Let the Wine of Friendship Never Run Dry

Soul friend

Life is a mystery.  To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity.  We need to hold the interior and the exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together.  To be holy is to be natural.  

This is pure wisdom I am reading as I plunge into a book, entitlted in English - "Spiritual Friend".  Be a spiritual friend to oneself and know not to separate the human from the divine.   Herein is the basic theme given in its introduction.  

As we enter a third wave of the pandemic here, being accompanied yet again by the cessation of public masses, I approach this time, as before, as a spiritual time, as a retreat.  Being the third wave, I must say I am better prepared and so readily take up my chosen companion.   

The worse thing for me during this time would be to simply see it as time off, to let loss of purpose rule the day, and so, close myself off from the world.  That path would be self-defeating, the easy way out for me.  Rather this time is a concrete reminder that busyness is not what matters and that there are more important things in life than completing tasks.  We are so much more.  We are not what we do.  More basic, what we do gives expression to who we are.    

So be a spiritual friend to oneself.  As Shakespeare named it in Hamlet, "To thine own self be true".  As they sing so passionately in Les Miserables, "Let the wine of friendship never run dry".