Spirituality of Non-Hurrying...

A SPIRITUALITY OF NON-HURRYING

Some spiritual writers see hurry as an obstacle to spiritual growth. Donald Nicholl says, “hurry is a form of violence exercised upon time”, an attempt, as it were, to make time God’s time our own, our private property.

There are kinds of hurry that come from simple circumstance and duty. Almost every one of us, at least during our working years, has too many things to do. We struggle to juggle the demands of relationships, family, work, school, church, child-care, shopping, attention to health, concern for appearance, house-work, preparing meals, rent and mortgage payments, car payments, commuting to and from work, bus schedules, unwanted accidents, unforeseen interruptions, illnesses, and countless other things that eat up more time than is seemingly available.

The gospels tell us that even Jesus was so busy at times that he didn’t have time to eat. Sometimes we are being stretched to the limit, being over-extended, having to juggle too many things all at once, driving faster than we’d like, working to the point of exhaustion, even as there is still more that we should ideally be doing.

Sometimes we have to hurry just to make do and simple circumstance and duty eat up every available minute of our time. That’s not necessarily an obstacle to holiness, but can be one of its paths.

Still we have to be careful not to rationalize. God didn’t make a mistake in creating time, God made enough of it, and when we can’t find enough time and, as the Psalmist says, find ourselves getting up ever earlier and going to bed ever later because we have too much to do, we need to see this as a sign that sooner or later we had better make some changes.

When we hurry too much and for too long we end up doing violence to time, to ourselves, and to our blood pressure.

(Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI)