Gratitude and Devotion Coda: Service

Holy Mother, in Whom we live, move and have our being, from You all things emerge and unto You all things return.

Beloved, I vow to keep opening my heart to you, to surrender to your love.

Holy Mother, I vow to serve and to celebrate and to reverence Life in all Your forms with authenticity and clarity and energy and joy.

Holy Mother, in Whom we live, move and have our being, from You all things emerge and unto You all things return.

So it is.

Blessed be.

This is my vow of ministry, which I took in 1998, and have repeated – sometimes daily, sometimes going years between voicings – ever since. I’ve been repeating it more often, lately. Since September last year – exactly ten years since I took my vow, in fact – I’ve been a full-time postgraduate student. I was led to it: it is my will, my heart’s desire, and that of the Universe that I be on this path. But, swamped as I have been by assignments and the practicalities of arranging fieldwork, to say nothing of the maintaining family relationships long-distance which the location of my studies has required, I have fallen into thinking that the studying is the point.

It is not.

My purpose is to share peace; my vow is to love and to serve. These are the point. Repeating my vow is helping me to remember that.

And you? What is your purpose? What is your vow?