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
