Photo by stéphane giner
How useful and relevant are your prayers in a world like ours, a world that can knock the wind out of the most resilient optimist, a world that needs more courageous action for justice and peace?
Do your prayers strengthen your heart and give you courage to help create what you, in prayer, perceive as God's desire for the world?
Are your actions sustained by the kind of inner life that makes those actions meaningful, useful?
Are they rooted in your deepest values and beliefs?
What's the evidence that they have the potential to bring about the kind of hope and healing our troubled, yet beautiful, world really needs?
In our multidimensional lives and complex world, how can you find the balance between enjoying life and making it possible for others to flourish too?
In this podcast (a one minute reflection from Sounds True) Matthew Fox, Episcopalian priest and founder of the Wisdom School of Graduate Studies in Oakland, affirms that we can each find integration, meaning, and balance between the inner work of prayer and the outer work of loving the world into wholeness.
The truth is, the activist life and the mystical life are two sides of the same coin.
In fact, an activist life may not be worth much without the sustenance of mystical encounter with the divine. What's more, I don't know how it's possible to live mystically, that is, in deep relation with what's Real, without finding ourselves pressed outward in action for justice, offering ourselves in creative and courageous actions that lead to the flourishing of the creation.
Intention: Take a moment today and honor the interplay between your inner and outer lives. What do you need: a better grounding in prayer that can nourish your work? Or do you need to adjust your work or activism so that it is better in line with what your prayerful heart desires to see in the world?