Prayer

I offer the following reflection by Thomas Merton, from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, as a prayer in response to today's sometimes head-scratching—and even unsettling—Gospel. His words have accompanied me for many years, especially in seasons when ministry has felt less like changing the world and more like tending to one crisis after another—and trying to hold together what is unraveling.

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealisd t most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

Amen.