The Work is the Prayer

A very good way to incorporate prayer into work is to use those damned annoying computer passwords of which we office types have hundreds to be committed to memory and changed, it seems, every ten days or whenever the I.T. crowd read about another virus during their extensive web-surfing coffee-breaks.

As you get older it's not so easy recall all the passwords. The temptation is to use just one but then you get a circular saying it's come to their attention that people are using just one password for everything and that's SO insecure and SO unprofessional and if your memory is SO bad maybe you should think of retiring.

I make my passwords lines from prayers, pious exhortations, verses from the Bible - something that will make me recognise, as I enter, that I am beginning a work that can be dedicted to God. Each work is holy: also dreary, boring, etc., but that can be offered up.

I thank God for having work in these difficult times, for having nice colleagues and a comfortable office. I thank God that no-one challenges me for saying my Angelus at my desk or complains about the little holy picture I have pinned up in my booth. They give me odd looks, sure, but then I give them odd looks when I see the younger girls wearing skirts that would hardly qualify as bandages, or the skinny boys with t-shirt slogans hinting at a manliness that is, frankly, not credible. I know they'll grow out of these fads and become boring old middle-aged people like me. I'd like to think they had a treasury of Catholic education in their memories to draw out for the times when the wind blows keener and the sky is not so blue. I fear they dont. Thank you Sisters of Mercy. Thank you, thank you.