God in My Everything

The path to greatness, whether pursued consciously or unconsciously, is one that requires a rhythm of disciplined practice.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Our busyness is like the weather. Everyone complains about it, but no one does anything about it.”

Sabbath … is a reprieve from doing what you ought to do, even though the list of oughts is infinitely long and never done. Oughts are tyrants, noisy and surly, chronically dissatisfied. Sabbath is the day you trade places with them: they go into the salt mine and you go out dancing…. You get to willfully ignore the many niggling things your existence genuinely depends on — and is often hobbled beneath — so that you can turn to whatever you’ve put off and pushed away for lack of time, lack of room, lack of breath. You get to shuck the “have-tos” and lay hold of the “get-tos.”11

counts. In order to deeply rest, we need more than simply the absence of work. We need to experience internal rest.

Our sexual energy, as Ronald Rolheiser says in Holy Longing, is the most powerful of all fires, the best of all fires, and the most dangerous of all fires.2 It can lead us to ecstasy or despair, to heaven or hell. A fire set in a fireplace can warm the entire house, but a fire set to the curtains can burn it down.

Dr. Gordon Neufeld, a respected secular psychologist. In his best-selling book, Hold On to Your Kids, he writes: Sex is a potent bonding agent: It creates couples, attaches to each other those who engage in it. Studies have confirmed what most of us will have found out on our own, that making love has a natural bonding effect, evoking powerful emotions of attachment in the human brain…. Simply put, sex creates a potent connection and then harnesses the rest of the brain through chemicals the brain releases to preserve the bond that has been created…. Sex creates couples, ready or not, willing or not…. Sex is like human contact cement, invoking a sense of union and fusion, creating one flesh.3

Single priest Ronald Rolheiser says life in a family (or another form of intentional familial community) “humbles us, deflates our ego, puts us into purgatory and then into heaven.”

Dr. William Dement, the founder and former director of Stanford University’s Sleep Research Center, contends that sleep, more than any other factor (including diet or exercise and heredity), predicts longevity and health.8 While amounts vary from person to person, he says a typical person needs between seven and eight hours of sleep per night.

Winston Churchill, certainly no slouch, understood the restorative value of naps: “You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you’ll be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will accomplish more. You get two days in one — well at least one and a half, I’m sure. When the war started, I had to sleep during the day because that was the only way I could cope with my responsibilities.”10

The wisdom of the Desert Fathers is helpful here as well. They defined gluttony not simply as overeating but also as being too fastidious in our choices concerning food. Pope Gregory the Great defined gluttony as not just overeating but as the penchant for eating “costly meats” and having “a need for food to be daintily cooked.”

Addictions to sex, drugs, or alcohol spring not just from a desire for a novel “high” but also from reduced levels of serotonin and dopamine. When a person senses that something is “missing” because of this neurochemical deficiency, they can resort to desperate measures (and excess) to try to relieve their misery.18 Rigorous exercise can help to naturally restore the optimal neurochemical levels in our brains that keep us from self-destructive behavior.

K. Chesterton said, “A man must love a thing very much, if he not only practices it without hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.”

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

grace, as we’ve seen, works most effectively in us when we play an active role.

To not find your job to be the primary place of discipleship is to automatically exclude a major part, if not the most, of your waking hours from life with him. The gospel turns your work into a spiritual formation training center.

St. Augustine defined sin as incurvatus in se or “turned in on oneself.”

“These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable until the day we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for the kingdom.”19 Wright continues, “You are not oiling the wheels of the machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are, strange though it may seem, almost hard to believe as the resurrection itself, accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world.”20

This means that our primary role, as those who communicate the gospel, is to serve not as a salesperson but as a hiking guide. We aren’t trying to convince people that they should follow God; we are helping them see the work of God that is already in their lives. There is less of an emphasis on “closing the deal” and more on simply being a friend on the journey, observing the beauty of God’s grace in their lives. UP