Contemplation and Work
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All Christian life is meant to be at the
same time profoundly contemplative
and rich in active work.
EXHORTATION
Christian holiness can no longer be considered a matter purely of individual and isolated acts of virtue. It must also be seen as part of a great collaborative effort for spiritual and cultural renewal in society, to produce conditions in which all can work and enjoy the just fruits of their labor in peace.
MEDITATION
The requirements of a work to be done can be understood as the will of God. If I am supposed to hoe a garden or make a table, then I will be obeying God if I am true to the task I am performing. To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself to God’s will in my work. In this way I become His instrument. He works through me. When I act as His instrument my labor cannot become an obstacle to contemplation. Yet my work itself will purify and pacify my mind and dispose me for contemplation.
Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God, because God never wills such work directly.
He may permit that through no fault of our own we may have to work madly and distractedly, due to our sins and to the sins of the society in which we live. In that case we must tolerate it and make the best of what we cannot avoid. But let us not be blind to the distinction between sound, healthy work and unnatural toil.
PRAYER
My only desire is to give myself completely to the action of this infinite love Who is God, Who demands to transform me into Himself secretly, darkly, in simplicity, in a way that has no drama about it and is infinitely beyond everything spectacular and astonishing, so is its significance and its power.
LESSON
Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe God’s air.
Work, if you can, under His sky.
But if you have to live in a city and work among machines and ride in the subways and eat in a place where the radio makes you deaf with spurious news and where the food destroys your life and the sentiments of those around you poison your heart with boredom, do not be impatient, but accept it as the love of God and as a seed of solitude planted in your soul.
If you are appalled by those things, you will keep your appetite for the healing silence of recollection. But meanwhile—keep your sense of compassion for the men who have forgotten the very concept of solitude.
You, at least, know that it exists, and that it is the source of peace and joy.
You can still hope for such joy. They do not even hope for it any more.
COLLECT
Beloved Spirit, You are all the prudence and the power
That change our dust and nothing into fields and fruits;
Enfold our lives forever in the compass
of Your peaceful hills.
ЕХАMEN
Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
Perhaps I am even afraid of my strength, and turn it against
myself, thus making myself weak.
Making myself secure. Making myself guilty.
Perhaps I am most afraid of the strength of God in me.
Perhaps I would rather be guilty and weak in myself,
than strong in Him whom I cannot understand.
KYRIE
Keep me, above all things, from sin.
Keep me from the death of deadly sin
which puts hell in my soul.
Keep me from the murder of lust
that binds and poisons my heart.
Keep me from the sins that eat flesh with irresistible fire.
And then to wait in peace and emptiness and oblivion
of all things.
BENEDICTION
And lo! God my God!
Look! Look! I travel in Thy strength
I swing in the grasp of Thy Love, Thy great Love’s
One Strength,
I run Thy swift ways, Thy straightest rails
Until my life become Thy Life and sails or rides
like an express!
~Thomas Merton (from A Book of Hours)
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