I was on my first day of vacation traveling from Louisville to Amsterdam and having a very antsy night. I was beside myself in a tiny, narrow, confining hotel space with a racing mind that wanted to keep doing rather than just being. My thought process just wouldn’t let go.
I asked myself: “Why does my life feel so hectic?” It’s because I need to concentrate on the fundamental things of life. Just getting up day after day and going on steadily, calmly, happily, is far more valuable to the life of the soul than frantic action can ever be.
I remember an older man who, every day after work in the late afternoon, stopped at St. Raphael Church where I was an associate pastor. The man would sit in the back pew for a good bit of time, still and silent, looking straight ahead. After some time had passed, he would get up and leave. One day I asked him, “I’m wondering, sir, why you come here. You have no prayer book. You have no Bible. You carry no rosary. You don’t appear to be praying — what are you doing?”
The man answered, “Well, I come here every afternoon, usually after a long and tiring day. I stop here to pray. So I just sit here and look at Him, and while I’m sitting here, He just looks at me.”
All of us could learn from him, and from another old guy I heard about who would sit on his front porch in his rocking chair, rocking and smoking his pipe. A group of young people pass by, and one of them calls out, “Hey old man, what are you doing?”
The man rocks and smokes for a minute and then says, “How soon do you need to know?”
What if it’s not about achieving anything? What if it’s about receiving? What if it’s about embracing the day — this day, this moment, as a gift?
I love Abraham Heschel’s prayer: “Dear God, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me. Amaze me. Awe me in every crevice of your universe. Each day, enrapture me with your marvelous things without number. I do not work to see the reason for it all; I ask only to share the wonder of it all.”
There is a cartoon about two monks sitting in meditation. The older monk responds to a question from the younger monk: “Nothing happens next. This is it.”
We simplify our lives not by theory or a seven-step program for life management. We simplify when we follow the example of the old man in the back pew — when we sit a spell.
When we are antsy like I was on the way to Amsterdam, the spirituality of balance is needed. And the spirituality of balance has five attributes:
Equilibrium — The ability to know when to quit.
Variety — The gift of learning to savor life at every level.
Self-Awareness — The monitoring of the heart that tells us when we are too tired to really enjoy life or be our best selves for those around us.
Recreation — The virtue that sends us off to cleanse the palate of our souls from the noxious residues of yesterday.
Imperfection — The gift that saves us from destroying ourselves in the name of some apotheosis of excellence that lives only in our minds.
By Bob Mueller | Bishop of the United Catholic Church, bobmueller.org
P.S. Be inspired by this article also by Bob Mueller: Finding The Fullness Of Life
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