seemless lives

I have often written about the Celtic maxim "laborare est orare" to work is to pray. Today I have been working on a primary school assembly on the subject. I pulled a few pictures of Iona and its barreness off the internet and even found a picture of a replica of Columba's coracle - but then, I wondered, how do you link this to prayer.
Then I remembered knotwork, that fascinating and laborious form of celtic decoration where there is no end and no beginning to the pattern. As a teenager I obtained a book on knotwork construction during a family holiday to the Highlands and spent many hours carefully plotting patterns and watching the lines weave in and out.
There is something to be said, though, for the seamless life where work and prayer roll together. There is not a suggestion that we should simply keep going with our tasks and never stop to pray, but rather that out daily work should follow from our prayer and be caught up into it. We are somehow to be complete in all that we do.
This is a challenge in a world which often encourages and sometimes aggressively goads us into segmenting out spirituality into a quiet and dusty corner - telling us that other more humanistic traits are real and every day. What is real and everyday as well as being astonishing and supreme is God's call to us to pray, to stay in touch until our whole lives get caught up into one seamless motion of prayer.