The domestic monastery
A kind reader just sent me this article, saying that it might have some food for thought for my ongoing quest to bring peace to my daily life. It was so good I had to share it. An excerpt:
What is a monastery? A monastery is not so much a place set apart for monks and nuns as it is a place set apart (period). It is also a place to learn the value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time is not ours, but God’s…Certain vocations offer the same kind of opportunity for contemplation. They too provide a desert for reflection.For example, the mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is definitely monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centres of power and social importance. And she feels it. Moreover her sustained contact with young children (the mildest of the mild) gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild, that is, to attune herself to the powerlessness rather than to the powerful.
AREWP Day 11: On being busy
[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]
A while back I was emailing with Fr. James Martin (author of the must-read book My Life With the Saints), and he casually mentioned something that’s stuck with me ever since: on the topic of prayer, he told me that when someone asked St. Francis de Sales how much one should pray, the Doctor of the Church replied that you should pray a half hour each day, unless you’re busy. If you’re busy, you should pray an hour.
“What a pithy quote!” I thought. “You should pray more if you’re busy — love it. That St. Francis de Sales, he sure does have some great sayings!” And then I promptly forgot about it. Or I tried to, anyway.
You see, as clever as I found that quote to be, I really was too busy. That advice may have worked for those “other” people who St. Francis knew back in the 17th century — who must have either been very holy or had a whole lot of free time on their hands — but it went without saying that here in the real world, that advice was nothing more than a witty one-liner to keep in my “good quotes” file.
And then I had my third baby in three years, and got really, really busy. In addition to keeping up with the kids, in our house I’m in charge of bill paying, filing, Quicken data entry, grocery shopping, budgeting, thank-you note writing, investment managing, (not not mention blog posting), etc. As my responsibilities snowballed, that advice that Fr. Martin conveyed would occasionally pop into my head:
If you’re busy, pray more.
I would reject this thought as one might shoo away a buzzing gnat, and promptly resume frantically running around from one thing to the next. Yet so often that line would interrupt my inner dialogue, which was usually something like: “How am I supposed to find time to put that huge pile of clothes away when I haven’t even cleared out room in the closet and I think I forgot to transfer that money from our savings account I hope all those checks will clear and when am I going to find time to fold the laundry and I still need to write that thank-you note and I DO NOT HAVE TIME to bake that quiche for the potluck why did I ever sign up for that and –”
If you’re busy, pray more.
I could not seem to get this notion out of my mind! It was only after I fell flat on my face, crushed under the weight of my to-do list, forced to admit that my way wasn’t working, that I decided to give the prayer thing a shot. I assure you, it was not out of any kind of spiritual maturity on my part — I just didn’t have any other options. It was either that or hire someone to slap me every time I started whining about how I never get anything done, just so that I didn’t have to hear myself talk about it anymore.
As I’ve chronicled, I started praying all three major hours of the Liturgy of the Hours. I had a lot of different factors motivating me to try to devote reckless amounts of time to prayer; I wasn’t doing it to follow St. Francis de Sales’ advice. Yet as I’ve gone through these weeks of praying more than I ever have in my life, his words have been popping into my head more than ever. And they finally resonate with me on a gut level. I finally understand that they are true, and why they are true:
Now that I’m nearing the end of the second week (third if you count the “trial run” week) of praying the Liturgy of the Hours, I’m feeling the inevitable pressure to backslide that I’ve felt (and succumbed to) with every other routine I’ve ever tried to implement. Last night, for example, I got overwhelmed with trying to make a new recipe and pay bills and answer emails all at once, and I ended up doing Vespers more than an hour late. It was tempting to just skip it altogether.
As this example illustrates, I’ve found that prayer is the “canary in the coal mine” for my life: the more pressure I feel to let prayer slip, to push it aside for something else, the more it indicates that I have let my life slide out of balance. When I glance at my prayer book and think “I don’t have time for this!” (as I did last night), it doesn’t mean that prayer is too hard; it means that I’ve piled too much on my plate again. The greater the temptation to skip Matins because I’m running late or Lauds because I have too much to do, the louder the alarm is sounding that something is off-kilter.
