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December 25, 2021 - January 12, 2022
“There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.
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The problem isn’t when you have a lot to do; it’s when you have too much to do and the only way to keep the quota up is to hurry.
Hurry and love are incompatible.
To restate: love, joy, and peace are at the heart of all Jesus is trying to grow in the soil of your life. And all three are incompatible with hurry.
We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens.
It used to be that leisure was a sign of wealth. People with more money spent their time playing tennis or sailing in the bay or sipping white wine during lunch at the golf club. But that’s changed. Now busyness is a sign of wealth.
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape. He offers us something far better: “equipment.” He offers his apprentices a whole new way to bear the weight of our humanity: with ease. At his side. Like two oxen in a field, tied shoulder to shoulder. With Jesus doing all the heavy lifting. At his pace. Slow, unhurried, present to the moment, full of love and joy and peace. An easy life isn’t an option; an easy yoke is.
If a vine doesn’t have a trellis, it will die. And if your life with Jesus doesn’t have some kind of structure to facilitate health and growth, it will wither away.
The point of a trellis isn’t to make the vines stand up straight in neat rows, but rather to attain a rich, deep glass of wine. It’s to create space for the vine to grow and bear fruit.
There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived…. This new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.
Andrew Sullivan
The noise of the modern world makes us deaf to the voice of God, drowning out the one input we most need.
“Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness” because it was there, and only there, that Jesus was at the height of his spiritual powers. It was only after a month and a half of prayer and fasting in the quiet place that he had the capacity to take on the devil himself and walk away unscathed.
Solitude is engagement; isolation is escape. Solitude is safety; isolation is danger. Solitude is how you open yourself up to God; isolation is painting a target on your back for the tempter. Solitude is when you set aside time to feed and water and nourish your soul. To let it grow into health and maturity. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the former.
one of the great problems of spirituality in our day and age that so few people feel safe enough to admit is how separated we feel from God. We rarely experience God’s presence throughout our day. “Love, joy, and peace” does not describe the felt experience of many Christians.
relational time is wildly inefficient. It comes in fits and bursts. You spend a day together, but it’s one short conversation you remember, a passing comment that changes everything.
Sabbath is the primary discipline, or practice, by which we cultivate the spirit of restfulness in our lives as a whole.
Shabbat means “to stop.” But it can also be translated “to delight.” It has this dual idea of stopping and also of joying in God and our lives in his world. The Sabbath is an entire day set aside to follow God’s example, to stop and delight.
Sabbath isn’t just a twenty-four-hour time slot in your weekly schedule; it’s a spirit of restfulness that goes with you throughout your week. A way of living with “ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer.” A way of working from rest, not for rest, with nothing to prove. A way of bearing fruit from abiding, not ambition.
The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has made the point that in the Western world, materialism has become the new, dominant system of meaning.7 He argues atheism hasn’t replaced cultural Christianity; shopping has. We now get our meaning in life from what we consume.
In 1927 one journalist observed this about America: A change has come over our democracy. It is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. In almost every act of our daily lives…we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who pull the wires which control the public mind.
Edward Bernays - Freud's nephew, "Propaganda"
Mark Twain perceptively noted, “Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.”
As Western wealth and technology continue to rise, many psychologists point out that our happiness is not increasing at pace. In fact, some studies indicate that as a nation’s wealth goes up, its happiness goes down. Or at least levels off. Something about the human psyche quickly adapts to a new normal. Things we categorize as “needs”—a car, a telephone, a daily multivitamin, electricity, running water—didn’t even exist until recently, and yet many people were quite happy without them.
Remember those predictions from the Nixon era that by now we’d all be working three or four hours each morning and playing golf in the afternoon while the robots made our living for us? What happened? Well, part of the story is that we chose money and stuff over time and freedom. We opted for a new 4K projector for movie night instead of “a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.”25 Instead of spending money to get time, we opted for the reverse: we spend time to get money.
“Simplicity is an inward reality that can be seen in an outward lifestyle”38 of “choosing to leverage time, money, talents and possessions toward what matters most.”
Jesus clearly sided with minimalism over materialism. No question. As Richard Foster noted, “a carefree unconcern for possessions” is what “marks life in the kingdom.”50 And Jesus put on display this “carefree unconcern” so incredibly well. To follow Jesus, especially in the Western world, is to live in that same tension between grateful, happy enjoyment of nice, beautiful things, and simplicity. And when in doubt, to err on the side of generous, simple living.
English designer William Morris offered a good rule of thumb: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
it will cost you to follow Jesus and live his way of simplicity. But it will cost you far more not to. It will cost you money and time and a life of justice and the gift of a clean conscience and time for prayer and an unrushed soul and, above all, the “life that is truly life.”
Walter Brueggemann: Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.
Slow down. Breathe. Come back to the moment. Receive the good as gift. Accept the hard as a pathway to peace. Abide.
But each time I recite my little liturgy, I come back to the moment. The moment is where you find God, find your soul, find your life. Life isn’t “out there” in the next dopamine hit, the next task, the next experience; it’s right here, now. As Frank Laubach, who self-identified as a “modern mystic,” so beautifully said, “Every now is an eternity if it is full of God.”
To live a quiet life in a world of noise is a fight, a war of attrition, a calm rebellion against the status quo.
