics. My favorite part of the month was seeing patients with the man who would shortly thereafter become my mentor—the training director of the residency and education programs, a quiet, reserved, cryptic man given to understated observations, the poetry of William Carlos Williams, the history of neurology, and a sardonic view of the tempests that often stirred the medical school teapot.

I looked at the calendar one evening and saw that a patient had been assigned the usual hour for a new visit, and the subsequent hour crossed out, closed and unavailable. I wondered what that meant. I asked, and he just grunted, "Well, you'll see."

In any event, the patient, drooling slightly, but dressed quite elegantly, arrived with her husband. An older woman, her clothing and demeanor were that of a more gracious era than we inhabited. Her husband was dapper, solicitous, clearly worried. It started when she experienced trouble speaking, slurring her words (at first, her husband admitted with a blush, he thought she'd been "tippling at luncheon"). Then she began to complain that she had trouble chewing and swallowing certain foods. At night, she began to snore. The first time she choked over supper her husband realized that her condition was something that needed medical attention. He took her to their internist, who said little, save that they needed to see a neurologist. Soon.

The internist had called my mentor, who cleared his evening clinic for this appointment. He took the history in a way that was gentle but probing. He reassured the woman he had no wish to embarrass her, but needed to know certain things. Ever so quietly, he asked question after question, to which she usually answered something in the affirmative, her eyes manifesting relief that someone seemed to understand what had been happening to her. Her husband was showing an increasing sense of foreboding [that] her symptoms seemed to be leading somewhere.

My mentor then examined her with the quiet-and-gentle-but-determined manner his questions employed. I was in awe—his hands, his reflex hammer, his tuning fork— all seemed instruments of some graceful music I could only barely hear.

After a time, he sat down. "Well," he said, "we need to talk. The roots of the nerves that care for the muscles of your face and throat and neck, the nerves that arise from what we call the brainstem, where the brain and spinal cord meet, are dying. As a result, the muscles in those places no longer follow your will. This is a problem that will progress, inevitably and unrelentingly, and I am afraid I can offer nothing to stop it.

"It will make it difficult, and then impossible, to swallow, or smile, or talk, and eventually to breathe. You have a disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. You have a form we call bulbar ALS, because it involves the brainstem. It is untreatable, and progressive."

We sat in silence for a while. She began to whimper, then sniffle, then cry, then let out a great keening wail that filled the room. It felt like her cry would fill the entire floor and then the building and then the whole hospital campus. Her husband threw his arms around her and began to sob.

My mentor sat there, watching them both, with sad and clear eyes. He said nothing. After a time, their crying slowed down, and they both looked at him.

"Is that it?" the husband asked. "Is there nothing else? Is there nothing we can do? Is there nothing to be done?"

"I can do nothing, I'm afraid," said my mentor. "We cannot treat this disease. But I will never leave you. I will never abandon you. We will all see this through to the end."

They sat for a while, and then asked what they should do next. "This is a lot to take in. Perhaps we should see each other next week, if that's all right with you," said my mentor. They smiled wanly, and said, "Oh yes, please."

"Good," he said. "The secretary will make some time for you next week."

They walked out.

He sat there, very quietly, for what seemed like a very long time. He then looked at me. "This is what we do," he said. "This is really what our discipline is about. Death, and as much truth and kindness as you can possibly bring up in the face of death. You need to know that, if you want to spend your life doing this."

And so I began to learn that hard lesson, the first of many along the path I have followed. But I also learned something about prayer, presence, gift, and gratitude. The first prayer I ever experienced at work was just this. Clear-eyed, honest, hard-won compassion, and a willingness to stand by someone in the valley of the shadow of death.

Jesus worked. His father Joseph worked, with a plane and a lathe and a pencil behind his ear. Mary had duties in the temple and household, working to wash and mend clothes, preparing food, caring for neighbors and friends in need. How did they, and countless others who have gone before us, work and pray?

In the collection of essays, Professions of Faith: Living and Working as a Catholic, Lucie Fjeldstad writes about the challenge of mentoring and guiding her company. Jesus was her role model, but instead of bringing religious quotes, church documents, or the sacraments into the business, she introduced Christian values and ethics. "Valuing people and operating with integrity, bringing a heart, character, and conscience" into their business model is what she sought to do. Those values became more important than money, and consequently the money became a by-product of a business that was respected and respected others. At the close of her essay, she concludes that she discovered she was "far more religious than I have given myself credit for." Her discovery is one we can all make.

Once Philip cultivated a pathway and opened his heart, God was never far away. He feels God's presence most acutely in his work. "No matter what my state of mind on any given day, God and I, without words, gather together to prepare a sacred space for all who enter. Like an old married couple, for 30 years we have been cooperating like this together. God begins some of my thoughts, and I finish some of God's." Philip's prayer at work is not in the form of words, his intention is to embody prayer in his actions. "My life's work is my ministry as a full-time clinical psychologist and therapist, a full-time partner and family caregiver," Philip tells me. "My work for the church is not more ministry, or more God directed than my work during the week as a therapist, or my devotion to my partner and family. They are all my life's work, and I need prayer to see me through each of them." Early in what Philip calls his spiritual evolution, "God broke into my awareness like a favorite Aunt who arrives unexpectedly on your doorstep."

* * *

Jim is a Landscape Architect.

My favorite image of how prayer intersects with work is from the film "Chariots of Fire." Olympic champion and committed Christian Eric Liddell talks about his experience when running; "I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure." Feeling God's pleasure and our own, simultaneously, captures for me the experience of prayer and its integration into what I do most of my days. It is about finding and utilizing our gifts. Eric's gift is running. When he runs he loses himself and is filled with joy. I have experienced this oneness, flow, and effortlessness in my work. It's not an everyday occurrence.

As I contemplate work as prayer, it raises questions about who I am and what I do. It unsettles me. It does not give me peace or comfort about my living reality. Perhaps if I were a teacher, minister, or social worker this would all be easier! And, I imagine, it would be even more difficult if I worked on Wall Street—or for a weapons manufacturer.

There are three aspects of my work as prayer: WHAT I do, HOW I do it, and my RELATIONSHIPS with the people with whom I work.

WHAT I do. I ask myself: is my business, the goods and services that I provide, within the scope of God's will or purposes? This can be a tough one. I have many opportunities to design landscapes or participate in land development projects that may be profitable and prestigious but that violate many of my faith- inspired, ethical, and environmental convictions. What's good for business, good for the land, and good for people aren't always the same things. So I have lost projects, struggled with building my firm, and had difficulties keeping employees while trying to hang on to the values that are important to me. At times I get cynical. I cave in to the norm, to business as usual. I tell myself: the customer is always right (which they rarely are). To be successful, I need to give people what they want and exceed their expectations, doing the work faster, and cheaper. This is not work as prayer.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from You Are Already Prayingby CATHY H. GEORGE Copyright © 2013 by Cathy H. George. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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