We become better at something in ourselves—more skilled, more creative, more effective—when we work. We discover that, indeed, we are good for something. Good work is, at the time, its own kind of asceticism. It needs no symbolic rituals or contrived penances.
The very act of continuing something until we succeed at it is soul-searing, life-changing enough... It makes us equal partners with the rest of the human race in this one common endeavor to grow the globe to wholeness. Good work is our gift to the future. It is what we leave behind—our persistence, our precision, our commitment, our fidelity to the smallest and meanest of tasks that will change the mind of generations to come about our sacred obligation to bear our share of the holy-making enterprise that is work.
Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds in a cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies ... and take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies ...
