Years ago, I gave up playing the guitar and other hobbies, in part because I felt I had more important things to do with my time, like saving the world.  What I’ve realized little by little, and especially over this Christmas while resting, praying and sharing during vacation, is that if I want to help other people reclaim their human dignity, I have to start by living a fully human life myself, and this includes letting myself enjoy the less practical, less rational things in life.  I am the type of person who expresses my love mostly by action, but I now realize that I can’t let my work be its only expression, and I also need to allow for the time, space and expressions of God’s and other people’s love for me.  If I let myself turn into a one-dimensional rational work machine, I end up dehumanizing myself and therefore I become less able to love.  In a word, I need to follow the Holy Trinity’s example and let my love for the world become more incarnate — limited but also enacted by a body and its capacities, as messy and complex as the history and community in which it’s inserted, and complete in its multi-dimensional depth and fullness. 

So it looks like the next step in my own gradual incarnation is to pick up the guitar again.  Since feeling this spiritual movement after a vow renewal retreat last week, I’ve been seeing many confirmations of it as something from the good spirit.  On a symbolic level for me, spending time playing the guitar will mean accepting that my past radical zeal, while generous and concerned with the real world, was also dangerously divorced from my own humanization.  I think it will also help that process of humanization, or incarnation, in more concrete ways:  it will be good to have a hobby to accompany my solitude on those long evenings spent in an empty Jesuit house, when I’m not in the mood to go out and visit people (this is part of an incarnate vocation too).  And for those days, the guitar offers a form of re-creation that will let me “put stuff out” emotionally, as opposed to “taking stuff in” (like when I read, watch TV or listen to recorded music), which I need because in my work I’m always taking stuff in.  Finally, many liturgical songs really move me, put me in God’s presence and help me communicate with God, so I hope that a little guitar-playing with those songs will soon start to enrich my prayer life.

In all honesty, I’m not a natural musician and I suppose I’ll never be one.  When I used to play in high school, the best I could do was to memorize solo pieces, while my friends picked up songs from the radio and could improvise at jamm sessions.  But that’s not the point.  The magis here, in my case, is not about future apostolic impact as a performing artist; it’s about regaining a gratuitous dimension of myself — I hope that playing the guitar again will make me more able to love in the rest of what I do, even if it means I work a little less overtime.

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