Reading 187, from Sr. Joan Chittister, brilliant!

here were two friends, and both were accused of a crime before the king. Since he loved them, he wanted to show them mercy. He could not acquit them because even the king’s word cannot prevail over a law. So he gave them this verdict:

A rope was to be stretched across a deep chasm, and the two accused were to walk it, one after the other. Whosoever reached the other side was to be granted his life.

It was done as the king ordered, and the first of the friends got safely across.

The other, still standing in the same spot, cried to him: “Tell me, my friend, how did you manage to cross this terrible chasm on that thin and swaying rope?”

The first of the two prisoners called back: “I don’t know anything but this: whenever I felt myself toppling over to one side, I leaned to the other.”

The answer to too much pressure and stress is not the death of the self from doing either too much or too little. It is life lived between the poles of too much and too little. It is life flavored by many things, not surfeited in a single thing that consumes our energies and dampens our appetite for the rest of life.

The spirituality of balance has five attributes: equilibrium, variety, self-awareness, re-creation, and an appreciation of the value of imperfection.

Equilibrium is the ability to know when to quit. When we find ourselves immersed in any one part of life to the detriment of all its other facets—family, prayer, rest, education, play—we are no longer running our lives; our lives are running us. Something we need, something that is air and blood to our very beings, is being denied. Something inside of us is drying up and will surely come back to haunt us in years to come.

Variety is the gift of learning to savor life at every level. We go to the children’s basketball games because we love doing it, not because we feel we must do it. We take family time and play time and reading time and rest time because each of them makes us a fuller human being.

Self-awareness is the monitor of the heart that tells us when we’re too tired too often to be able to really enjoy life, to be our best selves for everyone around us. When the fatigue settles into the center of our souls, when we get up as tired as we were when we went to bed, when we only half-listen, half-read, half-smile, and half-care about anything anymore, we are inclining dangerously to one side. It is time to tilt to the other.

Re-creation is the virtue that sends us off to cleanse the palate of our souls from the noxious residues of yesterday. It is that one single activity—the piano or the bowling team, the fishing boat or the woods, the workshop or the computer class—that makes us forget yesterday’s concerns and makes us young of soul again.

Imperfection is the gift that saves us from destroying ourselves in the name of some apotheosis of excellence that exists only in our own mind. It is the delusion of perfection that drives us to live so imperfectly. There are some things in life worth doing that are worth doing poorly. When being perfect is one aspect of life that destroys the rest of life for us, it is time to lean, lean, lean as far away from it as possible before we stop doing what only we can do in this place, with these people, at this time.

Welcome to the Wisdom of the World and Its Meaning for You

Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB

My notes:

I subscribe to the weekly newsletter from Sister Joan. I could not help myself when I read today’s issue. i hope Sister pardons any copyright issues my quote has created. She is so holy…