An old boatman painted the word “prayer” on one paddle of his boat and “work” on the other. He was asked the reason for this. To answer, he slipped the paddle with “prayer” into the water and rowed. The boat, of course, made a very tight circle. Returning to the dock, the boatman then said, “Now, let’s try ‘work’ without ‘prayer’ and see what happens. The paddle marked “work” was put into the water and the boatman began rowing with just the “work” rowing. Again, the boat went into a tight circle but in the opposite direction.
When the boatman again returned to the pier, he interpreted his experiment in these strong and convincing words, “You see, to make a passage across the lake, one needs both paddles working simultaneously in order to keep the boat in a straight and narrow way. The same happens in our life, if we want to keep it in a straight and narrow way towards heaven, we need to pray and to work.”
Sometimes we think that praying is enough to go to heaven and we do little or nothing in order to be virtuous or holy. As the anecdote says, just prayer is not enough. There are even people that think that it is worth it to neglect their duties in order to pray: like a mom who gives a screen to her child and spends the time she should be with her child in prayer; or those who do not care about the lack of charity in their actions or words because they are people of prayer. These are just two examples of negligence in action when we only pay attention to prayer.
On the other hand, there are people who think that working is enough to go to heaven and they take little or no care for their spiritual life. This group includes all those who fall into activism. They are continually giving or doing things for others, but they forget that in order to go to heaven themselves they need to cultivate a personal relationship with God, and prayer is essential for that. An example of this would be a dad that works very hard in order to bring food to his family but then he spends no time in prayer or, even worse, he does not go to Mass on Sunday because he has to work or because he is too tired from his work.
As the boatman of the story says, both things are necessary because we cannot go to heaven without praying nor without working on overcoming our sins and acquiring virtues. The famous expression of St. Augustine says “God created you without you, but He will not save you without you” which means that God will save us, and this is the reason for prayer; we must ask every day for the grace of final perseverance, which is a grace that comes from God and that we cannot obtain by ourselves. We must cooperate with God’s grace and not impede it, because as St. Thomas Aquinas says: “since this ability to impede or not to impede the reception of divine grace is within the scope of free choice, not undeservedly is responsibility for the fault imputed to him who offers an impediment to the reception of grace” (SCG, IV, 159) and that is our work.
St. Alphonsus of Liguori says: “God does not command impossible things, but at the same time he commands you to do what you can and to ask for what you cannot, and He helps you be able to do it” (Opere, Marietti, VIII, #153). To do “what you can” is our work, to ask “for what you cannot” is our prayer and with both of these, God will allow us to reach heaven.
