Today’s question: IS REPLENISHING YOUR BEING A PRIORITY IN YOUR LIFE?
This is Day 19 of the 5-week Lenten journey with The Society of Saint John the Evangelist and their daily meditation on TIME.
See Br. Geoffrey Tristram on the video (2:17) below, or to leave comments on the Brothers' website, go here. (http://ssje.org/ssje/2015/03/07/work-1-work)
If you want to share the youtube video, the link is: http://youtu.be/FJNIEZEEcc8
If you comment on social media, please use hashtag #ssjetime or #work
Question: IS REPLENISHING YOUR BEING A PRIORITY IN YOUR LIFE?
Transcript of Video:
One of the great joys of life at Emery House is that we’re surrounded by this wonderful countryside. And over these past years, we Brothers have become more and more aware of the importance of sustainable farming: that you don’t take out more from the land then you put back. And I think that principle is really important for the way that we lead our lives. I think so often we take and take and take, we work and work and work, and we slowly, in agricultural terms, degrade ourselves and become more and more tired. And we don’t give enough thought to putting back what we’re taking out, and so for me – I would call that the importance of sustainable living. To ask ourselves: “How much am I giving back? I know how much I’m working at the moment, but when do I take time, when do I take leisure and rest in order to replenish what has been taken out?”
And in the monastic world, in St. Benedict and the monastic tradition, that principle has been central to the monastic understanding of work: that we don’t run ourselves down into the ground so that we’re in desperate need of vacation. But that we have such a balance to our day and our week that we have times of work, but we also have times of rest and worship and replenishment, so that we remain centered. We remain balanced and we remain sane.
-Br. Geoffrey Tristram
Blessings on our journey to re-order time in our lives,
Agatha