"Businessmen, they drink my wine, ploughmen dig my earth..."

Last stop-everyone out of the Comfort Zone. Keep all preconceived notions within the carriage as we enter liminal space. Please extend your hands and open your hearts as we go forward.--Left Rev.

So good it had to be repeated. And leaving our Comfort Zone has to happen in the middle of what Kathleen Norris calls the "quotidian mysteries." It happens in the purely ordinary, purely everyday, experiences of life, because we never leave those things. We never leave ourselves behind.

IN practice, the way to contemplation is an obscurity so obscure that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing left in it that can be grasped and cherished as heroic or even unusual. And so, for a contemplative, there is supreme value in the ordinary routine of work and poverty and hardship and monotony that characterize the lives of all the poor and uninteresting and forgotten people in the world.

Christ, who came on earth to form contemplatives and teach the ways of sanctity and prayer, could easily have surrounded himself with ascetics who starved themselves to death and terrified the people with strange trances. But his apostles were workers, fishers, publicans who made themselves conspic-uous only by their disregard for most of the intricate network of devotions and ceremonial practices and moral gymnastics of the professionally holy.

The surest asceticism is the bitter insecurity and labor and nonentity of the really poor. To be utterly dependent on other people. To be ignored and despised and forgotten. To know nothing of decency or comfort. To live in much dirt, and eat bad food. To take orders and work hard for little or no money: It is a hard school, and one which most pious people do their best to avoid.

Many religious people, who say they love God, detest and fear the very thought of a poverty that is real enough to mean insecurity, hunger, dirt. And yet you will find those who go down and live among the poor not because they love God (in whom they do not believe) or even because they love the poor, but simply because they hate the rich and want to stir up the poor to hate the rich too. If people can suffer these things for the venomous pleasure of hatred, why do so few become poor out of love?--Thomas Merton

The questions all come back to a central question: why do you do what you do? It isn't just a matter of experience; it's a matter of what you do with that experience.