Dear Friends ~ Spring has arrived in all its glory. As I walk the labyrinth at Still Point, the Friends of Silence retreat house where Nan Merrill's library lives, I'm reminded time and again that "This is Holy Ground," both secretly and brazenly transforming itself in all seasons. Winter was mild in West Virginia with crocuses up early by the front step. March brought hints of the transformation to come. Shadowed by the dark clouds of Corona Virus spreading through the world, daffodils bloomed in profusion down by the pond and at the woods' edge.
The distinctive feel of the turning of the year to warmth, growth, flowering, and light speaks of rebirth, transformation, renewal. May we all turn inward, look outward, and see our own little resurrections guided by spirit. As Teilhard de Chardin puts it, "All around us, to right and left, in front and behind, above and below we have only to go a little beyond the frontier of sensible appearances in order to see the divine welling up and showing through... By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us... We imagine it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in it." ~ Mary Ann
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.