Fifty years ago Dag Hammarskjold observed with worldly wise perceptiveness that in the modern world the road to holiness lies through the world of action. And he was doing so at the same time as Thomas Merton was drawing seekers of God from the hyper-activity of contemporary life to the contemplative search for silence, solitude and the true self. Action and contemplation – not opposites, but forms of being that are intrinsically human and without which our humanity is diminished, our spirituality thrown out of balance and our Christian obedience reduced to monochrome. Parker Palmer has done important work on human fulfilment and lifelong learning as a life enhancing commitment. His writing often reads like a spirituality of pragamatic outward looking action, commending a lifestyle in which energy, inter-relationship, noise, creativity and work, can be as fulfilling as silence, solitude and retreat. In one book he brings as usual, an important balance to all of this.
People caught in the gap between monastic values and the demands of the active life sometimes simply abandon the spiritual quest. And people who follow a spirituality that does not always respect the energies of action are sometimes led into passivity and withdrawal, into a diminishment of their opwn spirits.
in the spiritual literature of our time, it is not difficult to find the world of action portrayed as an arena of ego and power, while the world of contemplation is pictured as a realm of light and grace. I have often read for example, that the treasure of "true self" can be found as we draw back from active life and enter into contemplative prayer. Less often have I read that this treasure can be found in our struggles to work, create, and care in the world of action.
Parker Palmer, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity and Caring (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990) p. 2.
My guess is that often the spirituality we settle for is a damaging dualism between what we think of as spiritual and all the other stuff. The point is, all the other stuff is the bulk of what we have to do to live life at all. Work, family, other people; the mobile, the laptop, the car; shopping, home-keeping, travelling; caring for friends, pets and ourselves. And God is in it all, not just the overtly intentional spiritual stuff.
And what's more, God can be just as quickly found, and more deeply encountered, not in the retreat and the deep journey into ourselves, but in the outward journey of work, people, circumstance and happening, in the way we drive, the use of our computer, the texts we send, the meals we cook, the bills we pay, the conversation at the checkout, the blether with the neighbour, the walk with the dog, the train journey and the birthday party. None of these get much mention in the more intense worship songs, in the list of spiritual disciplines or prayer techniques. But for followers of Jesus, the Word made flesh, the life of the body with its energy and capacity to work and transform the world, is a life which seeks to incarnate the love of God, suffusing life with the energy and creative action of the God in whose image we are ourselves made. And in the loving of God in all our activity, something deeply sacramental happens, so that all this ordinary stuff stops being a means to an end and becomes a means of grace. Well, anyway, that's what I think! And the new term starts tomorrow and in the busyness of it, God will be found, and will find us.
(The photo above is of a one hundred year old gardener who fully intends to harvest the vegetables from the seed he is sowing.)
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