Learning to celebrate

We must learn to celebrate. I say learn to celebrate because celebration is not just a spontaneous event. We have to discover what celebration is. Our world doesn’t know much abut celebration. We know quite a bit about parties, where we are artificially stimulated with alcohol to have fun. We know what movies and distractions are. But do we know what celebration is? Do we know how to celebrate our togetherness, our being one body? Do we really know how to use all that is human and divine to celebrate together?

Jean Vanier

The Reverend Peter Carey, Senior Associate Rector, St. Paul's Memorial Church, Charlottesville, VA

 The Reverend Peter Carey, Senior Associate Rector, 

St. Paul's Memorial Church, Charlottesville, VA

2012-2014

The Disease of Being Busy

The Disease of Being Busy 

BY OMID SAFI (@OSTADJAAN),  WEEKLY COLUMNIST

I saw a dear friend a few days ago. I stopped by to ask her how she was doing, how her family was. She looked up, voice lowered, and just whimpered: “I’m so busy… I am so busy… have so much going on.”

Almost immediately after, I ran into another friend and asked him how he was. Again, same tone, same response: “I’m just so busy… got so much to do.”

The tone was exacerbated, tired, even overwhelmed.

And it’s not just adults. When we moved to North Carolina about ten years ago, we were thrilled to be moving to a city with a great school system. We found a diverse neighborhood, filled with families. Everything felt good, felt right.

After we settled in, we went to one of the friendly neighbors, asking if their daughter and our daughter could get together and play. The mother, a really lovely person, reached for her phone and pulled out the calendar function. She scrolled… and scrolled… and scrolled. She finally said: “She has a 45-minute opening two and half weeks from now. The rest of the time it’s gymnastics, piano, and voice lessons. She’s just…. so busy.”

Horribly destructive habits start early, really early.

How did we end up living like this? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we do this to our children? When did we forget that we are human beings, not human doings?

Whatever happened to a world in which kids get muddy, get dirty, get messy, and heavens, get bored? Do we have to love our children so much that we overschedule them, making them stressed and busy — just like us?

What happened to a world in which we can sit with the people we love so much and have slow conversations about the state of our heart and soul, conversations that slowly unfold, conversations with pregnant pauses and silences that we are in no rush to fill?

How did we create a world in which we have more and more and more to do with less time for leisure, less time for reflection, less time for community, less time to just… be?

Somewhere we read, “The unexamined life is not worth living… for a human.” How are we supposed to live, to examine, to be, to become, to be fully human when we are so busy?

This disease of being “busy” (and let’s call it what it is, the dis-ease of being busy, when we are never at ease) is spiritually destructive to our health and wellbeing. It saps our ability to be fully present with those we love the most in our families, and keeps us from forming the kind of community that we all so desperately crave.

Since the 1950s, we have had so many new technological innovations that we thought (or were promised) would make our lives easier, faster, simpler. Yet, we have no more “free” or leisurely time today than we did decades ago.

For some of us, the “privileged” ones, the lines between work and home have become blurred. We are on our devices. All. The. Freaking. Time.

Read it all HERE at onbeing

Courage

“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.”
~Yeats

Do you need a "walkabout"? Bishop Steven Charleston recommends one!

"Among the Aboriginal People there is the tradition of the walkabout, an intentional time when young persons go out in search of themselves in the Outback, the remote places of interior Australia. I think there are times when we all could benefit from taking a walkabout of the soul, times when we let our spirits roam free, out into the wilder places remote from our comfortable dogma. We need the new. We grow in the strange. We learn from the challenge. God is not always found in the tame spaces, but in the outback of faith. So I think I will wander into the welcoming wilderness, looking to discover what waits beyond my own horizon."

Bishop Steven Charleston