What I’ve found, as someone who is officially “really busy,” is that there are so many potential demands on our time, especially in our 24/7 culture. And busy-ness tends to have a snowball effect, where the more commitments you make the less time you have to carefully consider what other projects you take on, and you pretty quickly end up feeling like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. There’s a huge temptation to be unrealistic about how much time you have available, to sacrifice peace to get a few more things done. And you find yourself scurrying from one thing to the next, needing to shove everything aside — including God — just to keep your head above water.
If you’re busy, pray more.
Now I get it. It’s not just a pithy quote, it is a critical lesson, probably even more applicable to our current culture than it was in the 17th century. With email and artificial light and cell phones and cars, the modern world lures us to try to squeeze in just a few more things, to tell ourselves that we can do just a little bit more, and more, and more…and prayer brings it all to a screeching halt. Structuring life around prayer means making the conscious, inconvenient choice to put something else in front of the frantic desire to “get stuff done!”
I recently came across a quote where someone echoed St. Francis de Sales by saying, “If you don’t have time for prayer, you don’t have time for anything.” I’ve found this to be so true. Prayer doesn’t impact my ability to get things done; it impacts my ability to make unrealistic estimates about the things I’ll get done.
As the newness of the experiment with prayer wears off, it is increasingly difficult to make prayer happen — not because I don’t have time, but because of my tendency to try to do things according to how much pressure I feel to do them, rather than how much time I actually have available. The fact is that God has given me the grace to more than make up for the 30 – 40 total minutes I “lose” in prayer each day. My amount of available work time is the same as it always was. The difference is that I used to live in a perpetual fantasy state where this large chunk of free time was always looming just around the corner, in a magical time and place called “later” I was going to be able to do it all. But now, where the phases of the day have distinct beginnings and ends that are marked by Lauds, Matins and Vespers, three times each day I am forced to leave my “later” fantasy and just admit that I am not going to get it all done. Morning comes to a close with Lauds, activity time comes to a close with Matins, and the whole work day comes to a close with Vespers. It’s painful. But it is exactly what I need.
Today is the feast day of St. Francis de Sales. Tonight I’ll raise a glass of wine and ask for intercessory prayers from this great saint, who offers us the only good advice I’ve ever heard on being busy.
AREWP Day 5: Permanence
[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]
Whenever I’ve tried to implement a new routine, a better system for control and organization of my household, it seems that invariably I have to go out of town or have some other life-altering event come up immediately afterwards. And woe be to the people who are anywhere near me at those times, because I always get ridiculously stressed and whine endlessly about how these events are going to derail my plans. I’ll snap at my mother-in-law for getting the kids down for nap a half hour late because she spent too long at the park, or moan the entire trip to Houston about how this out-of-town visit is going to just demolish the new routine that I worked so hard to create. Looking back, I had a surprising amount of angst about things as minor as bedtime getting pushed back or breakfast being at a different time than usual.
In this past week of creating yet another attempt at a routine, I think I finally understand why I felt so unsettled by such little schedule deviations: because they were my anchors.
I think the goal with every routine is to create structure, to get as close as possible to the way humans have always lived, with hard stops around which we can structure our days. Naptime being at 2:15 wasn’t just important because that’s when the kids needed sleep, but because naptime was my hard stop, it was my anchor. Along with breakfast time and dinner time, I used the beginning of naptime to provide structure to my days, to cue me to begin a different phase of the day, a different set of tasks, a different mindset. And when naptime (or breakfast or dinner time) got off track, I was adrift. That structure that I so desperately craved could be demolished with something as simple as eating brunch instead of breakfast one day.
As I’ve gone through my week, thrilled that this crazy experiment with prayer has been working so well, I realized at some point that I’m not on edge about these things anymore, about some event coming along to derail it all. If I found out we had to go out of town tomorrow I would honestly be fine with it, I wouldn’t freak out about it messing up my precious routine. What’s different?
