For Labor Day, Pray and Work
By O. Henry Swartzentruber
I can hear 11-year-old Camille and 9-year-old Henry practicing their Latin and talking about ora et labora in the other room. “Pray and work.” That inspired me.
Locals leaning into Labor Day weekend may paradoxically be thinking about leisure, not labor. Maybe they’ll think about camping at West Boggs. By the way, the West Boggs Hot Air Balloon Festival last weekend was great. Check it out in 2027.
Indeed, many of us will take this Monday off. Christians are called to rest and leisure; to refrain from servile labor on Sundays. Perhaps nowhere is the value of work more visible than in Daviess County, Indiana, where farms, family businesses, and industry share the same landscape.
Christian tradition challenges America’s increasingly transactional view of labor. At least here, we have relatively few “big corporations” whose demands, G.K. Chesterton argued, can become one factor that destroys family life. For Christians, work is a good. It should be woven into family and community—not understood simply as an economic transaction.
The dignity of work begins with the dignity of the worker. That is, in part, what Labor Day recognizes: the worker deserves respect. But in modern America, Labor Day can easily become a day off to celebrate the United International Workers of the World. But we are not valuable solely because of what we produce. We are not, in the deepest sense, human doings. We are human beings!
Of course, that does not mean what we do is irrelevant. What we do matters deeply. I am reminded of Dr. Glenn Martin and Indiana Wesleyan University would remark: that work, in its truest sense, is a form of worship of and unto God. When aligned this way, our habits, our work, and our prayers shape our character. Our work affects our families, neighbors, communities. The way we treat a customer, repair a machine, teach a child or care for an elderly parent says something about the kind of people we are becoming.
The Benedictine phrase ora et labora—“pray and work”—does not mean work is the measure of one's worth. It suggests that work belongs within a larger human life, ordered toward something beyond American consumption, status, and economic efficiency. We don't work to keep up with the Joneses. The modern temptation is to turn life into one long productivity measure: to work when we should be resting—the Lord’s Day—and to rest when we should be working (or departing from the workplace entirely, which many young men are apparently doing, according to a recent article in the other Journal, the Wall Street Journal).
People should want meaningful work and we should want excellence. We should take pride in what we do. But none of that work determines our worth. We are not human doings. We are human beings—and what we do matters.
Perhaps that is the lesson Labor Day ought to celebrate. Not simply that work is good, or that we should take one additional day off between July 4 and Columbus Day, but that work is good when it serves One greater than ourselves. Pray and work. Ora et Labora. It is a simple motto and exactly what modern man needs to hear.