Monotony

200 words: When the soul grows weary - finding God in the greyness of routine

No one likes a ‘one tone’ life, but at times our experience is exactly this:

For so it is that a man who has laboured wisely, skilfully and successfully must leave what is his own to someone who has not toiled for it at all (Ecclesiastes 2).

So many of us are wise, skilful, successful – and wealthy, too – but yet we feel disillusioned from time to time.

What to do? Embrace it or flee it?

We embrace it as a feeling that is pointing us in the right direction.

And so it was that in 1981 Pope St. John Paul II decided to teach us about the meaning and value of human work:

Work transforms things. Work transforms us. Work unites people in communion.

Of very special interest, living as we are, in our fast paced and febrile world, is the pope’s insight into the spirituality of work:

Our work is patterned after God’s act of creation, whereby God worked six days, and rested one.

This spiritual rhythm enables us to stop, look back upon our work, and see it as something in God’s hands.

That’s it.

Work is a participation in God’s creative work. Work is worship.

Amen.