The Our Father, Word by Word – a roundup of posts!
When I wrote the first post for this series back in March, I thought I’d have it wrapped up by the end of Lent. I would have never guessed that the final post wouldn’t be up until almost December! Keeping up with the project required more work than I expected, but it was so much fun. In particular, I loved hearing everyone else’s thoughts. The guest posters were constantly coming up with fresh insights I would have never thought of, leading me to see this prayer in a whole new light.
And so, nine months, 40 posts and 26 contributors later, here is a roundup on our meditation on the Our Father. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!
BY WORD
OUR | FATHER | WHO | ART | IN | HEAVEN (1) | HALLOWED BE | THY | NAME | KINGDOM | COME | WILL | BE DONE | ON | EARTH | AS IT IS | HEAVEN (2) | GIVE | US (1) | THIS | DAY| OUR | DAILY | BREAD | FORGIVE | US (2) | TRESPASSES | AS | WE FORGIVE | THOSE | WHO HAVE TRESPASSED | AGAINST | LEAD | NOT | INTO | TEMPTATION | BUT | DELIVER | FROM | EVIL
BY AUTHOR
Jason Anderson – HEAVEN
Erin Arlinghaus – EARTH
Marc Barnes – THIS
Margaret Berns – US
Melanie Bettinelli – HALLOWED BE
Betty Duffy – EVIL
Karen Edmisten – NAME
Steve G. – HEAVEN
Heather King – WE FORGIVE
Martina Kreitzer – NOT
Marcel LeJeune – FATHER
Dan Lord – DELIVER
Darwin – IN
Mrs. Darwin – WHO
Elizabeth Scalia – WHO HAVE TRESPASSED
Anna Macdonald – AS
Jeff Miller – FORGIVE
Anna Mitchell – GIVE
Eric Sammons – US
Dorian Speed – WILL
Matt Swaim – KINGDOM
Sally Thomas – LEAD
Stacy Trasancos – TEMPTATION
Brandon Vogt – ART, AS IT IS
Wellness Mama – BREAD
Kate Wicker – DAILY
Me – OUR, THY, COME, DONE, ON, DAY, OUR, TRESPASSES, THOSE, AGAINST, INTO, BUT, FROM
I hope your Advent is off to a great start!
What a spiritual director and an MBA taught me about being overwhelmed
I have a personality type that leads me to feel overwhelmed a lot. I’m ambitious but lazy; I have a latent perfectionist streak that comes out at unexpected times; I’m an Olympian procrastinator; and I’m so non-confrontational that I often find myself saying “Yes, I’d love to help with that” when what I should be saying is, “I CANNOT EVEN FIND TIME TO BRUSH MY HAIR RIGHT NOW, LET ALONE SIGN UP FOR ONE MORE FREAKING THING.”
Because God looks out for people like me, I’ve had some very wise counsel in this department over the years. For one thing, my husband is an MBA with a gift for managing difficult situations. Earlier in his career he wanted to be a turnaround CEO (an executive that takes failing companies and makes them profitable), so he gained a lot of experience wading into hot messes and getting things under control. Then there was my great spiritual director, who never failed to help me shift my view of any situation to see it through the eyes of Christ. Thanks to the two of them, I can usually dig myself out of overwhelming situations before I reach the meltdown zone.
I’ve gained a great perspective on how to parse through complicated situations, the details of which I once wrote up here. But I realized recently (when I found myself in over my head yet again) that the most important addition to my life toolkit is what I think of as the Burnout Emergency Gas Mask. If you were in a room that was filling with toxic gas, the first thing you’d do is put on a gas mask. You’d do it immediately, without any further analysis, to preserve your health and give you some breathing room (literally) so that you could calmly evaluate the situation and make prudent decisions about what to do next. Through my husband and my spiritual director, I’ve learned a set of steps to take when I begin feeling overwhelmed that function the same way: If I do them immediately, without any further analysis, the process gives me the breathing room to collect my thoughts so that I can make prudent decisions about how to remedy the situation.
