My Work

 Recently our Church held its annual Arts Festival and invited poets and artists to contribute. The theme was centred on our calling, vocation - in short: work. 

I spent some time pondering what my work actually is. Because I am an on-the-go, sometimes-at-home, Mom, Spiritual Director, Piano Teacher, occasional Doula, and all-round Presence In The House For Anyone Who Shows Up, it took me some time to consider what it is I actually DO. Here is the poem that emerged from these ponderings:

My Work

My work is to be - to taste, to see

Every good gift tumbling

Flowing into these outstretched hands

To be Open, waiting.

My work is to worship: To savor

Sweet bread, broken, given;

To lift up my fainting heart

To yield all I am for

One Who yielded to death for me.

My work is to welcome.

If every good gift is from above,

Then so is the stranger at my door.

In no time he won't be a stranger,

But a fellow pilgrim seeking

Good gifts from a good God.

Welcoming is Opening:

I open my heart's door to

Love, with my hand on the weathered doorknob

Ready to receive One standing out in the cold.

My work is to touch.

I lift the aged, the young.- I touch what is soiled

And remember: Jesus has touched me

In all the mess I am and bring.

With my hands I carry a meal, a child, an ache -

In another, in myself.

I fold laundry, I drive, cook, and a thousand things.

My work is to rest.

I am told I must strive to enter it.

Such striving is labour - to yield to my need

To acknowledge I am but dust

I give myself to Sabbath - The One Who

Works for me, has done everything

And the something I do is to

Bring loaves and fishes and a soul

Full of need.

My work is to Word:

To imitate Logos, borrowing only from all that He is.

I muse, and each thought would not,

Could not, 

Be

If not for that first Being:The first Word.

I write, speak, teach.

I soak in a word until its flavour

Seeps out into more words, that spill through fingertips, or the tip of my tongue.

My work is to Doula.

To serve as midwife to body and soul,

In flesh, in spirit - the work is one and the same:

To sit with pain, to witness breaking,

Birth of flesh and spirit,

To weep with those who weep - rejoice in new life

Whether visible or invisible;

To delight in the Creator of souls and babies.

My labour is to Mother

Which means to love: Over all these virtues,

I put on love which binds them, and me,

Into perfect unity.

I have been untied, unbound,

Unable to work as I might

Were I tended, bound up, whole.

And somehow in the strange, miraculous

Work of the Master, I am able to toil and rest,

Write, speak, welcome, serve, listen, Mother,

Help, teach, and receive:

All because of His wondrous carving in me;

Moulding this willing and unwilling clay of flesh

His image forming and re-forming

From one degree of glory to another.

Father, send me out to do the work

You have given me to do:

To love the I Am, Who tirelessly labours

Patiently entering the travails of my soul;

To welcome those He loves; To love in Word and

Being and Doing.