The Discipline of Work, Part Two

_{We continue this week with Part Two in our new fall series featuring excerpts from Joyful Surrender.}

Brother Lawrence practiced the presence of God in the kitchen of a monastery. Sophie the Scrubwoman did floors for Jesus. Dag Hammarskjöld as secretary general of the United Nations offered his work to God, finding the explanation of how a man should live a life of active social service in the writings of the great medieval mystics:

For whom “self-surrender” had been the way to self-realization, and who in “singleness of mind” and “inwardness” had found strength to say Yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbors made them face, and to say Yes also to every fate life had in store for them . . . Love—that much misused and misinterpreted word—for them meant simply an overflowing of the strength with which they felt themselves filled when living in true self-oblivion. And this love found natural expression in an unhesitant fulfillment of duty and an unreserved acceptance of life, whatever it brought them personally of toil, suffering—or happiness. . . 

What are the demands that the needs of our families or neighbors lay upon us? That is the line of duty God has marked out for us. It was plain enough to me, when I was a close observer of the life of jungle Indians, that they all did what they had to do to survive, from the smallest child who could walk to the old grandmother who still took her basket and went out to plant manioc in the family clearing. There were few choices indeed. They did not congratulate themselves on doing their duty. It certainly never entered their heads that they were virtuous for doing it. Duty is good. When we do it, we are doing good, but are not thereby gaining merit.

_{**Excerpt originally published in Joyful Surrender, pp.118-119}