An alert and loving confrontation

Writing about the poets and others who have influenced her, and of the 'inherited responsibility' of being formed by exposure to their work, Mary Oliver says this:

I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life, with them I enter the event, I mold the meditation, I keep if I can some essence of the hour, even as it slips away. And I do not accomplish this alert and loving confrontation by myself and alone, but through terrifying and continual effort, and with this immeasurable, fortifying company, bright as stars in the heaven of my mind.

(Upstream, p.57f, my emphasis)

It strikes me that what she says is comparable, for those in ministry, to the great theological minds and writers we are blessed to have at our fingertips. And so, daily, to this alert and loving confrontation, with terrifying and continual effort.