Outer Work

During the Order retreat I wanted to read the following quote from Maria Jaoudi's book Christian Mysticism East and West several times and never quite found a place for it. So I want to put it now into your thoughts as you ponder your outer work more fully in the days and weeks ahead. It is very significant, I think.

Each of us has a mystical social gift gained through our prayer life. It is vital to have social commitments, whatever form those commitments may take for each of us. Someone may picket to protest an unfair law; another might be a Wester-trained anesthesiologist who decides to learn about Chinese acupuncture so as not to administer as much anesthesia during surgery, someone else may become involved in hospice work to counter our culture's inability to cope with the reality of dying. Social action that lasts, according to the Bhagadvad Gita, and does not become uninspired, is directed from within as an integral part of our total human development: "great is the person who, free from attachments, and with a mind ruling its powers in harmony, works on the path of consecrated action" (52).