Welcome to our “little cloister”
where we
EXPLORE MONASTIC WISDOM FOR EVERY DAY LIVING
Drs. Almut & Chuck with little one
Home of
+The Hildegard Seminar,
+Kierkegaard Masterclass,
+Bach Passionweek Consolations,
+The 12 Days of Christmas Contemplations &
+The “Little School” of Spiritual Formation
All tagged work
Work is sanctified in the light of Christmas, and is judged to be of worth, on a shockingly different scale than how economists value it. The work that we often value least, service work, women’s work, is valuable because it is done for others. If we see our work this way, we can bring Christmas into our lives all year.
How do we know the proper value of work? How do we decide its role in our lives? In a monastic community the value of work is not measured in how much someone will pay to have it done. It is not seen in narrow economic terms. The value of work is instead measured in the contribution of that work to all the aspects of daily, shared, life. For monastics that means daily shared spiritual life – because ALL of monastic daily, shared life is our spiritual life. In the gospel, all life is seen through the ultimate lens of love of God and love of neighbor.
We are indeed busy with all the "work of our hands” that feels thrust upon us. But why is it someone else's fault? How did we become so busy? How did we get to this place where the work of our hands rules us? I recently learned of new anxiety that may be a cause, or a symptom, of our busyness: FOMO. This acronym stands for the Fear of Missing Out. Students are said to be frantically checking their facebook pages to keep track of all the interesting and important things that others are doing, to make sure that they don't miss out on the fun, or get left out of the action. So the constant checking of the cell phone is not out of interest, but out of fear.
