Wasting Time

Wasting Time

“Parents, can you “waste time” with your children? It is one of the most important things that you can do each day.” –@pontifex, twitter, 10/27/2015

My youngest child is a living pause button in my life.  At 6, he is too little to know the pressures and programming of homework and club sports, and too much of a little boy to be stressed out by a schedule.  As he’s ushered through his day’s activities he somehow maintains a space in his brain that is free, where he considers the best design for a Lego airplane, or which tree’s leaves would fall to the ground first in a race. 

He often invites me into this space.  At the grocery store, as I am trying to get in, grab what we need, get out and move on to the next task, he stops dead in his tracks:  “Mom, if this was a mine, I would use a pick axe and get that apple, because it’s green like emeralds.  What would you dig out? Do you like the apples that are red like rubies?  Rubies are beautiful, you know. You could put them in earrings.”  Pause.  Shift gears. Look down at his bright eyes, get into his curious mind… “I would definitely pick the rubies, Daniel.  And look- bananas!!!  They’re gold! We should mine those too!”  He lights up, “Yes, mom! We should mine the bananas to get gold to pay for our groceries!!!”  Our chore became a treasure hunt. 

“Busy with the ugliness of the expensive success,
We forget the easiness of free beauty
Lying right around the corner,
Only an instant removed,
Unnoticed and squandered.”
―Dejan Stojanovic

The world must be strange to my son, looking up at all the adults rushing about, glued to their cell phones, missing the fascinating world around them.

For grownups, a moment of forced pause, of silence, is uneasy. At each red light the invitation to solitude, to observation, to thought, is drowned by the distraction of a smart phone… so we can keep up with how busy everyone else is.  What are we afraid of missing?

“Being busy is better than being bored. Bored left a long time ago. Busy is always around for me. ” ―Tabitha Robin

When we’re busy, we don’t need to make time to give attention to others or confront problems. Busy is soothing, busy is productive, busy makes us feel accomplished…

A recent article about the decline of innovation in our time asserts that for centuries, 80 percent of people made their living using their hands, doing manual labor, which left their brains free to roam, to explore, and to innovate.  Now, 80 percent of the developed world works using their minds.  Most manual tasks are automated. We have lost the freedom to be bored, to let our minds wander and explore.  Add on the instant entertainment from our cell phones when we have to wait or stop working and there is no space left for imagination.

Our schedules are crazy, but our minds are busier.

“I wanted to figure out why I was so busy, but I couldn’t find the time to do it.” ―Todd Stocker

Busyness infects Christians too.  We’re tempted to believe that if we aren’t hyper-busy, we neglect the urgency that the mission of serving God deserves.  We look at the saints, but focus on what they did instead of who they were.  We try to cram maximum evangelizing efficiency into every hour, instead of maximizing our presence and love in each hour. Taking corporate skills to the kingdom. Streamlining it. Multitasking it.

“One of the most convicting things I have recently come to realize about Jesus is that He was never, not once, in a hurry.” ―Mark Buchanan

Jesus never multitasked.  Instead, he showed us that we are made to go deeply into our experiences and to be fully present to each other.

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her.” –Luke 10:41

The multi-tasking myth has us so busy with “many things” (see above) that we neglect each other and do our work with less excellence than if we had given it our full attention. Knowing Christ demands pause.  It demands silence. It demands holding His gaze and allowing it to penetrate us for as long as He wants.  It demands that we live Holy Saturdays of questions with no answers and an inertia that becomes humility, prayer and surrender. Christ builds the kingdom in and through us. We just show up, with a FIAT.  And that accomplishes the will of the Father in us.  It shows those we touch that the way to God is not in buying his love with good activity, but by being with him and letting him love us.

“…caught up in our own busyness, frantically running from one crisis to the next in a cycle that looks less like loving the Messiah and more like trying to become one.” ―Phileena Heuertz

The whole point of our mission is to create spaces for Christ to love others through us, and for others to experience his transforming presence.  That’s it.  Yes, we strive for excellence, we do our best for Christ, but we do our best, to best be able to LOVE.

“What a pity if in the end you had carried out ‘your’ apostolate and not ‘His’” –St Josemaria Escriva

This morning as my 6 year old was putting on his shoes I sipped my coffee, picked up my phone and read what Pope Francis wrote on twitter overnight:

“Parents, can you “waste time” with your children? It is one of the most important things that you can do each day.” –@pontifex, twitter, 10/27/2015

It dawned on me that though the pope knows that this is good for our kids, he is also asking us adults to live the way WE need to as children of God the Father.  The Father loves to waste time with us. He lavishes his love on us with delight, unconditionally, without any other motive.  Not only do we as parents need to waste time with our children, we need to waste time AS children of the Father…. In one of those amazing paradoxes that God is so good at, we see that spending time with our kids becomes a mutual exchange of love, a love that nurtures them and makes us more like children.  As He said….

“Truly I say to you, unless you change and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” –Mt 18:3

And isn’t that the point?

So my takeaways from time wasted at the grocery store:

1. Plan, but live in the moment. Organize time and priorities well, but when living them, live them fully. Be present in the moment and encounter God and others there.
2. Put down the phone. Schedule time to check email and social media and then have boundaries that exclude the phone from moments when God calls me to take a breath of solitude with him, to be Alone with the Alone at a red light, or be observant and present to others or ideas when bored in the car-pool line, at the check-out, etc.…
3. Put actions and ministry at the service of Love. Make sure what I am doing creates a space for love to work, no more, no less. Live the apostolate of personal attention to others.
4. Let the Father waste time with me each day (i.e. prayer). Make the space, the pause, to let him lavish his love on me. He is waiting for it. Christ died for it.

