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February 20 - February 22, 2020
“Hurry,” he wrote, “involves excessive haste or a state of urgency. It is associated with words such as hurl, hurdle, hurly-burly (meaning “uproar”), and hurricane.” He defined it as a “state of frantic effort one falls into in response to inadequacy, fear, and guilt.”
What would my life be like if God touched my mind as frequently as I touch my phone?)
Take a deep breath. Put your cell phone away. Let your heart slow down. Let God take care of the world.
Why am I in such a rush to become somebody I don’t even like? It hits me like a freight train: in America you can be a success as a pastor and a failure as an apprentice of Jesus; you can gain a church and lose your soul.
“As go the leaders, so goes the church.”3
I’m on the unpaved road with no clue where it leads, but that’s okay. I honestly value who I’m becoming over where I end up. And for the first time in years, I’m smiling at the horizon.
Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han ends his book The Burnout Society with a haunting observation of most people in the Western world: “They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.”5
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.7
“What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?”4 There’s a long silence on the other end of the line… According to John, “With Willard there’s always a long silence on the other end of the line.” Then: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Willard: “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.
Carl Jung had this little saying: Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.
“The number one problem you will face is time. People are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually rich and vibrant lives.”
Granted, there is a healthy kind of busyness where your life is full with things that matter, not wasted on empty leisure or trivial pursuits. By that definition Jesus himself was busy. 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.
Michael Zigarelli from the Charleston Southern University School of Business conducted the Obstacles to Growth Survey of over twenty thousand Christians across the globe and identified busyness as a major distraction from spiritual life. Listen carefully to his hypothesis: It may be the case that (1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to (2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to (3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to (4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions
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Finnish proverb so eloquently quips, “God did not create hurry.”
Hurry and love are oil and water: they simply do not mix.
Paul’s definition of love, the first descriptor is “patient.”8
Kosuke Koyama put this language around it: God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love.9
The same is true for joy and peace—two of the other core realities of the kingdom. Love, joy, and peace are the triumvirate at the heart of Jesus’s kingdom vision. All three are more than just emotions; they are overall conditions of the heart. They aren’t just pleasant feelings; they are the kinds of people we become through our apprenticeship to Jesus, who embodies all three ad infinitum.
Think of joy. All the spiritual masters from inside and outside the Jesus tradition agree on this one (as do secular psychologists, mindfulness experts, etc.): if there’s a secret to happiness, it’s simple—presence to the moment. The more present we are to the now, the more joy we tap into.
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.
John wisely observed: “I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul.”
Walter Adams, the spiritual director to C. S. Lewis: To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.11
Meaning, very little can be done with hurry that can’t be done better without it. Especially our lives with God. And even our work for God.
Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. 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
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T. S. Eliot. A little of it I even understood, like his line about “this twittering world” where people are “distracted from distraction by distraction.”13 Meaning, a world with just enough distraction to avoid the wound that could lead us to healing and life.
We are “distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.”
Ortberg has said, For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We wi...
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Willard was right? That an overbusy, digitally distracted life of speed is the greatest threat to spiritual life that we face in the modern world?
I can’t help but wonder if Jesus would say to our entire generation what he said to Martha: “You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.”15
Listen to one historian’s summary of this key moment: Here was man’s declaration of independence from the sun, new proof of his mastery over himself and his surroundings. Only later would it be revealed that he had accomplished this mastery by putting himself under the dominion of a machine with imperious demands all its own.5
America. 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. You see this cultural shift in advertising. Commercials and magazine ads for luxury items like a Maserati or a Rolex used to show the rich sitting by a pool in the south of France. Now they are more likely to show the wealthy in New York or downtown LA leading a meeting from a high-rise office, going out for late-night drinks at a trendy club, or traveling
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Andrew Sullivan, in an essay for New York Times Magazine entitled “I Used to Be a Human Being,” had this provocative analysis: That Judeo-Christian tradition recognized a critical distinction—and tension—between noise and silence, between getting through the day and getting a grip on one’s whole life. The Sabbath—the Jewish institution co-opted by Christianity—was…a moment of calm to reflect on our lives under the light of eternity. It helped define much of Western public life once a week for centuries—only to dissipate, with scarcely a passing regret, into the commercial cacophony of the past
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Nicholas Carr’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is still the seminal work on this evolution (or devolution?). He wrote: What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.13
A similar study found that just being in the same room as our phones (even if they are turned off) “will reduce someone’s working memory and problem-solving skills.” Translation: they make us dumber. As one summary of the report put it, “If you grow dependent on your smartphone, it becomes a magical device that silently shouts your name at your brain at all times.”
Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook (played by Justin Timberlake in the movie), now calls himself a “conscientious objector” to social media. In an interview with Axios, he begrudgingly admitted: God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains. The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them,…was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a
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Tony Schwartz said in his opinion piece for the New York Times: Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet.27
Neil Postman, another prescient thinker, well ahead of his time, gave this prophetic warning for our day: Technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things…. Every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control.28
Gandhi wisely said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
To summarize: after millennia of slow, gradual acceleration, in recent decades the sheer velocity of our culture has reached an exponential fever pitch. My question is simple: What is all this distraction, addiction, and pace of life doing to our souls?
Lettie Cowman, in her telling of this story, wrote, This whirling rushing life which so many of us live does for us what that first march did for those poor jungle tribesmen. The difference: they knew what they needed to restore life’s balance; too often we do not.1
Meyer Friedman—the cardiologist who rose to fame for theorizing that type A people who are chronically angry and in a hurry are more prone to heart attacks—defined it thus: A continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time.3
hurry is a form of violence on the soul.
an overbusy, hurried life of speed is the new normal in the Western world, and it’s toxic.
Thomas Merton once called “the rush and pressure of modern life” a “pervasive form of contemporary violence.”9 Violence is the perfect word.
Hurry kills relationships.
kills joy, gratitude, app...
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kills wisdom; wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow. Wisdom has its own pace. It makes you
Hurry kills all that we hold dear: spirituality, health, marriage, family, thoughtful work, creativity, generosity…name
