Meditation of the Month

The following is the reflections of W. R. Matthews, an Anglican minister who died in 1973:

“If we are in fact strangers and pilgrims, we have certain conclusions to draw which concern our daily lives. There is a counsel in most spiritual religions…that we should cultivate detachment. This has not meant, in the mind of the best spiritual guides, that we should wrap ourselves in an inhuman aloofness from the affairs of human beings, or that we should look on life as a spectacle in which we have no vital concern, but it does mean that we should live in this world as if we did not wholly belong to it and that we should avoid that complete absorption in its vicissitudes into which the most eager spirits easily fall. It is wise to remind ourselves that even our most cherished ambitions and interests are passing; the soul will grow out of them or at least must leave them behind.

We look backward, perhaps, to the pleasant days we have known, and we linger in the past, reluctant to let it go; or the present may be so vivid and captivating that we would hold on to it, and we resent the law which compels us to move on to unknown scenes….The time has come to move on? Then break up the camp with good heart; it is only one more stage on the journey home.”