Ambition is the energy that moves us on our path in life. When we are young we have time to engage in pleasant daydreams, to escape from the material realm into fantasies of satisfaction and delight. And then comes the clamant call to immediate action, to pursue our schemes in tangible careers or occupations, so that we may both live and justify ourselves among the names of the living. Our real home may be with God from which we trail clouds of glory as we venture forth into the world of childhood and adolescence - as Wordsworth perceived in his "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". But we have to fashion a less beautiful home here on earth when, as adults, we can depend on nobody except ourselves to proceed with the work. It happens only too often that haste and inefficiency mar our efforts, while we may now and then fall into grosser company and betray our higher calling as humans in actions of questionable honesty and tired immorality.

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sonnet "God's Grandeur" speaks not only of the human desecration of the earth but also, more fundamentally, of the person's desecration of his or her own life in following the paths of expediency, in sacrificing moral excellence for the mores of the general public. One can appreciate the profundity of Jesus' baptism of repentance as a sign of his complete identification with the masses; who so seldom know what they are doing to themselves and the earth on which they depend for sustenance. He remained inviolate, so radiant was the Holy Spirit within him, but we fall all too readily into temptation. The spirit may be willing, but the weakness of the poor flesh is pitiful to behold. St Paul writes, "The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will" (Rom. 7.19). He goes on to discover the sinful principle within us all which frustrates all our good intentions: we ourselves, by that very fact, cannot heal ourselves of this fundamental incubus. But God, in the person of his Son Jesus Christ, has placed salvation before us, since Jesus, in accepting the sin of the world and remaining uncorrupted by it, has lifted its burden from us, reconciling us once more to the Father. And so we even now, though we may often betray the highest in our reach, are still united to God, whose love sees us in the form of our distant aspirations even when our past and present actions belie our sincerity.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Indeed, God's grandeur is, if anything, magnified by the ill-considered incursions of the human being. Our efforts, if well motivated in terms of love, bear their own reward, as do our humble lives even when our childhood ambitions remain unfulfilled. We are; as St Augustine puts it, what we love. We believe that in the fullness of time we will actualize that love in our relationships. These will last; even if the outer edifice of our works returns to the earth from which it was built.

Give me, Lord, sincerity of heart to cling to the highest I know even when the voices of the crowd occlude my deeper knowledge. May my integrity of purpose dead them quietly beyond indifference to the path of commitment where they may begin to know themselves as children of the light.