As the Executive Editor of Harding House Publishing (as well as a parent, a wife, a daughter, roles that absorb much of my time), I find that my attention is often scattered. My personal life distracts me from my work, my work distracts me from my personal life, and all too often, both halves of my life distract me from my sense of connection with God.
 
The word “distract” is a good one for what I experience (what I suspect many of us experience). Its earliest meaning (from the Latin) meant “drawn asunder,” “separated into pieces.” I picture a pair of scissors snipping away at the fabric of my life, leaving raveled threads, jumbled colors, and broken patterns. How do I reknit the pieces of my life into something whole and coherent?
 
In my work for Anamchara Books, that sense of wholeness seems more tangible. The chores at hand (writing this column, editing our modern-day version of the Showings of Julian of Norwich, working with an author who is writing a memoir of her life in the Sufi tradition) all lead me toward a greater consciousness of spiritual meaning in my life. Instead of distracting me, they help me re-vision the essential coherency of my life. They allow me to glimpse the many ways my life is united with God.
 
But I can’t turn away from the other more ordinary demands of making a living and being in a family. Few of us can. Nor should we.
For most of my adult life, Robert Frost’s lines in Two Tramps in Mud Time have challenged and inspired me:
 
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
 
Frost implies that uniting our work with our deepest calling (vocation and avocation) is a question of vision. The change is internal, perceptual, rather than external. It has to do with consciousness. Without that deliberate awareness, our perceptions are often fragmented and broken—but all the while, Divine creativity pulls everything together into a unified pattern. It takes discipline and practice for us to see with a truly united vision, but when we do, the reality we glimpse is not dependent on our efforts. Grace weaves our world together, regardless of our perceptions. As the author of Colossians writes, the Divine Word “holds all things together” (1:17).
 
And so the laundry I did before I came to work this morning . . . the drive to the high school with my daughter . . . the hour I just spent working on our company’s annual budget . . . the e-mails I wrote to staff and colleagues . . . and these random thoughts: I offer them all up—to Heaven, to the future, to love.