Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.
...the imagination works not so much through inspiration as through perseverance. One must slog through the false starts, spot the wrong words and hold out for the right ones, and above all, be vigilant about staying on the path of revision, no matter how uncomfortable or even painful the journey might become.
What we perceive as dejection over the futility of life is sometimes greed, which the monastic tradition perceives as rooted in a fear of being vulnerable in a future old age, so that one hoards possessions in the present. But most often our depression is unexpressed anger, and it manifests itself as the sloth of disobedience, a refusal to keep up the daily practices that would keep us in good relationship to God and to each other. For when people allow anger to build up inside, they begin to perform daily tasks resentfully, focusing on the others as the source of their troubles. Instead of looking inward to find the true reason for their sadness - with me , it is usually a fear of losing an illusory control - they direct it outward, barreling through the world, impatient and even brutal with those they encounter, especially those who are closest to them.
I recall the passage in the letter to the Hebrews in which we are reminded that Christ has already done everything for us. It speaks of the Christ who "offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins" (Hebrews 10:12). And yet the church teaches, and our experience of faith confirms, that Christ continues to be with us and to pray for us. The paradox may be unraveled, I think, if we remember that when human beings try to "do everything at once and for all and be through with it," we court acedia, self-destruction and death. Such power is reserved for God, who alone can turn what is "already done" into something that is ongoing and ever present. It is a quotidian mystery.
For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.
To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.
True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.
Change is still resented on the Plains, so much so much so that many small-town people cling to the dangerous notion that while the world outside may change drastically, their town does not...... when myth dictates that the town has not really changed, ways of adapting to new social and economic conditions are rejected: not vigorously, but with a strangely resolute inertia...Combatting inertia in a town such as Lemmon can seem like raising the dead. It is painful to watch intelligent business people who are dedicated to the welfare of the town spend most of their energy combatting those more set in their ways. Community spirit can still work wonders here - people raised over $500,000 in the hard times of the late 1980s to keep the Lemmon nursing home open...By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.
By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...
I just don’t understand how you can get so much comfort from a religion whose language does so much harm.”…I realized that what troubled me most was her use of the word “comfort,” so in my reply I addressed that first. I said that I didn’t think it was comfort I was seeking, or comfort that I’d found. Look, I said to her, as a rush of words came to me. As far as I’m concerned, this religion has saved my life, my husband’s life, and our marriage. So it’s not comfort that I’m talking about but salvation.