Loving God and neighbor are our highest duties, yet we turn from those duties when we allow our lives to become so disordered that we are too busy to hear.
Following a tip from a scholar-priest I follow at Cambridge, Maggi Dawn, I reserved time to dust off my copy of Eugene Peterson’s The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction
But the word busy is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It is not devotion but defection. The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a husband, or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront…“
Can the busyness of our lives be symptomatic of creeping idolatry, akin to hedging our bets at the altars of Baal while claiming allegiance to the Temple? Should the sounds of our busyness resound as a warning against spiritual adultery?
Following C.S. Lewis, Peterson makes a strong case that our busyness too often results from laziness. We are too busy to order our lives rightly, and as a result we excuse ourselves of the duties to be present to one another and to listen to God. A key indicator of our idolatry: we are too busy to pray:
I know it takes time to develop a life of prayer: set-aside, disciplined, deliberate time. It isn’t accomplished on the run….I know I can’t be busy and pray at the same time. I can be active and pray; I can work and pray; but I cannot be busy and pray. I cannot be inwardly rushed, distracted, or dispersed. In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than to my clamoring ego. Usually, for that to happen there must be a deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day, a disciplined detachment from the insatiable self.
The same is true about our duty to loved ones. We can be good lovers and parents and sons and daughters and friends and priests when we are active, but not when we are inwardly rushed, distracted, or dispersed.
Loving God and neighbor are our highest duties, yet we turn from those duties when we allow our lives to become so disordered that we are too busy to hear. Like Lewis, Peterson claims it is laziness and perhaps idolatry at the heart of our anxious busyness.
By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us; then we find ourselves frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen different demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation….
It’s for this reason that C.S. Lewis claims that “only lazy people work hard.“ As Peterson notes, “leisure is a quality of spirit, not a quantity of time. Only in the ambiance of leisure do persons know they are listened to with absolute seriousness, treated with dignity and importance.“ And that means that the intentional disciple sets aside time for holy leisure, which of course is what sabbath living is all about.
Are you too busy to listen? Too busy to truly hear? Too busy to truly and actively love as God intends? If so, it may be time for you to repent of your lazy busyness, and to do right now the hard work of ordering your life toward the priority of holy leisure.
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