Since we’re approaching prime burnout season with the Fall in full swing and the holidays just around the corner, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned:
The 4-Step Burnout Gas Mask
1. Get your physical environment in order
I find it to be critical to do this step first. I used to think that a messy environment didn’t bother me at all, but I’ve come to believe that living in chaos is objectively bad for the spiritual life. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, it goes a long way toward bringing me peace simply to get my house in order. I don’t mean achieving Martha Stewart levels of perfection, but just clearing out obvious piles of clutter and wiping off messy surfaces to get things looking basically orderly. (And yes, I turn to Fly Lady when I need inspiration in this department.) In situations where the whole house seems to be out of control and it makes me even more stressed to imagine dealing with all of this, I focus only on the kitchen and the bedroom: Waking up to a tidy room and making breakfast in a clean kitchen invariably gets the next day off to a much better start, no matter what else is going wrong.
2. Get some sleep
One of my husband’s biggest mantras is, “Don’t think about your problems when you’re tired.” I need to have this tattooed on my hand so I never forget it. As I’ve said before, I’ve been known to reason my way into believing that the entire universe is falling apart at the seams when I’m tired, only to find that I have a completely different perspective after a good night of sleep. Especially if you haven’t been getting good sleep for a long period of time, pull every single string available to you to make this happen. Even one solid night of catchup sleep can give you an explosion of energy.
3. Pray — preferably outside of the house
We should, of course, pray without ceasing. I know that when I’m overwhelmed, I toss up all sorts of scatter-brained prayers asking God for assistance (and, okay, making sure that he is aware of JUST HOW TERRIBLE everything is that I’m dealing with). However, in order to truly “put on the mind of Christ,” I need to shut the door on everything else that’s going on in my life, and give the Lord my full attention. In particular, I find it to be critical that I actually follow the A.C.T.S. model of prayer (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, then Supplication); otherwise I tend to blather on and on about what I want God to help me with as if he’s my personal assistant, rather than listening for what he may be trying to tell me.
Also, it doesn’t work well if I try to do this at home. When I feel like I’m surrounded by chaos, it’s super helpful to pray outside of the house at least once, either in our church or at the Adoration chapel. If I try to do one of these “gas mask” prayer sessions at home, my prayers tend to go something like, “Lord, I praise you for your...laundry! Who knocked over that basket of laundry that I just spent an hour folding?!?!”
4. Talk through it
After I’ve gotten my house (or at least my bedroom and kitchen) in order, gotten a good night’s sleep, and spent some time in focused prayer, the final thing I need to do in order to set a path forward is to talk through everything with my husband or a close friend. I note from much experience that it is important to make this the last step, otherwise I tend to initiate the conversations with proclamations about how horrible everything is, then ramble for a while with an incoherent series of aimless, self-pitying statements. And, like with prayer, it’s also important to carve out time for this conversation so that both of us are calm, and so we’re not interrupted a bunch of times. (In other words: When I catch my husband at work when he’s late for a client meeting and I’m shouting over the sounds of five screaming kids, it tends not to be a very fruitful discussion.) But when we actually do have time to have a positive, focused discussion, it can work wonders for helping me test what I’ve discerned in prayer, think through new possibilities, and come up with a clear plan to bring peace back into my life.
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So those are my four “gas mask” steps that I take as soon as I catch the first whiff of burnout in my life. What are your tips for when you’re feeling overwhelmed?
Prayer: Because sometimes you need to be dog-whispered
Back when we had cable, I used to be a big fan of the Dog Whisperer show. I don’t even have a dog, but it was fascinating to see how Cesar Millan could take all these bad dogs and turn them into happy, obedient pets. One of his most common techniques is to pinch a dog quickly on the side of its neck while making a sound that is hard to convey in writing, but goes something like, PRSSSSCHT!!!
By mimicking the corrective nip that the top dog in a pack might use to keep his subordinate canines in line, Millan gets the dog’s attention and snaps him out of whatever he might have been fixating on. It’s amazing how well it works. In one of the last episodes I saw, this one dog had a problem with obsessing about rocks. He would run up to one, growl at it, bite it, run around it, bite it some more, and this could go on for almost an hour. Normally he was pretty good about listening to his owner, but when he’d come across a rock, it was all over. You could practically hear the dog thinking, “NO SHUT UP DON’T TALK TO ME I’VE GOT TO GET THIS ROCK! ROCK! IT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD! ROCK! ROCK! ROCK!” And then Millan would dog-whisper him with that PRSSSSCHT!!! thing, and he’d break out of it and look up at his master like, “Oh, hey, sorry about that! I guess that rock isn’t that important after all.”
