Re-balancing life -- December 9, 2009

For six years I led 8 day CREDO conferences for clergy. The curriculum was designed to help clergy assess their financial, spiritual, vocational and physical life -- and then invite them to rebalance those dimensions of their life, and to devise a "CREDO plan" for living into the future. In almost every case, the clergy indicated that their lives had gotten out of balance. The week spent together in community, with guidance from the faculty and support from one another, enabled the 30 or so clergy who were present to claim what was important and then dare to live into it.

In her 6th chapter -- "A blend of harmony, wholeness and balance", Joan Chittister renders an indictment that almost everyone's life is out of of balance. I knew that. My guess is that we all know that. She claims that we lack awareness.

I would suggest that the need for a Copenhagen Conference on climate is, in part, the result of a global lack of awareness, and a desire to rebalance humanity with the earth. We have a lot to do.

At the end of the chapter, she has a paragraph that captures the problem -- as well as the opportunity: "All we lack, now that life has become so speeded up, is the will to slow it down so that we can live a little while life goes by. We need to want to be human as well as efficient; to be loving as well as informed; to be caring as well as knowledgeable; to be happy as well as respected." (page 78)