“Try, with God’s help, to see the connection–even physical and natural–which ties your labor to the building of the Kingdom of Heaven; try to realize that heaven itself smiles upon you and, through your work, draws you to itself; then, as you leave church for the noisy streets, you will remain with only one feeling, that of continuing to immerse yourself in God.”
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Divine Milieu. Translated by Siôn Cowell. Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2012, p. 24.
“Is not work worthwhile for its own sake? It is one of the crimes of our age to have belittled it and to have substituted for its beauty the ugliness of fierce self-seeking. Noble souls live a glorious life and expect it to be fruitful in addition. They work not only for the fruit, but for the work; they work in order that their lives may be pure, upright, and manly, like that of Jesus, and ready to be united with His.”
Sertillanges, Antonin G., O.P. The Intellectual Life: its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), p. 254.
Note:
Bonhoeffer writes about “praying and working” and I can see in it Bill Haley’s refrain about “contemplation for kingdom action.” Two apparently opposite goods in tension, a creative tension, a necessary one. It’s like the way negative space in art defines where and what the positive space is. Or in the words of the secular song “you can’t have one without the other.”” Still, I might quibble with his pronouncement that “the bulk of the day belongs to work.” That seems to say that prayer is walled off over there or is in a box. Praying at all times, however, and contemplative living puts prayer at the core and wraps work and everything else around it. How big is the core in your life? How thick is the wrapping layer?
Quote:
“Praying and working are two different things. Prayer should not be hindered by work, but neither should work be hindered by prayer. Just as it is God’s will that man should work six days and rest and make holy day in His presence on the seventh, so it is also God’s will that every day should be marked for the Christian by both prayer and work. Prayer is entitled to its time. But the bulk of the day belongs to work. And only where each receives its own specific due will it become clear that both belong inseparably together. Without the burden and labor of the day, prayer is not prayer, and without prayer work is not work. This only the Christian knows.”
Source: Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1954, pages 69-70. (original German pub in 1939)
Note:
At the very least we should simplify our inner lives by removing attachments. Then, ideally, we become free to simplify our outer lives, making the exercise of our spiritual gifts (i.e., doing our work) more fully possible. It’s deeply interesting how the inner and outer operate in tandem.
Quote:
“One word suggests itself here before any other: you must simplify your life. You have a difficult journey before you — do not burden yourself with too much baggage. Perhaps you are not absolutely free to do this, and so you think there is no use laying down rules. That is a mistake. Given the same external circumstances, a desire for simplification can do much, and what one cannot get rid of outwardly, one can always remove from one’s soul.”
Source: Sertillanges, Antonin G., O.P. The Intellectual Life: its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987, page 41.
“There is no more effective means of keeping the mind fresh and its faculties at the height of their performance than the occupation, within proper limitations, with some side-line of study. When we inquire how it is that some men maintain even into old age a peculiar freshness of mind and true balance of mental faculties, here is the answer.”
From: Graebner, Theodore. The Pastor as Student and Literary Worker: Lectures Delivered at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. Second, revised edition. St. Louis : Concordia Publishing House, 1925, page 68.
“Praying and working are two different things. Prayer should not be hindered by work, but neither should work be hindered by prayer. Just as it is God’s will that man should work six days and rest and make holy day in His presence on the seventh, so it is also God’s will that every day should be marked for the Christian by both prayer and work. Prayer is entitled to its time. But the bulk of the day belongs to work. And only where each receives its own specific due will it become clear that both belong inseparably together. Without the burden and labor of the day, prayer is not prayer, and without prayer work is not work. This only the Christian knows.”
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1954), p. 69-70.
“In my literary career I have escaped trying to write for the public or for editors; I have written for myself. I have not asked, ‘What does the public want?’ I have only asked, ‘What do I want to say? What is there in my heart craving for expression? What have I lived or felt or thought that is my own, and has its root in my inmost being?’ ”
Burroughs, John. The Writings of John Burroughs. 15 vols. The Riverby Edition. (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1904-1913), Vol. 15, page 5.
“The literary compositions of studious premodern Christians place much less emphasis upon authorship than do those of curious moderns. …. The literary works of the doctores ecclesiae are very often saturated with allusions to and echoes of Scripture and the works of their predecessors, many of them not marked in any way, but instead woven invisibly and indivisibly into the fabric of their own words. This lack of marking of alien words is often because the echoes and allusions are thought sufficiently obvious not to need marking….”
Griffiths, Paul J. Intellectual Appetite : a Theological Grammar. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), page 182.
“But I know what I have discovered: that the kind of work I once feared most because I thought it would interfere with ‘solitude’ is, in fact, the only true path to solitude. One must be in some sense a hermit before the care of souls can serve to lead one further into the desert. But once God has called you to solitude, everything you touch leads you further into solitude. Everything that affects you builds you into a hermit, as long as you do not insist on doing the work yourself and building your own kind of hermitage.”
Merton, Thomas. The Sign of Jonas. (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1981), pages 333-334. Entry written 29 November 1951.
“Ah, if one could work in the heart of nature, one’s window open on a fair landscape, so placed that when one was tired one could enjoy a few minutes in the green country; or, if one’s thought was at a standstill ask a suggestion from the mountains, from the company of trees and clouds, from the passing animals, in stead of painfully enduring one’s dull moods — I am sure that the work produced would be doubled, and that it would be far more attractive, far more human.”
Sertillanges, Antonin G., O.P. The Intellectual Life: its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), page 247.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 