蜜芽传媒

Good Morning and a Happy New Year.

This is the morning, when all across the UK, offices are reopening, factories restarting production and commuters rejoining their customary traffic queues. For many of us, today is the day when the holidays are over and it's back to the grind. Sadly, next door to my Cathedral, at Manchester鈥檚 busy Victoria Station, today is also the first working day after a serious incident brought counter terrorist police back into the city centre. Three people are recovering from wounds. They face a New Year very different from what they would have expected. A city and nation hold them in their hearts.

How we respond to the highest and lowest points of our lives, everything from joyful holidays to tragic events, plays a significant part in defining what sort of people we are. Yet there is much more that determines our humanity than these occasions. Today鈥檚 return to routine reminds us that it鈥檚 amidst the mundane and the ordinary that we pass most of our days. No wonder then, that the challenge of seeing true worth and value in the regular rhythms of life, lies at the heart of most religious and ethical traditions.

The seventeenth century poet George Herbert gave up a potentially glittering career at court to take up the role of priest at a small parish outside Salisbury. One of his most famous works is called The Elixir. I suspect the title alludes to the search for magical spells and potions which was a characteristic of life in Jacobean Britain. But Herbert's Elixir is of a very different sort. What he calls "the trivial found, the common task" becomes infused with a deeper meaning when it is undertaken as though for God himself. One who sweeps a room with this sense of purpose makes, in Herbert's words, "drudgery divine". He discerned a greater glory in the gentle care of his parishioners, and the enjoyment of his poetry and music, than he had ever found at King James's court. A similar but more recent story is told of an American president, visiting the NASA space centre at Cape Canaveral and asking a worker pushing a broom what their task was that day. "Mr President", replied the floor sweeper, "today, I'm putting a man on the moon".

So whatever the title of the job you may be returning to this New Year, and whatever duties you may have to perform in and out of the home, look beyond the immediate and see each task finding its place in a greater purpose. From actor to actuary, from barista to barrister, may we each glimpse the glory that lies within our daily labours.

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