There are any number of monastic rules passed down through the centuries from the time of the Desert Fathers. In his, Benedict makes it clear that living the Christ-life means giving worship pride of place when he says: "Let nothing be preferred to the Work of God." When Benedict outlines the daily timetable, it is the times of worship which provide the structure of the day. Everything else is scheduled around the acts of corporate prayer. Moreover, the sacred time, given over to God alone, is woven into the threads of everything else a monk does to sanctify the whole day, so that each day becomes a tightly woven garment. Here we have a reversal of the way time is usually structured – in fact, has to be structured – in non-monastic settings. Most of our time, no matter how much we may prefer prayer to everything else, our work controls our day, and prayer is worked around our commitments. The monastic schedule reminds us all of the true priorities, even when their daily timetables simply cannot (and ought not) embody them.
The sense of balance in relation to work, however, can only be seen by noting the importance of work in the monastic life. To live a life of worship and to work in such a way that the two form a unified life devoted to God and one's neighbor. Work is not a distraction from prayer. On the contrary, prayer must be grounded in concrete acts of work which keeps us in touch with the reality of the material world. We need this grounding in material reality in order to keep in touch with the reality of God who created the world. Moreover, putting work in the context of a life of worship changes one's perspective on work. One works for the sake of doing the job itself rater than primarily for ulterior motives such as making money, necessary as that is for living in the world, or making a name for oneself. Taking care in one's work, in the way one handles tools can have a salutary effect on one's interiority which opens the way to deeper prayer. Benedict demonstrates his vision of prayer grounded in work most succinctly when he says that the cellarer, the monk responsible for distributing the goods of the monastery, “will regard all utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the alter.”
Worship and work do not provide sufficient balance, however. Study is also important. However, here the perspective on study is quite different from what we normally experience in school. Benedict envisions study as a means of growing close to God, not merely as something one does just to get a diploma. This means that reading and meditating on scripture and studying the classic test on Christ-life spirituality are fundamental to monastic study. I will write more about the Benedict's teaching on the prayerful reading of scripture later. The important thing to note here is that the more one can get a feel for the love of God revealed in scripture, the more one can judge how much of this love has been captured by other writers. Given this foundation, there is a wide variety of reading from insightful novels to historical studies to books on nuclear phisics, which can also drw one closer to God.
If we think of study as engaging the mind and work as engaging the body in the spiritual life, then it is worship which engages the heart. This is not to say that monastics chop up life into three compartments. Rather, as oblates, we make these three activities a unity forming a single Christ-life. Our acts of worship become a guide for living the rest of our lives, and we work and study in such a way as to prepare ourselves for our acts of worship.