Dedicated Acceptance

Jesus neither surrounded himself with ascetics, nor did he work to recruit academics. Instead, he came to alert common labourers to the activity of God in their daily lives. He came to shape contemplatives from ordinary people. This was fitting. There is nothing dramatic, heroic, or unusual about contemplation. For a contemplaive there is great value in work, poverty, hardship, and monotony. The surest way to let all of the masks that we cherish to fall away is to become present to the moment, to accept the transformative value of physical labour, to become increasingly dependent upon others, to accept being ignored and despised and forgotten, to know little of respect or comfort, to work hard for little money. And this is a hard school, andone which most pious people do their best to avoid. Yet there is natural comeliness to it, this depending on God, and not on our own resources. Humility dictates that we accept these if we are to step into the possibility of the direct experience of God. A large part of this means learning to mind your own business. The desire to reform others reflects a mania for doing things that you will never be asked by God to do. Renounce your futile concern with others' affairs. Likewise, when it comes to minding your own business, you do not enter more deeply into God by practising virtue for its own sake. All of your devout campaigns are only reflections of your own fixation on the vices that you believe stand in the way of this. The disciplines that you impose on yourself by your own vanity only strengthen the very things that you most need to kill off. Your carefully covered up imperfections only confirm your deeper attachment to your own judgement and will. The initiative needs to be left fully in God's hands. You need to sit back and accept that you really do not have a way to remedy this, and to turn to God in love and isolation and sheer dependence and absolute passivity while you go about the monotony of the physical labour that lies right in front of you.