“Today it is not enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself without precedent.”[i] So pronounced Simone Veil, as she surveyed the erupting landscape of Europe in the 1930’s. Veil, certainly one of the great revolutionary philosophers of the last century, was not speaking here of some gentle idealized version of saintliness. She was speaking about the devoted day after day after day of living in the trenches of our lives while holding up the candle of illumination.

All working space can be an anchorhold and all activities can be interpreted through the anchorholding model. It matters not whether you are making cheese in your kitchen or making business deals in a high tower of commerce. Though, to be truthful, the former will be easier than the later, though not impossible. What is required is a shift in thinking that moves away from a computational model that is transactional to a gratitude that is relational.

So you can see how this works in a specific modern context, here are the elements of the three entrance ways of my anchorhold. They change, of course, from day to day, and by the time this book is published may well be dated/shifted/changed. But this will give you an idea of what I am speaking about in specifics. And you need to work in specifics to build your own anchorhold.  You can easily make up your own list, but this might help you understand what that list looks like. What I think you will discover, as I have, is the enormous body of people and entities that have enabled you to be sitting here this very moment.

Each of our contexts is unique. Reflecting on the three entrances to a traditional anchorhold, you may come to see the elements they represent in your own particularities. And in doing so, you may know the gifts of this viewing. I am hoping so. The first entrance of your anchorhold does not empty into a nave, but a vast vortex of knowledge, education, experience, and internal and external struggles upon which you were both formed and continue to rely for support. We are never alone; this is an impossibility.

If you should walk up the stairs to the second floor of my stone house and make a sharp right, you would find yourself in a room that appears to be an office or workspace of some sort. There are two desk top computers, a small portable one, and the technological paraphernalia needed to keep everything running. There is an old-fashioned land line telephone, stacks of books, two large white boards covered in scribbles, a large paper note pad on a frame, many files, baskets of ragged notes, and stacks of journals. I am supposing it looks like a writer’s workspace.

Contemplation, when held in an active posture, is known as contemplative stance. In its practice of attentiveness, its experience of a fuller reality, and its encounter with the divine Other, this spiritual discipline of compassionate waiting gives new sight to standard perceptions, training the mind and eye to resist the known in order to attend upon the unknown. It is accompanied by creativity able to imagine alternate ways of being in any given situation. Grounded in the certainty of sacred goodness, this practiced posture is able to hold steady in the face of uncertainty and apparent chaos.

There are at least as many reasons to give up as to carry on. This is so. But if we are going to carry on, if we have decided to draw breath yet another day, perhaps, also, we might consider jhow and why and with whom we share our breath. We are inextricably linked to everything. When carrying on seems arduous, lean on the strength of the web. Breathe. You have a place in all things. How you hold that place matters.