What Francis didn't say

What Francis didn’t say  

I think Archbishop Kurtz summed it up well by saying that being in Philadelphia with Pope Francis this week was like being on retreat, like hearing again that “original call” from Christ. And while the Holy Father’s words were incredibly meaningful, there was something else that struck me powerfully. 

Nothing in the course of history has been as impactful as language: on a person, on a community, on a culture. It has been our connector throughout time. God himself became WORD, knowing the resonance he would have in our hearts for generations. 

Writing is art and a space for community.  It is a unique medium, inviting us to grow in our maturity, understanding, and humanity: touching our minds, hearts and experience in an integrated way.  It can connect culture and life with truth, dialogue and our shared, but deeply personal human experience.

But in our culture, language is broken. We are saturated with information, not wisdom.  We have no common lexicon. What ‘love’ means to me is not the same to those who would hi-jack the term. What ‘freedom’ has always meant has been bent to serve a less noble purpose. And ‘family’ is no longer a clearly defined concept.  Language has not only been distorted by agendas but cheapened and commercialized for profit.

We are living in a new age of Babel, where dialogue fails because we can’t understand each other.  So we need to communicate, and to listen, with more than our voices and our ears, because truth is not bound by language, and neither is God… if we listen.

It’s through what Francis didn’t say that he taught us to listen.  In a loud, noisy, polarized culture, there isn’t a lot of listening going on.  Fears and frustrations, expectations and agendas scream at each other… in politics, social media, relationships, and even in the Church.  This swirling vortex watched Francis and was determined to draw him in, to applaud or condemn him for his part in the American drama while in our land.  But ‘Hurricane Francis’ in many ways, was the ‘still silent sound’ (1 Kings 19:12) that confounded those who expected him to use the language of fire and brimstone.  He spoke truth to power in unexpected ways instead of in thunderous rebukes. He spoke of Truth, of Goodness, of Beauty, the face of God Himself, so that nothing less is adequate. Nothing less is worthy.  Nothing less could satisfy. It’s going to take me weeks to pour over his words and reflect on the lessons God has for me in them.

But more than what Francis said is what he didn’t say.  What he didn’t say teaches us to hear if we have ears.  To truly listen to a message that biased media and our own preconceptions and expectations can’t distort.  To be surprised by God. To listen to the powerful unspoken message of a father, showing us the warm embrace of The Father, come to be close to the fatherless in a land where 40 percent of children grow up without a full time dad.  Proximity speaks volumes in a cold and distant culture with fragmented families.  He is here because he loves.  Because God loves us this way.

The visit to the Little Sisters of the Poor after his address to the most powerful legislative body in the world.  Meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk jailed for being obedient to a Christian conscience. Eating with the homeless instead of with congress. Visiting a prison where many of us would fear to go.

Stopping, so many times, to embrace the smallest among us, the weakest among us, the broken among us. Without words speaking volumes to us about how God loves us in our smallness, our weakness, our spiritual destitution, in spite of the ways we offend Him daily. How we must love each other. Encouraging us to be strong in our consciences, our convictions, to ‘be not afraid’.  Just Listen. His message was clear and resonant.

The stamina needed for six days in two countries, the attention of the world on him, guarded by secret service, speaking to the most intense and powerful leaders in the world (several times in a language he learned just to be able to communicate to us) with sciatica pain, short nights and long days. At the age of 78. And yet with an indefatigable smile that spoke sincerity and gentleness, and an exuberant joy that rose to the surface like a fountain at times, like when he spoke off the cuff late Saturday night at the Festival of Families. 

10 pm. Many people had already left as it got dark, assuming he would not take the podium.  I am usually in bed by then. But that night, his voice, his words, his joy, reminded me of Mary, exhausted after her journey, but brought to life by the stirring of God within her, such that his ‘soul proclaimed the goodness of the Lord, and his spirit rejoiced in God our savior.’ So we stayed – and heard him speak.

His words that night were the most beautiful I have ever heard him speak, but it was the witness of this Father, late at night, with his children around him, joyfully loving and exhorting us to be lovers of the true, good and beautiful, because God is true good and beautiful, that left me in tears.

Listen, to the clear message of our true identity as a family, the family of which he is father, that he spoke by drawing together 900 000 men, women, children, priests, nuns, consecrated people for a moment of joy. A family celebration. 

Listen to his gentleness, his smile. His genuine presence among us.  No cell phone, no selfies. He was there in the moment, perhaps more than any of us were. We had his undivided attention.

He pointed to the best in us as an American people while he addressed congress, asking us to rise to what we are created to be, instead of condemning us as being the sum of our mistakes as he justly could have. 

Like a father.

The Acts of the Apostles says that “Where Peter’s shadow fell, there was healing” (Acts 5:15-16). America is in the shadow of Peter, and I pray, not with a furtive hope, but with a peaceful confidence, that this country will never be the same. I know I won’t be.  

There are moments in history and in our personal histories where God withholds answers & clarity, or reveals them bit by bit. We can sometimes feel a bit stuck or like we are stumbling in the dark. For me, the World Meeting of Families and Visit of the Holy Father was like walking the road to Emmaus.  It was like a cloudy night broke to show the constellations I could confidently chart my map by. I hope for this country the clouds of politics, fears, consumerism and utilitarianism also broke, and that for the 900 000 there, and everyone else who had ears to listen; we can truly “Go forth and proclaim the Gospel.”

Francis said it in words, but shouted it with his presence, “Love is celebration. Love is joy. Love is moving forward.” I am determined to move forward with him and invite along everyone I meet…. 

Coming?