Mark 6:30 - 34
When I was younger than I am now, I
took a certain kind of pride in having too much to do. I had a
demanding job, but felt that I should also be doing some research. I
had a big family, and worried that I wasn't giving enough of my time
to each of them. And I worried about other relationships which I had
always planned to nurture - - friends from college, for example. In
the midst of all this I took up guitar lessons, which I faithfully
squeezed in to my day. I'm still this way but not so much. But I
always have a vague feeling that I could have done more with my day,
with my week, with my year.
Turns out that this attitude is not
uncommon, especially among professional people. There just isn't
enough time for all the stuff we want to cram into it. But in a way,
that attitude is a little perverse. Someone called it an attitude of
violence towards time. After all God made enough time, and we are
trying to stretch it and squeeze more into it. We are doing violence
to time.
The apostles, if you remember from
last week, have just returned from their first mission trip. They
have been healing and teaching and driving out demons. It must have
really been exciting. There is a passage in another gospel that when
the disciples return they report to Jesus all that has been going on
and Jesus makes a comment which might have a touch of sarcasm in it.
He says, “I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven.” And then
we come to today's passage. If I were an apostle, I'd be eager to
get out there again, to do more, to wield the power I had been given.
I couldn't wait. But Jesus says, “Come away by yourselves to a
deserted place and rest for a while.” The gospel seems to indicate
that they didn't make it, but I suspect this was merely the first of
many times that Jesus told them to cool their heels and take it easy
for a bit.
Last week we celebrated the feast of
Saint Benedict of Nursia, who sort of invented western monasticism.
Up till that time there were monks, especially in the eastern half of
the empire. Being a monk meant that you spent all your time in
prayer, you might wear a hair shirt, you did a lot of fasting – and
Benedict started out that way when he organized his first monastery.
The monks who followed him were encouraged to out do each other in
the penances they took upon themselves. It got so bad that there was
a rebellion and somebody gave Benedict a poisoned drink. Legend has
it that he made the sign of the cross over it so it didn't actually
kill him, but it wasn't too much longer before the band of monks
dispersed. After a lot of thought, Benedict wrote a rule, much of
which could apply to our lives, in addition to those of monks. The
rule is all about balance.
Benedictine monks have as their motto
“ora et labora” which means, “prayer and work” Benedict
wrote a rule that went back and forth, between prayer and work.
Penances were supposed to be light, and assigned by a superior. No
more hair shirts, no more self-flagellation. Fasting was moderate,
and broken with feast now and then. Benedictines brewed beer and
made wine and consumed some of it. . You worked for a while, then
you prayed, which meant meditation, contemplation, in addition to
verbal and mental prayer.
And I think that's what Jesus is
getting at today. He's saying, “there is enough time for God's
plan to be carried out. It isn't something that depends on you and
I. What is important is that you pause every now and then and think
about what has been going on. Where do you find God in what you just
accomplished? What lessons have you learned? How has the Holy
Spirit spoken to you.? Are there things you should do more of? Less
of? If you don't take these pauses, you may be a dynamo and impress
all your friends, but you won't make any spiritual progress.
Jesus says, “come away” because we
can't contemplate in the middle of the workplace. If nothing else,
we have to come away in our minds and put aside the to-do list. He
says, “by yourselves” because it goes without saying that we
can't hear God's voice unless the other voices are temporarily
silenced.
He says, “to a deserted place”.
There was a movie a while ago about a woman who set up a spot in her
closet where she would go to pray. She had the right idea. We
should all have a favorite place to pray – preferably a place we
don't use for anything else. Pope John Paul II, Bishop Fulton Sheen,
Dorothy Day, Mother Theresa. And countless others made it a point to
spend an hour a day in front of the Blessed Sacrament.
Unfortunately, I guess, that spot tends to be deserted for most of
the day.
He says, “for a while”. What
Jesus is recommending is that we deliberately make time to recharge
our batteries, but not forget that we have to get back into the
world, into the world where we are all called to evangelize, to
teach, to heal, to bring the good news of Christ into our workplace.
Jesus himself took his own advice. It
seems as though he frequently went off to commune with his Father,
and the apostles would have to go looking for him.
So today we are invited by our
Lord not to more and more action, but if we don't do so already, to
deliberately introduce into our lives a regular time for reflection.
Only by alternating action with reflection can we hope to truly
progress in our spiritual lives.
