![]() But give me the strength that waits upon You in silence and peace. ![]() Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me, and from the cowardice that does what is not demanded, in order to escape sacrifice. Untie my hands and deliver my heart from sloth. ![]() Stamp out the serpent envy that stings love with poison and kills all joy. Stanch in me the rank wound of covetousness and the hungers that exhaust my nature with their bleeding. Keep me from the dead works of vanity and the thankless labor in which artists destroy themselves for pride and money and reputation, and saints are smothered under the avalanche of their own importunate zeal. Keep me from loving money in which is hatred, from avarice and ambition that suffocate my life. Keep me from the sins that eat a man’s flesh with irresistible fire until he is devoured. Keep me from the murder of lust that blinds and poisons my heart. Keep me from the death of deadly sin which puts hell in my soul. Therefore keep me, above all things, from sin. Let me use all things for one sole reason: to find my joy in giving You glory. Sheep’s wool and cotton from the field shall warm me enough that I may live in Your service I will give the rest to Your poor. I will hear Your voice and I will hear all harmonies You have created, singing Your hymns. Let my tongue taste no bread that does not strengthen me to praise Your great mercy. Let my eyes see nothing in the world but Your glory, and let my hands touch nothing that is not for Your service. Shine in my mind, although perhaps this means “be darkness to my experience,” but occupy my heart with Your tremendous Life. “Justify my soul, O God, but also from Your fountains fill my will with fire. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.” Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. When we are alone on a starlit night when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat when we see children in a moment when they are really children when we know love in our own hearts or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash-at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.įor the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. What in God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what he Himself takes most seriously. “What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. ![]()
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