The Siren Song of "I Need It Now"

Since committing myself to Holy Cross’s Rule for Associates, I’ve tried to live more in balance: less time at work, more space for quiet, more routine ensconced in prayer. So much fruit has come from this—and some of it is most visible during those times when, Rule or no Rule, work and other commitments still get out of hand.

The last two weeks, for instance—which included a gigantic work project on ridiculous deadlines—have reminded me just what it feels like to live out of balance. The frenetic pace robs me of my ability to pray, concentrate, or reflect deeply. I have neither the time nor the energy to step back and gain perspective. I suspect this is why people call you for information you’ve already provided in an e-mail, or they repeat back something to you that they think you said, but you really didn’t: they’re moving so fast that they haven’t been able to pay attention.

I can’t live this way for more than a couple of weeks. The pace is insane. It is also, however, strangely seductive. To pull it off, I have to restrict myself to a certain level of input, sealing off perspectives that might intrude on my own sphere. As long as I stay in that zone, I’m OK…or so I think. It makes life easier. It gives at least the illusion of control in a culture that drowns us in information and false urgency.

This isn’t necessarily bad in the short run. Sometimes it’s all you can do to cope with what’s at hand. But when this becomes a long-term strategy for dealing with the world, it closes us off to the essentials: to God, to the deep workings of the universe, to one another, to plight of those who are poor, to listening. It keeps us from the abundant life that God holds out to us to savor and engage.

I wonder if this is why we so often have epiphanies during a crisis or catastrophe. In those moments, life breaks through the illusion of control and forces us to waken to something larger. It may not be that “this catastrophe happened for a reason”: maybe it just happened, and for better or worse, it now presents an opportunity to see beyond our limited sphere.

It’s an opportunity worth seizing, within crisis or without. The life beyond modern culture’s frantic pace—especially life with the Divine Presence—is rich beyond measure. May we embrace it with both arms.

Three Words to Promote Healing

No, not those three words. To be sure, I love you goes a long way toward building solid relationships and healing broken ones. But three other words might help the healing process as well.

I don’t know.

Something in our DNA compels us toward knowledge. Perhaps it’s the thirst for understanding: where would science be today without it? Maybe, less beneficially, it’s the desire for control. Or the drive to hold on to something concrete amid constant change: such a drive, I suspect, has contributed mightily to the rise of fundamentalism.

One tiny problem: certainty eludes us. The cosmos isn’t built for it. Look at the mind-boggling uncertainty at the subatomic level; you can’t even tell where a particle is with any certainty. On the human level, we have studied the psyche for thousands of years—and yet there is still so much about our inner life that is mysterious.

This is all the more true of God. Even the Bible speaks of a God who changes course and sometimes seems to act in a contradictory manner. In our everyday lives, God stuns us just when we think we’ve got him—wait, her?—figured out.

If we could embrace such uncertainty—if we could hold our ideas about God and the world lightly—we would be more at peace with the nature of things. But in so many ways, we insist on certainty. That, in turn, means that we clash with others who cling to their certainty. We cannot afford to listen and dialogue because our certainty might be threatened.

Conversely, the more we embrace I don’t know as our fundamental orientation, the more we open to the thoughts and insights of others—even others with whom we disagree. That enables us to move into dialogue, into respect for other people and their own experiences of God, into appreciation for those experiences and what they can teach us.

In a world where so many people and cultures clash with one another over their conflicting “certainties,” the simple admission of I don’t know could be the dialogical equivalent of laying down one’s arms—the first step to peace and to healing.