Busyness

“Busyness, of course, is not peculiar to the pastoral life; it is endemic to our culture.. We need a strategy that takes into account two sets of demands that seem to cancel each other out.. The first set of demands is that we respond with compassionate attentiveness to the demands of the people around us...demands that refuse to stay within the confines of regular hours and always exceed our capacity to meet them..

“The second set of demands is that we respond with reverent prayer to the demand of God for our attention, to listen to him, to take him seriously in the actual circumstances of this calendar day, at this street address, and not bluff our way through by adopting a professionalized role. This is a kind of attentiveness that we know from instruction and experience can be entered into only slowly and deliberately. There is a large, leisurely center to existence where God must be deeply pondered, lovingly believed. It means entering realms of spirit where wonder and adoration have space to develop, where play and delight have time to flourish. Is this possible for pastors who have this other set before them daily?

“It is possible for pastors. Because there is a biblical provision for it.. The name for it is sabbath…”

Eugene Peterson in Working the Angles

Your Most Important Conversation

Gordon McDonald, who probably knows as much as anyone about what happens when you don't spend enough time with God, has written an article for the Leadership Journal called, Your Most Important Conversation.

Here's a short extract.

Among my most frequently-asked questions to men and women in leadership who are struggling with spiritual malaise is, "What does an ideal week look like for you? Describe for me the priority activities that fill your week." Usually, I hear a list of leader-like activities with which we are all familiar: staff meetings, sermon study, consultations with church leaders, training seminars, budget meetings, counseling appointments, long-range planning functions. Sometimes there is comment about physical exercise (that's good) and family functions (that's even "gooder"). But what is missing all too often? Any allusion to a personal Sabbath: those times for activities that enlarge and cleanse the soul, times for inner conversation.

"What do you do in Sabbath time?" I am sometimes asked. I disappoint, I suspect, when I evade the formulaic answer. I discarded the gimmicks a long time ago. They didn't work for me. What became more important was outcomes. What do I do? Simple: whatever it takes for a renewed sense of conversion to Christ, a deeper awareness of the biblical way, an assurance that God's grace and power remain with me.

When I ask many leaders if there is time in their calendars for the pursuit of such outcomes, I get these kinds of responses:

• I'm just too busy.
• I don't have the slightest idea what I'd do if I took the time.
• My mind is too full of thought; I can't concentrate.
• I'm an extrovert. Being alone, being quiet, reflecting is not my thing.
• I don't get any immediate result out of doing it.
• It's boring.

Amongst other things, McDonald discusses William Wilberforce's habit of taking a weekly Sabbath - not so much the day as the intention. Apart from McDonald's own list of questions he might ask himself at such a time, he lists the much shorter one set out by John Newton, Wilberforce's great friend and pastor:

* To begin and end every day with God.
* To peruse Scriptures with a diligence and attention suited to the dignity of the subject.
* To spend the Sabbath entirely with the Lord.
* To choose for my companions only good people from whom I may derive some improvement.
* To become all things to all men in order that I may save some.

These aren't just Sabbath statements, and they may not be something everyone can grasp hold of in their current life situation. However, between the list that McDonald offers [see the article itself], and the list that Newton gives, there is certainly plenty to consider.

"The battle is won in the secret places of the will before God," wrote Oswald Chambers. "Never first in the external world. … Nothing has power over the (person) who has fought out the battle before God and won there."

Take it easy - or go mad

I came across this wonderful paragraph in an article on something else altogether yesterday.

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idle¬ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy."

It comes from an essay by Mark Slouka entitled Quitting the Paint Factory. The reason for the title only becomes clear if you read right towards the end of the piece.

It's quite long - prints out at ten pages in Times New Roman - and his point is clear enough from early in the piece, but he hammers it home with example after example, and the whole thing is worth reading; it's worth sitting back, putting your feet up on your cluttered desk (push some of those piles of paper onto the floor, even into file 13) and chewing over what he has to say. Because it isn't just relevant to the world of work, it's relevant to the Church as a whole. The Church has taken up busy-ness as a virtue, and it just ain't.

Barbara Brown Taylor

An interesting quote from Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, Leaving Church, after she finds that life in a rural parish is just as 'busy' as life in the inner city - interesting, as this same 'busyness' is a prime factor in ministers burning out. (page 75, HarperSanFrancisco paperback edition, 2007)

I had moved to the country in order to lie down in more blessed fields, to live closer to the Divine Presence that had held me all my life, but I had once again become so busy caring for the household of God that I neglected the One who had called me there. If I still had plenty of energy for the work, that was because feeding others was still my food. As long as I fed them, I did not feel my hunger pain.

And one other quote, about her visit to Ireland:
Later I would find the Celtic theology...in which God's 'big book' of creation is revered alongside God's 'little book' of sacred scripture. I would also find Christian mystics such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Julian of Norwich, who found heaven on earth in union with the Divine. 'I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks,' Bernard wrote in the twelfth century, while Julian recognised the love of God in a hazel nut in her hand. Hildegard of Bingen coined the word viriditas ('green power') to describe the divine power of creation, while Francis of Assisi composed love songs to Brother Sun and Sister Moon.
'You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins,' wrote the seventeenth-century Anglican priest, Thomas Traherne, 'till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.' Since I had received Christian education that taught me to view creation as both fallen and inert, I was happy to discover these dissenting opinions, but they only confirmed what I already knew to be true. I did not live on the earth but in it, in communion with all that gave me life.

(Page 81-82)

More on leaving Church here.