must, as virtual communities,
as committed individuals,
define the social labor —
the peacemaking, the culture creating,
the justice making, the community building —
by which they shall personally or corporately be known.
Work is a path toward self-fulfillment, as well.
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 same 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.
Work also puts us in solidarity with those
for whom the rewards of labor
are few and far between.
It keeps us conscious
of the burdens of the poor,
of injustice to workers,
of the dignity of human labor,
of the glory of ongoing creation.
It makes us equal partners
with the rest of the human race
in this one common human 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.
Then we shall truly be
authentic witnesses to the fact
that a life lived in the scriptures
shapes a universal heart
and rallies the global soul.
Then it will be clear that the spiritual life
is not an escape from the world,
it is a commitment to share with the world
the creative potential
of the monastic vision
of life.
A Monastery of the Heart
stands as sign to the world
that whatever work we do
will be done with full heart
and extra effort,
not for our own sake alone
but for the sake
of the development of the entire world.
