X445SUVZNH5X

My blog post is late this week because I have been forced to sit still, literally. On Sunday I fell off a ladder and severely sprained my ankle. It’s day three, and I still can’t walk. Luckily it was not worse. A jesuit priest I know recently had hip replacement surgery. Rather than feel frustrated with his lack of mobility, he told me he had decided to turn his convalescence into a retreat. I have been thinking about that the last few days and decided that I would try to do that too. It has been a fruitful time.

My wife tells me frequently that I never slow down. I always nod and say, yes yes, but I don’t really believe her. Now I suspect she is right. This week I have come to a full stop. Oh, I can answer email, read, watch movies, stuff like that. But I’m literally not in motion and this, it turns out, is kind of a big deal. I realize I need to stop more, maybe even schedule it, and the next stoppage time will probably need even fewer distractions. I am reminded anew that is really hard to meet God and listen to what God is saying when one is careening around.

I know that the Ignatian tradition talks a lot about the goal of being contemplatives in action. That means that we can’t spend hours every day in the kind of deliberate meditative awareness that would be characteristic of the monastic life. Yet, being contemplatives in action does not mean being people in perpetual motion who think they are cultivating a contemplative awareness when instead they are careening. It’s an easy trap to fall into. We may even pretend that we haven’t because we check off our meditation time every day; prayer time can become just one more task, like painting the windows of your house (which I was doing when the ladder tossed me off), or cooking, or any one of the many imperatives that fill our days.

Fixing the kind of motion sickness I am describing here is hard. Yet if we aspire to become contemplatives in action, then we really do need to find some way to actually be contemplative so that we can then act out of and with a contemplative spirit.

Between now and my next blog entry I am going to try an experiment. I have a strong interest in theology and the environment and some of the writers I have been reading are recommending that the Church try harder to recover the sabbath as a spiritual practice. For the next month I’m going to try this out. One day a weekend I’m going to intentionally put on the breaks. I’ll turn of the email. I won’t watch the news. I won’t work on work. I’m a bit prone to Phariseeism, so, I’ll have to guard against making my experiment in sabbath keeping into yet another project to check off my task list. That would not be good.

Even as I write this, I feel a creeping sense of anxiety – “how will you get everything done if you take time to do nothing?” So, I’ll let you know what happens.

In the mean time, I’m not liking my swollen ankle, but sometimes we need a jolt to wake us up to what we need to do, the more stubborn among us often need a harder one.

Photo: “Go slow or careen out of control!” by “SandShoes” from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

No related posts.