Ora et Labora: On Manual Labor for Academics

Does manual labor serve as a foreigner or as a friend to academic labors? If you taught theology at Oxford University in the 19th century, there’s a good chance that “grunt work” would have been seen as a distraction to rigorous intellectual labors.

For those of us who spend our best energies seated at a desk or standing in front of a lectern, reading, writing and teaching, some amount of physical exertion may serve as an important tonic to the sedentary life. 

But what if physical labors, excluding all sporting or “leisure” activities, functioned instead as an invaluable friend to academic labors?

That’s, of course, how the monastic tradition perceived things. In chapter 48 of Saint Benedict’s Rule, he writes: “The brothers should have specified periods for manual labor as well as for prayerful reading.”

But the conditions of our meta-modern, hyper-capitalist society do not make this a feasible proposition from most academics. It’s why I feel incredibly lucky to own land that actually requires hard labor.

This past Saturday I spent 11 hours laying sod. Working with Phaedra and my friend Evan, we laid out 2200 square feet of Bermuda grass in the backyard. It was backbreaking work that left us feeling spasmodic and senescent in the morning.

But it was also one of the most exhilarating things that I’ve done in a while—excluding driving a bulldozer, naturally.

There’s no direct link, I don’t think, between wheel-barrow work and editing a multi-author academic volume. Perhaps here and there my mind will solve a problem in a current writing project while “mindlessly” tossing sod and dirt onto the ground.

It’s rather that such labors keep me human, close to the “humus” or earth (as Genesis 2:7 puts it), attentive to the rhythms of creation, sympathetically attuned to my neighbors near and far who daily perform manual labors, and it gets me “out of my head” and into my own body.

They keep me, in short, honest, and for that I’m deeply grateful.

I’ve included a host of “work” prayers in our prayerbook with PJ, but my favorite, I think, is the prayer “For Minding Our Own Business.” In my case, manual labor is perfectly suited to that end.