The last few weeks have been extraordinarily busy for me. I’m not sure exactly how these things happen, but my desk has an 8 inch tall pile of paperwork on it (it is threatening to fall over, but so far it has stayed intact!), my email is even further behind than usual, my next available meeting is in a month or something, and I have a few projects that I was hoping to complete by now that I haven’t even started.
But my busyness is not what I wanted to talk about.
I know that I’ll get through all these things eventually, even though I would very much like to have finished them already. What I want to talk about is the constant temptation to cut things out so I can tend to the work that is–in a very physical sense–piling up in front of me. Homily preparation and the study involved in that preparation and spending time in prayer are the first things I am often tempted to cut out, because they seem like things that can be delayed or put off until later. It goes something like this with the homilies: I ran out of time to read any commentaries for my homily on Monday, but I can probably fit it in Wednesday, then I forgot to pray about the Sunday Gospel on Wednesday, but there’s always Friday, and then I get to Friday night and realize that I need to cram it all in that night and on Saturday morning. With the holy hour, the thought is more along the lines of, “well, this morning is super busy, so I can do the holy hour later.” Then later becomes now and I’m too tired or, well, forget to do the holy hour until I lay down to go to bed.
I run into many people who express the same struggles: they get busy with day-to-day tasks and forget to pray or to set aside time for longer term things, even if that “longer term” is only a week. The constant noise we face daily, the demands on our attention, especially from social media, and the rapid pace of life in the United States all contribute to this struggle.
There are no easy solutions to this constant fight over our time, because the only thing we can do is decide what is most important to us and guard those things jealously. As a concrete example, this means I don’t schedule anything on my calendar until after 10 a.m., because I can consistently do my holy hour in the mornings and I need to protect that time (for everybody’s sake!).
As Catholics, one of the ways we do this every week is by our faithful attendance at Sunday Mass (or Saturday evening Mass). When we set aside this time every week, our action says something like, “God is important enough for me to prioritize this and let nothing intrude on it.” As we build up that good habit over time, it becomes easier for us to make God a priority on other days too, whether that is coming to daily Mass, spending time in Eucharistic Adoration, praying our daily Rosary, or something else.
I suppose that what I’m getting at is this: God, through his Church, has shown us a way to find peace and to maintain our priorities in the midst of the busyness of the modern world.
What a great gift we have!
Fr. Matt