Prayer Before Work

Actiones nostras — "Direct, we beseech Thee, O Lord, our actions" — is an ancient collect of the Roman liturgy, found in the early sacramentaries and prayed by the Church for well over a thousand years to place any work, great or small, under the guidance of God. It is the classic prayer before an undertaking, as the grace before meals is before eating: a few words that lift the coming labor out of mere busyness and offer it to God.

Its theology is exact. The prayer asks two distinct graces: that God would go before our actions by inspiring them (aspirando praeveni), and would follow after them by helping them to completion (adiuvando prosequere). Between His inspiration at the start and His help at the end, the whole work is enclosed in grace — so that, as the prayer says, "every prayer and work of ours may begin always from Thee, and by Thee be happily ended."

This is nothing but the plain teaching of Our Lord, set to prayer: "without me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). The Christian does not first act and then ask God to bless the result; he asks God to begin the work in him, knowing that no good deed has any other source. St. Paul gives the same rule for the whole of life: "whether you eat or drink, or whatsoever else you do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 10:31).

The prayer breathes the spirit of St. Benedict's ora et labora — "pray and work" — in which prayer and labor are not rivals but one offering. Brief enough to be said in a breath, it is used before study, before meetings, before any task of the day, and remains one of the surest ways to sanctify ordinary work.