Blessing the Daily Grind

Last night I found it hard to sleep: the minor challenges of life were looming large, for no particular reason.  And so 4:30 found me reading Teilhard de Chardin -- which turned out to be the perfect choice, even though I'm just reading for a course, because I chanced upon his famous Hymn to Matter. (Here's a link, though it's a different translation; I was reading the one by Ursula King).

After reading it through a couple of times, I decided to translate it into terms that work for me, and then, once that was done, I thought -- I'll share this in the blog!  So for the next week, I'll be taking the individual sections of his hymn, each of which is a blessing, and conveying them in terms that make them real to me -- and hopefully to you as well...

Today's blessing reads as follows:

Blessed be you, the daily grind --
the difficult, the repetitive,
the labor that it takes just to survive:
the dishes and the diapers,
the commute, the papers (written, read, or graded)
the ditches dug, the lumber chopped,
the clients and the customers served,
things stacked and loaded, lifted and delivered...
Bless them all for feeding us and keeping us alive.

Trust me: when we get to the end, you'll see how it all plays in to a single and uplifting view that gratefully encompasses all the challenges of life...