Does "pray and work" make happy? ...

Friday, Feb 15, 2013. The old monks in medieval ages had a guiding principle for their life: ora et labora. The latin words mean “pray and work”. They dedicated their life to prayer in their particular communities, and they used it to work for their living.

Does prayer make happy? …

Does prayer and work make us happy? You may ask first: what about prayer, does that make us happy? There are many different ways we can pray. We can go to the Lord with our needs. We can ask him for help, ask him to provide what we need. This type of prayer is important, without doubt. But it is not all.

You might go to the Lord with the quest for wisdom. You might ask him to guide your life. You might ask him to fill you with his spirit. That is a particular need, but also a spiritual step which leads you beyond the prayer for your immediate physical needs. It can be an important step for our life, to move beyond egoism and ask God for guidance. When we want him to be the Lord, and also OUR Lord, then we move into true trust and a much deeper faith.

There is prayer which spends time with the Lord in meditation and bible study. This is another layer of prayer, another world of prayer. We move into a peace zone, we move into another world! The meditational prayer takes our whole existence and searches community with the Lord in spirit.

Ora et labora …

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But our fathers in faith also knew that humans need a balance of activity and rest. We also need a balance of activity and prayer. We need to pray, and then go and do. We need to put our own strength in to achieve things. We need to work for our life. God has given us strength, to shape our environment, to shape our life. He wants us to do, to set goals and achieve them.

When you have a solid balance of prayer and work, it can make you extremely happy. The balance, with clear dedication both to prayer and to sincere work, will generate joy. It will bring peace into your life. Both is needed: without prayer, you loose the connection to the Lord, to the source of life. Without prayer, you cannot live, neither now nor in eternity. But without work, you also loose touch of reality, and your prayer will decay. Work is needed as well, both for physical health as well as for mental health.

Ora et labora is a good principle, which has not lost any of its significance. Let us pick it up, let us pray every day, and let us work for our enviroment and our community. We will see many fruits growing! ... more texts