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True Spiritual Work

“...by the work of contemplative love man will be healed.”


The Cloud of Unknowing


It is work, there should be no mistake about that. One of my biggest misconceptions about the spiritual life--before I actually started living it--was that it shouldn’t involve much effort. Even prayer, which I understood I should be doing regularly, I didn’t think of as work. What “work” I did conceive to be part of spiritual living was more along the lines of a to-do list: read scripture, attend regular religious services, pray. If I checked these things off the list often enough, I was doing alright. If I didn’t, I wasn’t. I had no idea of what true spiritual work looks like--the work of meditation, for instance, in which I try every day to train my unruly mind to attend to the thoughts I choose. Or the work of forgiveness, that searching, humbling effort to see myself in the one I resent, or at least to see that their hurtful actions come, as mine do, from ignorance or busyness or fatigue and not badness. This work is good work. It is, as the author says, healing work. And it takes all the effort we can muster.

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