A Balanced Life

Prayer, study, work, and rest.  This is the Rule of the Lindisfarne Community, in a nutshell.  Committing to my life as a hermit at the Wild Goose Hermitage offers me a way to focus each of those elements of my life. 

Prayer is enhanced because I have created a small space, an altar of sorts, with an icon of Christ, "the Blessed Silence," my Lindisfarne chalice and paten, and a few stones from Holy Island on it.  A rocking chair sits beside the table.  I used think I had to pull out my meditation cushion and timer and stuff to enter into the place of prayer, but while cleaning the room recently, I wondered why I didn't stop there to pray more often.  Oh!  It would be easier if I just used the rocking chair.  So I do now, morning and night.

Study -- that's easy!  As a part-time instructor in religion, I'm always reading things, about God, or religion, or how to teach religion.  It's a constant part of my life, and a blessing.

Work -- that's harder.  When I'm not teaching, my paid work is in the college library.  It's good work, but it's not what I'm on this planet to do, and too much of it drains me.  I seek the balance point between enough hours to pay the bills and not so many hours that I become exhausted.  Most semesters it's doable.  This semester not so much.  But that's for another day.

Rest -- now that's where the hermitage is really useful!  While we do go out for all sorts of reasons, there are moments when the right thing to do is to just stay put.  To allow myself to exhale into the holiness of place and practice a kind of Benedictine stability.  This is where I belong, this is where I choose to encounter God.  Here I can rest from the kind of frantic searching that so characterizes much of modern life, and just be.

The Wild Goose Hermitage becomes the "stillpoint" of the turning world, to use T.S. Eliot's phrase, the place where prayer and rest anchor the activities of work and study.  With practice, and it's always a practice, life here comes into its own unique balance.  God is good.