Work, Overwork, and Listening

 So if I live in this awesome reality of partnership with God, as I see it I have two primary responses to that. First, I should respond to the needs that are obvious: doing my daily duty (oy vey -- try being a seer of endless potential and ridiculously high ambition, and then figure out what I "should be doing" every day!), the things asked of me by the commitments I have undertaken, and second, I should listen for the directives of the Holy Spirit. 

I guess I could group that as another task I should do, but it seems a different kind of thing, so I'm trying to distinguish in order to unite.

St. John of the Cross says somewhere or another that we shouldn't wait to feel inspired to do what we know is right to do, because sometimes we are only given the knowledge of what we should do, and not any accompanying feeling. I know that I have had the tendancy to check in with my feelings in a rather primary place when "discerning" what to do. I would try to figure out if God wanted me to do something by considering how much I wanted to do it. As if God motivates solely through making us want to do things. Sure, "for it is God who works in you both to will and to do in order to fulfill his purpose" (Phil. 2:13). But that willing part is about choice, not necessarily about feeling like it. I can feel like all sorts of things. Sometimes I know that my duty entails faithfulness to a task. That needs to be able to movitate me right there.

If you are like me, you have a issue with being right. Doing right. Pridefully hating to be wrong or to miss something that will make me look like I'm not all together, in command of myself and everything. It's kind of an anxiety; something in me can't settle unless I feel like I know what to do. And I have looked for that in myself. I think that's why I would scour every little feeling that would go flitting through my interior radar, because I thought perhaps God would be sending me a message, and I would miss it, and screw up. But if as partner with the Holy Spirit I can reliably know that I don't have to feel anything to know I need to be faithful to my obvious duty entailed in my commitments, well then, that helps. All of that interior scouring of my feelings leads to being very complicated. Faithfulness to duty frees me for simplicity.

Listening to the directives of the Holy Spirit. I think of the song by John Michael Talbot called We Are the Exiles. The chorus says this:

We are the exiles in the far end of solitude

We are the exiles living as the listeners

With hearts attending to the skies, we cannot comprehend

Yet waiting for the first far drums of Christ the coming King

Planted like sentinels, upon the earth's frontier in exile we sing.

It's a song about cloistered contemplatives, and while I'm definitively not cloistered, I am called to contemplative life as a Secular Carmelite. 

And you know what, I really love to just be busy. I'm thinking maybe I like it just a bit too much. Or perhaps it is that I can take care of the work that is on my plate with a deeper element of contemplation. And maybe that's what is really, really vital to living in partnership with the Holy Spirit, this think of actually not ignoring my partner, but checking in deeply, expectantly. People have been telling me for at least ten years that I am a natural-born leader, something I never saw in myself earlier. More and more in exercising that I have found freedom and growth, but it also plays into a life-long fear that the people around me are not going to step up and take their own responsibility, and that I will end up with it.

Work, yes. Not as a slave, but as a creator, because only Love creates. 

I think maybe I need to get myself registered for that JMT retreat over Pentecost!