How to turn your ordinary work (including homework) into a prayer

An important aspect of living the presence of God is being able to be recollected and prayerful while you work.

(This is another post connected to my major post on what to do before starting spiritual direction.)

1 Peter 2:4-5, 9: “Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God, and, like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ… You are ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may announce the praises’ of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”

The Second Vatican Council recovered the notion, present in the above passage from St. Peter, that all Christians are priests. The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (10) declares that “The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, in order that through all those works which are those of the Christian man they may offer spiritual sacrifices…” As St. Peter says, the spiritual sacrifices of the people are to be offered “through Jesus Christ.” Which is where the second type of priesthood, the ordained priesthood, is needed.

Priests offer sacrifices. In pagan countries and in the Old Testament, the sacrifices were usually material sacrifices—livestock, birds, crops, and (horrifically) humans. Over time, God through the prophets taught the people of Israel that more important than those material sacrifices were spiritual sacrifices. And this is what St. Peter is telling us Christians that we ought to do—make spiritual sacrifices in which we offer stuff to the Lord.

So when you work, think of your desk as your altar. Begin your time of work with an act of offering: “Lord, I offer this time of work for the following intentions: the health of my grandfather, that my roommate have a conversion of heart, that I may have the grace to trust you even when it is difficult,” and so on. Then do your work as well as you can. That might mean not getting up and taking breaks until you get to a point you’ve chosen (e.g., until the top of the hour, or until you finish the problem you’re working on). It might mean not checking your email or answering a text until a specific time. It might mean turning off music while you work. If you work in a group, it might mean charitably helping the others not to waste time, or checking in on someone else to see if you can help. Some people combine their work with a small mortification–they don’t cross their legs while sitting, or don’t use the back of their chair, or don’t drink water or coffee while working. The idea is to work with a spirit of sacrifice, so that you can offer your working as a sacrifice to God.

The next time you go to Mass, you then take all the work you’ve done, along with all the prayers and good deeds you’ve done, and your very self, and offer it all to the Lord. You do that especially during the “collect” or opening prayer of the Mass, once the priest says “Let us pray” for the first time. The prayer is called the “collect” because the priest spiritually collects the spiritual offerings and sacrifices of the people in order to present them to God. Later in the Mass, during the “offertory” when the gifts of bread and wine are brought forward along with the collection, the fruits of the people’s labor is brought forward and offered to God through the Church. For students, the fruit of their labor is usually knowledge, rather than money, and so they don’t offer much during the offertory; but those who do make money with their labor should offer it then.

During the Eucharistic Prayer, when the priest offers to God the Father the Body and Blood of God the Son, all the various sacrifices, whether in the form of spiritual sacrifices or in the form of offering the fruits of labor, are also taken up by the angel who brings the offerings to heaven and places them before the Lord (cf. Eucharistic Prayer I). In this way, the priesthood of all the baptized and the priesthood of the ordained priest work together to offer to God an acceptable sacrifice of all that we have produced, of all our “heart, strength, soul and mind” (Luke 10:27), and most importantly of our Lord Jesus in the form of the Eucharist. In this way, our work is transformed into a particular sort of prayer–a sacrifice–so that even when we’re not thinking about God directly, we’re still working for him and loving him and giving back to him all that he has given us, with interest.