Daily Signet

Photo credit @zenoeffect on Unsplash

The 9th Christuman Foundation reads, “We seek to marry the vision and the action through a true beloving.” I think this to be the most difficult of all our foundations for it calls upon us to consummate our love with God—to take the pitch of our passions and joy and find ways to unite with him—and still we must work, attend committee meetings, clean up messes, feed the animals, tend to the details. I remember my daughter’s statement when she stepped off the merry-go-round and started to stagger: “Oops! I almost lost my conscience." How she had come to associate “conscience” with balance, I’ll never know. But I thought it a most brilliant insight—that the moral compass of the human conscience was somehow interrelated with keeping a balance.

I think there is something heroic in seeking the balance between the vision and the action. I don’t think this is done by giving twelve hours to prayer and meditation and twelve hours to action. Somehow it is finding a way to saturate your actions, our work be with a full awareness of the divine. There are days when I want to stop the madness, retire to the house on the hill and just focus on the vision. But my work is where the vision, the beloving, the challenge of becoming human occurs. Even though I am confronted with a web of foibles and conflicts that I can’t seem to untangle, I still press on the accelerator and let in the fuel to sustain the momentum.

I pray that we can retreat from the division of “time for God” and then “time for everything else,” retreat from seeing what we do as mundane and that only time in worship or in prayer is a sacred moment. I hope that as a community we can serve as reminders to each other to make sacred the daily actions of our days and continue to converse with God that we may be alight with his flame in everything we do. May it be so.                                        

Benjamin Martin