Journal of Sacred Work

"…we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!" – Thomas Merton

   Our innate wisdom tells us Merton is right. As monotonous as some tasks seem, each time we do one of them we are doing that thing for the first time. The nurse, the surgeon, and the social worker
interviewing her fifth client of the day would all do well to remember this wisdom. It may feel like the thousandth time for them, but it may be the first time for the patient.
   My granddaughter is living her first January. How many have you lived? Does each one still feel new and exciting to you? At the end of this month, we have the opportunity to reflect on how many years we have begun and what new things and new people we will encounter this year…

   I like thinking about life as beginnings. It is a great exercise in humility. For there can be nothing more potentially arrogant than a veteran talking to a new recruit. The new young nurse, nervous on her
first day of work, may encounter a twenty-year senior employee. "I remember my first day," the senior nurse may say grimly, "Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it real fast."  But is it good to "get used to it?" It may help us feel comfortable. But right next to comfort is the demon of complacency.
   Author Richard Foster says that joy is the centerpiece of the spiritual disciplines. The reason for this is that joy frees us from our painful marriage to fear and ego. I find this simple sounding notion very complicated to practice. I feel like a beginner at spirituality even though I’ve been working on it, in one way or another, since I was four years old.
   How do we celebrate joy independent of ego and self-interest? Part of the answer comes in the example of children and grandchildren. How do we love them without wanting to possess them? The desire to possess grows a garden of fear. For possession means we will be afraid of losing ownership.
  We proudly call our offspring "ours." In truth, they are not. That is why, as a high school student, I was so enchanted with Gibran’s writing that begins:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
   Nothing belong to us – no thing and no one. We do not really even own our own bodies. We just live in them for awhile before our spirit moves to other planes of awareness.
   That is why we are all beginners, and we are all wise veterans of life. Why do I see wisdom in my granddaughter’s face? Could it be because she, like all babies, has come from a place of wisdom and already knows a great deal more than we think?
   Perhaps we are the beginners and she is the veteran.

-Erie Chapman