Somehow I sense that this might this connect with yesterday’s post?!
The Journey
by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Peace, dwight
“The Journey”
Dwight,
The beginning of the poem says "One day you knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice…"
This poem reminded me of something Merton said in Thoughts In Solitude (Part 2 Chp. 4).
"A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live…When we find our vocation – thought and life are one.
Suppose one has found completeness in his true vocation. Now everything is in unity, in order, at peace. Now work no longer interferes with prayer or prayer with work. Now contemplation no longer needs to be a special state that removes one from the ordinary things going on around him for God penetrates all."
Brother Lawrence stated this in a different way, "God is among the pots and pans of the kitchen." What hope and rest this gives me. Our lives are nothing but continueous KP duty. In the movie Pricess Bride, Wesley said that,"Life is pain. Anyone else who says otherwise is trying to sell you something." Life may be pain, pots, and pans but these are what our Father uses to camoflauge the Gates of Heaven with. Heaven is those very pots and pans. It is a paradox, but God loves to use paradoxes. When we cease looking for wisdom from an external source, we see our Fathers gentle smile and the Sons tender eyes in the suddsey water of our very lives and those around us.
(Dwight- Im starting to ramble. I hope Im making sence.) Peace and Rest in the arms of the Father- Kyle