If ethics are to be evangelical, they...have to speak of God at work within us, applying and confirming God's act in Christ for us.  We have to show that the redeemed creation does not merely confront us moral agents, but includes us and enables us to participate in it.

--Oliver O'Donovan in Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics

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By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

What’s more, it’s possible that our horizons have become too broad, and that real spiritual breakthroughs require a kind of narrowing — the decision to pick a path and stick with it, rather than hopscotching around in search of a synthesis that “works for me.” The great mystics of the past were often committed to a particular tradition and community, and bound by the rules (and often the physical confines) of a specific religious institution. Without these kind of strictures and commitments, Johnson argues, mysticism drifts easily into a kind of solipsism: “Kabbalism apart from Torah-observance is playacting; Sufism disconnected from Shariah is vague theosophy; and Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming.”

Most religious believers will never be great mystics, of course, and the American way of faith is kinder than many earlier eras to those of us who won’t. But maybe it’s become too kind, and too accommodating. Even ordinary belief — the kind that seeks epiphanies between deadlines, and struggles even with the meager self-discipline required to get through Lent — depends on extraordinary examples, whether they’re embedded in our communities or cloistered in the great silence of a monastery. Without them, faith can become just another form of worldliness, therapeutic rather than transcendent, and shorn of any claim to stand in judgment over our everyday choices and concerns.

Without them, too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

via www.nytimes.com

Since then, my God, thou hast

So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it,

That it may dwell with thee at last!

Till then, afford us so much wit;

That, as the world serves us, we may serve thee,

And both thy servants be.

-- George Herbert from "Man" in George Herbert: The Complete English Works

To accept the risk of personal consciousness and growth to inner freedom can be painful; it is never easy to follow the light of oneself when others do not seem to agree.  Communities can tend to close in upon themselves.  But belonging should always be a means to personal becoming.  It is accepting the risk of dying to aggressiveness and rivalry in order to discover a new freedom and a new fecundity - a new way of giving life to others, to be in "one body" with them.

--Jean Vanier in From Brokenness to Community

I tremble with gratitude 

for my children and their children

who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinners together, the dead

enter and pass among us

in living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.

-- Wendell Berry in Leavings: Poems

I struck the board, and cry'd, No more.
  I will abroad.
 What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
 Loose as the winde, as large as store.
 Shall I be still in suit?
 Have I no harvest but a thorn
 To let me bloud, and not restore
 What I have lost with cordiall fruit?
  Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn
 Before my tears did drown it.
 Is the yeare onely lost to me?
 Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
  All wasted?
 Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
  And thou hast hands.
 Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
  Thy rope of sands,
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
 Good cable, to enforce and draw,
  And be thy law,
 While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
  Away; take heed:
  I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.
  He that forbears
 To suit and serve his need,
  Deserves his load.
But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde
  At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!
  And I reply'd, My Lord.

-- George Herbert, "The Collar," in George Herbert: The Complete English Works

Is your work profane?

Most of us yearn for a sense of fullness in our lives, a sense of flourishing in which two things are present. First, we’ve a sense that we’ve been delivered from those moments of confusion, melancholy, distance, and even isolation that sometimes make us feel utterly lost and alone in the wilderness. Second, in spite of the dailiness of life, we feel connected and moving towards a time in which all things are given eternal meaning, a destiny in which we rest in truth, beauty, justice, and joy.

Right now, we Christians only glimpse this our destiny in a fragmentary way, darkly, as through a mirror. But those glimpses are immensely important; they sustain us and direct us in our journey towards joy. And the name we give to such moments - and to the places and habits where we regularly encounter this fullness to which we are called - is “sacred.”  Sacred is the name for our windows to the holy. 

That which is not sacred we call profane (“outside the temple, not sacred”) or, increasingly, secular (“belonging to ‘worldly’ rather than sacred time”).

As Christians, we are called to make the secular sacred, to see our work as holy no matter our particular vocation.  When we discover that our work has a certain flatness about it, that our work is all too often filled with moments of confusion, melancholy, and despair, it may be that we have allowed our work to become profane. Work that is profane has been emptied of its vertical dimension; it is flat and so it flattens us.

If this describes you, I remind you of the warning given us by the great Anglican poet and priest, George Herbert, that we take care not “to labor anxiously, distrustfully, or profanely.”

"...they labor anxiously, when they overdo it, to the loss of their quiet and health; then distrustfully, when they doubt God’s providence, thinking that their own labor is the cause of their thriving, as if it were in their own hands to thrive or not to thrive.  Then they labor profanely, when they set themselves to work like brute beasts, never raising their thoughts to God, nor sanctifying their labor with daily prayer; when on the Lord’s day they do unnecessary servile work, or in time of divine service on other holy days, except in the cases of extreme poverty, and in the seasons of seedtime and harvest....[They] labor for wealth and maintenance as that they make not that the end of their labor, but that they may have wherewithal to serve God the better, and to do good deeds.”

Is your work profane? If so, I urge you to ponder seriously Herbert’s words, especially during this Lenten season, and to consider well how you might go about making the secular sacred in this important part of your life. For God gives all things that we might enjoy God.  

Lord, thank you for giving me work to do that is more important than my feelings about it on any day. Amen.