As I reflect on another year behind me so to speak, it is shocking at how radically different the year was from previous years. And even more shocking how different it was from the "plan" year. I'm also aware of a much larger question mark than ever before, as I look at the 2018 calendar of work that has been scheduled for two years now. I consider the work I do very much a phenomenon. I only go where I am invited. I stopped "working" at finding organizations and people to work with several years ago, and that one change, changed everything for me. I'm still astounded, at the acceptance and patience of my hosts and participants, to wait over a year or two for a workshop/speaking date. They keep signing up and showing up over and over for their insights, support, breakthroughs, and deep inner healings of the mind.

I often wonder and sometimes doubt the value of this work when I witness the depth of "what's left", after years of dedicated and very determined uncovering and processing. I accept this as a natural doubt and bewilderment, as I have many times read of leaders and teachers before us, that spoke authentically about their own doubts.

I recently witnessed an ordination ceremony, where a response letter from Thomas Merton, to a young man weary and doubting whether the work he was doing was meaningful or not, was read as part of the ceremony. Here's some excepts and thoughts from a Merton scholar, Jim Forest. Both writers speak my heart and mind.

Letter to a Young Activist has often been reprinted and translated. It captures the heart of Merton's advice to anyone in a similar burned-out state while eliminating portions that were more directed at the work of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Here in italics is Letter to a Young Activist as published in The Catholic Worker interspersed with Jim Forest's commentary:

Do not depend on the hope of results.
What a challenge that is. Any action one embarks on is undertaken with the hope of positive, tangible results. One must have hope that what you do will have an impact. But to the extent you depend on success, your capacity to persevere is undermined.

When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps, results opposite to what you expect.
Before receiving Merton's letter it had never occurred to me that peace work is of its nature an apostolic work-quite a dignity but also quite a responsibility.

As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
It's not easy getting used to the idea that what you are doing is probably going to crash against a stone wall. The shift from focusing not on quickly measurable results but rather on the value, rightness, and truth of the work one is doing requires a major shift of perception.

And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.
That last sentence became for me one of the most important insights that I ever received from Merton: " In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything." I know it by heart and recite it often. It sums up incarnational theology. Words and slogans and theories are not nearly as important as how we see and relate to each other-the relationships we build-and not only with friends but with adversaries.

You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.
Social movements require words and often use slogans to sum up goals. These have their place but it's secondary. In a talk to his novices, Merton-best known for his words-once said, "He who follows words is destroyed." Like arrows, words point but they are not the target. One of Merton's main contributions to many people who were involved in peace efforts was the witness given by his contemplative monastic life in which prayer and meditation were integral elements of every activity, each day having a liturgical and sacramental foundation. What he had to say helped reveal what couldn't be said.

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.
I found these few words-"after all [personal satisfaction] is not that important"-especially helpful. It's not important that we personally get to see the results of our efforts, however worthy our goals may be. Here Merton suggests what I have come to think of as a cathedral builder's mentality, a metaphor that easily comes to mind as I live just a minute's walk from a cathedral whose construction began in 1470 and which wasn't completed until 50 years later. By cathedral building standards, half-a-century was fast work-Notre Dame in Paris took nearly two centuries. But even in cases in which construction took less than a century, those who helped lay the foundations of a great cathedral knew they had slight chance of living to see their building roofed. Perhaps they imagined their grandchildren or great-grandchildren having that satisfaction.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love. Think of this more, and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.
Building an identity in one's work is so basic an element for all of us living in a career-driven, results-oriented, fear-wired society that it's hard to imagine another way of identifying ourselves. Asked who we are, we tend to respond with information about what we do. It's not easy to think in other terms, and indeed any more basic answer (what would that be?) might be embarrassing. But if what you do is rooted in attempting to follow Christ, that foundation may not only keep you going in dark times but actually, ironically, make your work more effective.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths.
Merton meant myth in the sense of a purely fictitious narrative. In my own case the problem was not so much making myself the servant of a myth (truth often comes wrapped in myth) but the servant of an ideology. Even Christianity can be flattened into an ideology-a loveless closed system of ideas, theories and concepts, every spark of paschal fire smothered in ashes.

If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration, and confusion.....
It is after all Christ's truth that matters, a truth we experience from time to time but which can never be adequately expressed in words or be obtained by movements and causes. Trying to live within Christ's truth certainly doesn't mean we will live an undented life, a life free of disappointments-there is a reason that Christianity's main symbol is the cross-but it may help prevent frustration and disappointment from becoming despair.

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand.
Thank you, Thomas Merton.

I have read these words many time over the last week or so and continue to get inspired, bolstered up, comforted, and renewed in the truth of them. I pray that you receive your own EXTRAORDINARY BLESSING from them. As we surrender the need for results, we are empowered to move ahead with uncommon motivation and stamina for the good of the whole.

I believe that we all have been called to the "noble" work we are about and that the creator of that calling is the force and power that will carry us through any/all times, dark, doubting, or full speeds of light.

So following a time of winter vacation, renewal through silence and solitude, I am dusted off, raised up, in the starting gate for whatever God has in store for me.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and all the best for the NEW YEAR beginnings and wise changes we all make to keep our spirit soaring (no matter what).

P.S. Many of you have asked what "home" is for me now. All my answers sound so mysterious without me trying to be mysterious. Where ever I am-is home. I continue to use the PO Box 1081, Louisville, KY 40201 and someone gets my mail to me upon request. You will see from the calendar that I am all around Florida between Christmas and Easter, moving about somewhere different every week. I have what I need with me in the trunk or a suitcase and shoulder bag. As a reminder, this is by choice. I have many options for a "where" if I desire that. I look forward to seeing you in person and TREASURE our relationships, heaven and earth. Join in the Birthday Cruise February 10th-8 nights on Princess out of Ft. Lauderdale and come play. Call All About Travel NOW-502-245-8747.

"Do more of what you feel great about. Stop doing anything you feel bad about."

~ Martha Creek

"Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you. You will suddenly know. Everything there is To be known."

~ A.A. Milne

"Hindus call it nirvana; Buddhists-awakened soul; Quakers-inner light; psychologists-superconscious; divine nature; Kingdom of God within; the hope of glory; whatever you call it, the important thing to remember is that it dwells within you."

~ Peace Pilgrim

"I know that in life there will be sickness, devastation, disappointments, heartache-it's a given. What's not a given is the way you choose to get through it all. If you look hard enough, you can always find a brighter side."

~ Rashida Jones

For a complete list of Martha's events, please visit 

www.marthacreek.com.