Prayer and Works III: God's Math

In the Kingdom, it’s a whole new ballgame.  Here’s a box score a colleague sent my years ago after a frustrating committee meeting during which I refused to give in to pessimistic assumptions.  He admired my resolute optimism.  To the logical person, this doesn’t add up.  The idealists scored one in the second and one in the eight, and thus have only two runs, thus losing the game.  But my friend Jeff was a minister, and knew God’s math is different.

My name in John, and I’m a workaholic.  I don’t like to stop.  Back in the 50s when I was growing up, the Catholic Mass was in Latin.  The priest, robed in heavy brocade chasuble and lace-hemmed white surplice would say Mass with his back to the congregation, but every once in awhile he would turn, face the people, open his folded hands toward them and say “Oremus”: Let us pray.  There would be
a slight break in the cadence of things, a momentary pause, a lowering of his voice when he began again, to…pray.  We had been kind of praying all along, weren’t we?  I mean, we were stuck there in our good clothes and all, I mean, in church, weren’t we?  So why did he stop and ask us to … pray?

One way of looking at prayer is that we stop and do it; we do it instead of doing other things.  If we have 16waking hours in a day, taking a half hour to pray leaves us 15½ hours for other things.  Well, if you’re following me, my being a workaholic and such, you can already see my problem.  I don’t wanna stop to pray.  I just want to get going. 

So it’s not surprising that a non-stopper like me would latch right on to the idea that everything we do is prayer.  Ohh, yeah.  The Workaholic’s Creed.  Frankly, I’ve tried it.  It doesn’t do anything for me.  I should say it doesn’t do for me what time set aside for prayer does for me.  When I finally decide to turn around, to turn my back to my work and stop to spend time with God, (even if it is nothing but longing and waiting) I feel something change.  A pebble of infinity is dropped into the pool of my limitedness and all the math changes.  When I return to work, I’m lifted by a ripple of that infinity, and time, which I fight, slows down what is going on so I can see the infinity in it, to notice the changes in the person’s face, the life in the lines around their eyes, the slightest movement of their shoulders that sings the sotto voce lament, or the silent Allaluia!  And wood becomes not a plastic to be formed by my will and my tools, but a living thing whose lines of grain each tell of 365 sunrises, of four seasons, who guide my sharp edge with nuance as subtle as those human shoulders or the lines around eyes.

Just as prayer changes works, works change prayer.  Scripture stories become populated by familiar faces.  The leper coming back to say thank you has a face, and a name, and an accent.  The woman reaching out to touch the hem of Jesus garment is someone I know.  Tears come to my eyes that taste of real salt on my lips, because the words are not just ink on paper or pixels on a screen, but words made flesh by the gift of work done in the echoes of prayer.  Moments are like loaves and fishes.  Time is made in spending it, in Gods Kingdom.  Work and prayer become threads crossing, weaving, supporting each other.