@HaddenTurner @affinitytalks end\ It seems fitting that today is 'Plough Monday'—the year’s anointing: scent of turned earth and shared bread, sweat as prayer, hands as liturgy. Cross-shaped work, quietly faithful—Paradise and Kingdom collapsing into one incarnate Yes, refusing mastery, refusing escape.
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Eleanor Parker Today is Plough Monday, the first Monday after Epiphany. This was traditionally the first day back at work after the Christmas holiday, and it was celebrated by blessing tools of work - a way of starting off the new year well, but also an excuse for some last Christmas festivity! …role of the plough. From the fifteenth century onwards, the early days of January were marked in England by a variety of traditional customs involving a plough, usually on ‘Plough Monday, the first Monday after Twelfth Night.” This might include, for instance, a plough being blessed in church, decorated and paraded around the village by ploughboys, who would dance, sing or perform plays as they went to collect money — originally to keep candles, ‘plough lights, burning for them in church, and later, once the Reformation suppressed that practice, for their own purposes. These plough rituals provided an opportunity to seck God's blessing on the tools of daily life as the new year began, but doubtless also offered a way of making the post-Christmas return to work more palatable with…
Open original document@TheBruderhof Paradise begins where breath meets labor. This is not metaphor. It is action, not abstraction—the incarnation practiced at ground level. Dirt under fingernails. Jim Wallis: "Jesus didn't say, 'Blessed are the peace-lovers.' He said, 'peacemakers.'" The labor of peace is handmade.
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3rd Way Thread. Transcending the distinction between ‘ora et labora’, work & prayer. Matthew Fox: “Clearly, work is at the center of adult living.” Rilke: “Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life & the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.” 1/ @RevDrMatthewFox “How readily the idea of work as a role fits a new cosmology, that of work playing a role in making the cosmic wheel go around.” N.O.Brown: “Work is mystical.” 2/ “Our action in the world matters," notes @RichardRohrOFM, "because it contributes both to the deeper incarnation of God and to the redemptive gathering of the whole world.” @RevDrMatthewFox: “We are talking about resacralizing our work worlds and therefore our whole world." 3/ “Work is that which puts us in touch with others, not so much at the level of personal interaction, but at the level of service in the community. A spirituality of work is about bringing life and livelihood back together again. And Spirit with them.” - Fox /4 “The environmental crisis tells us much about our crisis in work today, furnishing us with an opportunity & a responsibility to ask deeper questions of work. To ask how a spirituality of work might assist us in redefining how, why, and for whom we do our work.” @RevDrMatthewFox What is it to heal the Earth and ourselves in the concomitant embrace of a single garment of destiny? Hundertwasser: “Paradises can only be made with our _own_ hands, with our _own_ creativity in harmony with the true creative spirit of nature.” /7 N. O. Brown: “To find meaning is to find work. In alchemy, the Great Work of Transformation; transform the nature of work. Labor is fertility. Instead of Gross Natural Product, reproduction. Reproduction of the eternal earth. Ecology instead of economy.” Brown: “And labor to be an act of love. Homo laborans, man in labor, is man amans amare, in love with loving, and seeking an object for his love. Return culture to the root; rediscover our roots, the radicalism. The Garden Project.” N. O. Brown: “Laborare est orare, to labor is to pray. Overcoming the distinction between the active and the contemplative. Overcoming the distinction between works and grace. The Garden Project.” The heaven of earth, made Real. The Third Way.
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