Getting over it is a spiritual discipline that is in short supply in secular life. It’s what makes the paradoxical but deeply humane approach to work at the monastery possible. The Benedictines who live in the canyon keep strict watch over their time and attention. Doing so keeps their desires in order. But it also keeps labor within limits. They get over work so they can get on with something much more important to them.

Un travail de bénédictin—literally, a Benedictine labor—is a French expression for the sort of project someone can only accomplish over a long time through patient, modest, steady effort. It’s the kind of thing that can’t be rushed: illuminating an entire Bible, writing a thousand-year history, recording the position of stars at each hour of the night and each day of the year. It’s work that doesn’t look good in a quarterly earnings report. It doesn’t maximize billable hours. It doesn’t get overtime pay.

But it’s a way to work without the anxiety that drives us to put in long, intense hours and uproot our lives every few years in pursuit of “better” jobs. One elderly, stooped monk with bright eyes behind his glasses told me over homemade cookies and instant coffee after Sunday Mass that he had been assigned to catalog all the books in the monastery’s library. That was in 2003, fourteen years before my visit. He started the task and kept going, day after day, book after book. He wasn’t even close to finishing.

Benedictines often say they aim to unite prayer and work—their rule is ora et labora. And in some ways, their prayer itself looks like a kind of work, with early hours and a rigid schedule. St. Benedict, author of the rule that governs life in the monastery, called the Liturgy of Hours “opus Dei,” the work of God.

But monastic prayer is much more unlike work—at least secular work—than like it. There are no salaries, no promotions, and no productivity quotas. It never hangs over the monks’ heads. They can’t put off the day’s offices and vow to pray twice as hard tomorrow. They can’t use prayer to prove their worth in others’ eyes. They don’t get anxious that robots will replace them. The process for opus Dei hasn’t changed in 1,500 years. In the Middle Ages, monks were early adopters of water mills, to improve their agricultural labor. The monks at Christ in the Desert are debating whether to connect to the grid or stick with solar power and satellite communication. Benedictines care about efficiency. Just not when it comes to their prayers. In fifteen centuries, they’ve made no effort to streamline them.

In fact, the monks go out of their way to resist efficiency in the work of God, reciting prayers at a pace much slower than what I’m used to at Catholic parishes. Even within religious communities I’ve visited at Catholic universities, Vespers—evening prayer—takes about fifteen minutes. At Christ in the Desert, it’s half an hour. Both groups follow the same text. It’s just that the monks in the desert sing it, drawing out every syllable.

During the first few offices I attended, I grew impatient with the pace. The monks sing the Psalms—all 150 in the course of a week—antiphonally, with choirs in opposite corners of the chapel alternating verses. The pause between verses extended too long for me. We were wasting precious milliseconds. The monks could pray faster, but they don’t want to. They don’t have something better to do.

That first Monday morning, after prayers, I reported to the guestmaster for work, but there was nothing for any of the guests to do. So, led by the demon of our work ethic—who demands constant productivity—we found things to do. Someone noticed the windows in the monastery’s reception area were dirty and wondered if there was Windex to clean them. Others dusted the windowsills and picked up stray bits of trash in a courtyard. A tall guy, fiftyish, said he wanted to clear a gravel path that was becoming overgrown with weeds. I wanted to be useful, too, so I went with him. After an hour of uprooting tumbleweeds and marking the edges of the path with rocks, we admired our work.

I headed back to the guesthouse and encountered two middle-aged women who were straightening up the kitchen in the guests’ common room. I got some water and left them to it. Meanwhile, young brothers wearing blue nitrile gloves were ducking into and out of bathrooms and empty guest rooms, preparing for new arrivals. One wore a discreet pair of earbuds. When they finished their work, they leaned back in chairs outside the guest rooms and chatted in Vietnamese. They were taking a load off, like any manual workers. They headed back toward the cloister even before the bell rang.

Father Simeon told me that, in mentoring novice monks from all over the world, he gets to see the whole range of work ethics. Americans are the most obsessive about work, he said. But he finds that, regardless of nationality, it takes time for younger monks to adapt to the monastic schedule and the priority of prayer. Young brothers are often anxious about their labor, he said. They struggle to get over the fact that they can leave it at the end of the work period and pick it up again the next day. They want to prove themselves, because they haven’t yet learned what it means to live a life of prayer for the world, a world they’ve renounced.

“You’re giving your life away and not seeing any results,” Father Simeon said. “So of course you want to work.”