I hate to admit this, but the dog kind of reminds me of me.
Whenever I’m good about sticking to regular prayer times, it breaks me out of whatever I’m fixating on. In fact, I usually don’t notice that I am fixating on anything until I stop what I’m doing and focus on God. I’ll be walking around, just like the dog, saying, “NO SHUT UP DON’T TALK TO ME I’VE GOT TO GET THIS ROCK! ROCK! IT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD! ROCK! ROCK! ROCK!” Just replace “rock” with some item from my to-do list, and that’s me.
Then the hard stop of prayer time comes along, and it’s like Cesar Millan’s PRSSSSCHT!!!
When prayer time first approaches, I shrink away, convinced that I simply must keep obsessing about whatever it is that has captured my attention at the moment. But when I actually enter into silence, both internal and external, it’s such a drastic change from my normal mode of living that it startles me into a new frame of mind. Contemplating the eternal instead of fixating on the temporal requires such a huge shift of mental gears that it breaks me out of whatever short-sighted rut I’d been in. Like the dumb dog, I finally stop chewing on my silly worries of the moment, and pay attention to what my Master is trying to tell me.
How I pray when I don’t have time to pray
There’s nothing like daily prayer time. Over and over again, I’ve found that when I make the necessary sacrifices to structure my schedule around prayer (instead of vice versa), my small efforts are repaid tenfold by the tremendous graces I receive.
But I can’t always get there. I usually blame it on not having time, though that excuse is a little suspect since I always manage to find abundant time to mess around on the internet. Anyway, whether it’s due to laziness, fatigue, a lack of faith, being overwhelmed, truly not having time, or some combination of all of the above, there are seasons when regular prayer time just doesn’t happen.
With my personality type, there’s a temptation to let that mean no prayer at all: I am the master at letting perfection be the enemy of the good, not doing anything at all if I can’t do it the “right” way. When I let this happen, it’s always detrimental to my spiritual life. Though I do try to “pray without ceasing,” offering up my actions throughout the day to God, it has not been my experience that that is a substitute for dedicated time spent focusing exclusively on the Lord. As my spiritual director always pointed out, prayer is about building a relationship. Praying as I do my work is like when my husband and I work alongside each other managing the household chaos: that’s a wonderful, necessary part of maintaining a healthy relationship, but if we never spent any time alone, our relationship would suffer.
So I’ve found it to be extremely important to make sure that I’m getting some dedicated prayer time in on a somewhat regular basis, even if it’s not quite as much as I’d like. The most helpful advice I’ve ever come across in this department is from Fr. Michael Scanlan’s book Appointment with God (which is out of print now, but I ordered a copy by phone from the Franciscan University Bookstore). The book is full of great advice about taking your prayer life to the next level, but the biggest thing I took away from it was the idea of making prayer appointments.
Fr. Scanlan points out that when we want to make sure we meet up with someone, we don’t just say, “Yeah, I’ll see you sometime.” Rather, we name a specific time and place the meeting will occur, which allows us to protect that time from getting displaced by our busy schedules.
I already had a routine where each Sunday I’d sit down and write out my weekly schedule, transferring whatever is on my Google Calendar to my handy day planner from Faith Calendars. After reading Fr. Scanlan’s book, I added a new element to this routine: I’d write down my appointments with God too. I’d take a moment to prayerfully think about when and how I should pray this week, then note that time on my calendar. Some weeks I might feel called to step it up and include serious prayer time every day; other weeks I might feel like just once or twice would be about all I could realistically handle. Not only do I note the time I’m going to pray, but the type of prayer as well (e.g. Gospel reflection, Rosary, silent meditation, etc.)
The process is actually fun! I might feel moved to get up early on Tuesday to pray a full Rosary at 6:30, to reflect on the Gospels at 2:30 PM on Thursday, and to wrap up the week with some Bible reading at 10:00 on Friday night. It’s always interesting to see how much of what type of prayer I feel moved to include that week. And when these “appointments” are written on my calendar, I actually tend to keep them.
This idea has really helped me keep my prayer life from fizzling out altogether when I’m in phases where daily prayer time isn’t happening. What are your tips for carving out time for prayer during busy seasons of life?