What would become of our souls if they lacked the bread of earthly reality to nourish them, the wine of created beauty to intoxicate them, the discipline of human struggle to make them strong? What puny powers and bloodless hearts Your creatures would bring to You were they to cut themselves off prematurely from the providential setting in which You placed them!
~ from HYMN OF THE UNIVERSE by Teillard de Chardin
Educate your inner being in all aspects of life. Keep to the order you learned during your schooling. You did not begin all of a sudden to grasp the higher subjects; you started by learning the alphabet. The same applies to your soul. It is not good for it to strive toward exalted feats until it becomes familiar with the spiritual alphabet: humility and obedience. Let the whole of your life become a continuous prayer.
The soul seeks to serve; it inspires the personality to serve in particular ways and means. As that happens we become less and less interested in the personality aspect and more and more concerned in altruistic service for the benefit of all. The soul has no sense of being an individual, separate self and knows nothing of separation. It sees only the whole and itself in relation to the whole.
Dark and cold we may be, but this Is no winter now: the frozen misery Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move: The thunder is the thundering of the floes, The thaw, the flood, the upstart spring. Thank God our time is now when wrong Comes up to face us everywhere, Never to leave us til we take The longest stride of soul we ever took. Affairs are now soul-size. The enterprise Is exploration into God.
~ from "A Sleep of Prisoners" in SELECTED PLAYS by Christopher Fry
There are seasons in our souls: times of withering, times of coldness, times of renewal, times of sun and light. May the force which drives nature to its fulfillment be brought forth in us, too. Within each of us is the power to love and care awaiting our wills and our acts to bring it forth. Let us be instruments of the power oflove which comes through us but not from us, the power which waits for us to bring it forth.
~ from CYCLES OF REFLECTION by Robert E. Senghas, thanks to Pat Habif
This is essentially the argument for the soul: it holds reality together, it is my offscreen director, my presiding intelligence. I can think, talk, work, love, and dream, all because of the soul, yet the soul doesn't do any of these things. It is me... Everything that makes the difference between life and death must cross into this world via the soul... Soul is a connection between the world of the five senses and a world of inconceivable things like eternity, infinity, omniscience, grace, and every other quality unmanifest.
The love of God, unutterable and perfect flows into a pure soul the way that light rushes into a transparent object. The more love that it finds, the more it gives itself; so that, as we grow clear and open, the more complete the joy of loving is. And the more souls who resonate together, the greater the intensity of their love, for, mirror-like, each soul reflects the others.
"Is there enough Silence for the Word to be heard? "
MAY BLESSINGS ABOUND, dear friends, in work, leisure, learning, sharing . . . as we move into the Autumn season. When we offer ourselves in service to humanity as co-creators with Love, all that we need in all aspects of life will emerge to assist in the inner and the outer work. May we ever be guided in all we do by the Voice heard in the Silence — Holy Wisdom.
Think of your work not as a place to make a living, but as an opportunity to make a life. Think of yourself as a channel through which creative activities flow.
Douglas Steere writes in WORK AND CONTEMPLATION of occasional moments of transcendence, as "ripples of ecstasy, when our deepest creative impulse, our spring of freedom, is drawn upon and released . . . And in such moments of utter self-absorption, we are lifted above both pain and pleasure. "These moments move us beyond the ordinary labors of our lives. They often occur when we have been in the company of strangers. They require time, and they invite Love.
I was invited to a barn raising near Wooster, Ohio. A tornado had leveled 4 barns and acres of prime Amish timber. In just three weeks the downed trees were sawn into girders, posts and beams and the 4 barns rebuilt and filled with livestock donated by neighbors to replace those killed in the storm. I watched the raising of the last barn in open-mouthed awe. Some 400 Amish men and boys, acting and reacting like a hive of bees in absolute harmony of cooperation, started at sunrise with only a foundation and floor and by noon, BY NOON, had the huge edifice far enough along that you could put hay in it -- a vast work, born of the spirit.
~ Gene Logsdon in AMISH ROOTS by John A. Hostetler
Each person, no matter how old, has an important work to do. This good work not only accomplishes something needed in the world, but completes something in us. The work we do in the world, when it is true vocation, always corresponds in some mysterious way to the work that goes on within us.
For me, the question is whether my encounter with death has freed me enough from the addictions of the world that I can be true to my Work as I now see it "sent" from above. It clearly involves a call to prayer, contemplation, silence, solitude, and inner detachment. I have to keep choosing my "not belonging" in order to belong, my not being from below in order to be from above. For, the taste of God's unconditional love quickly disappears when the addictive powers of everyday existence make their presence felt again.
Be a gardner. Dig a ditch, toil and sweat and turn the earth upside down and seek deepness and water the plants in time. Continue this labor and make sweet floods to run and noble and abundant fruits to spring. Take this food and drink and carry it to God as your worship.
The wise work diligently without allegiance to words. They teach by doing, not by saying; they are genuinely helpful, not discriminating, positive, not possessive. They do not proclaim their accomplishments, and because they do not proclaim them, credit for them can never be taken away.
A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through detours or art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which that person's heart first opened.
Twenty years ago, when I was near death from a life-threatening illness, a vivid dream was more real than life. Floating out of my body, I rose up, up, and up inside the clouds above. With no door visible, I nevertheless knocked, repeatedly demanding entry. The sky whitened with my greeting as a Large Voice stated, "You have got a lot of work to do. "It sent me down, down back into my body with the life-long question: What is my Work? Is my present action leading to my Work?
If we just worry about the big picture, we are powerless. So my secret is to start right away doing whatever little work I can do. I try to give joy to one person in the morning, and remove the suffering of one person in the afternoon. If you and your friends do not despise the small work, a million people will remove a lot of suffering.
In order to continually re-imagine ourselves through our work lives, we must have a part of us that belongs to something beyond the status quo. Something over the horizon or, paradoxically, beneath us, in the ground of our life. Something as yet hidden, yet to be brought to light. Something which is governed by other laws than the ones we so assiduously obey every day. Something to do with the laws that govern the way we belong to this stubborn and beautiful world.