In every other attempt to get organized and establish a routine, I’ve used fleeting worldly things as my anchors, my cues to transition from one part of the day to the next. It’s no wonder then that something as simple as a cold virus or an overnight trip could leave me without anchors, without a routine, picking up the pieces of all my big plans.
But prayer is something I can always do.
My prayer book fits in my purse, so whether I’m here at home, on a plane, in the hospital, visiting family out of town, in a hotel, out running errands, on a bus — wherever I am — I can always say Lauds, Matins and Vespers at roughly the same times, every day. Unlike all my other routines that revolved around fleeting events specific to this phase of life, there is no foreseeable reason why I couldn’t keep this same basic routine, praying the Liturgy of the Hours, every single day for the rest of my life.
That’s one of the reasons I have a really good feeling about my odds of keeping up with this: it’s not only about praying or organizing or establishing a routine. It’s all of that, and more. It’s a radical re-thinking of the way I approach life. It’s about finally admitting after all these years that my way isn’t working, that if I had it all figured out I wouldn’t spend so much time feeling behind and overwhelmed; it’s about trying to get as close as possible to living as we’re designed to live, with daily and seasonal cycles directing how much I attempt to get done; it’s about living on God’s time, sacrificing large portions of my to-do list in order to balance periods of work with periods of rest; it’s about trusting that God will give me the grace to make up for time “lost” in prayer and rest, that if I just trust in him it will all get done (though God’s definition of what “it all” involves may be different from mine); and it’s about forcing myself to turn to God often, to pause to ask for his help before embarking on each new phase of the day.
This week has been a tough week: I’ve been up with the baby multiple times each night, unable to nap during the day, and my two toddlers seem to have been replaced by half-human, half-robot superbeings who can demolish the house in the time it takes me to blink. And yet here it is, Friday afternoon, and I actually feel pretty calm. I’m annoyed about the cereal being dumped out on the newly vacuumed carpet and the bowl full of macaroni and cheese landing face-down on the kitchen floor, but I don’t feel overwhelmed. For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel behind on anything. My to-do list was smaller this week to make sure I left plenty of time for prayer, but what was there did get done. (And, honestly, I probably didn’t accomplish any less than I used to, it’s just that I accomplished 100% of a smaller list instead of 60% of a larger one.)
The reason I originally called this a “reckless” experiment was because I supposedly did not have one more minute in my day to devote to prayer. I could have proven to you on paper that my life (as well as my family’s lives) would be thrown into chaos if I set aside even a few extra minutes to devote to God. Needless to say, I’m thrilled that so far I’ve been proven wrong — very wrong. Everything that needed to get done got done. We could all feel God’s grace working. Our house was a peaceful place to be (well, as peaceful as it gets with three little kids). As it turns out, putting a reckless amount of trust in God was exactly what I needed to do.
AREWP Day 4: Focus and procrastination
[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]
Until I started this experiment of drastically restructuring my life around prayer, I didn’t realize how unfocused I tend to be, and just how much I use the word “later.”
Because of the extreme extent to which I am not a morning person, I have Lauds (Morning Prayer) scheduled to begin after breakfast time, at 9:30. An interesting thing has happened: because I know that I’ll need to stop all work to pray, I naturally tend to focus more on one task at a time, getting to a clear stopping point before prayer begins.
In the past, breakfast and kitchen cleanup were jumbled together with to-do list items for the day, meaning that rather than having, say, a clear breakfast time that ended when the kitchen was restored to order, followed by folding clothes, followed by adding some pictures to a photo album, it would all be one jumbled project that extended throughout the morning: I would start folding clothes as the oatmeal cooked, then drift off to eat breakfast, fold a few more clothes, set out the pictures to add to the album, put some dishes in the dishwasher, remember that I was folding clothes…and so on and so on. At the end of the morning I’d often survey the house to see a bunch of unfinished projects, feeling like I’d accomplished nothing even though I’d been working all morning.
This week (and last week when I did the trial run), it’s been different. Having to stop everything to pray snaps me out of the scattered, unfocused daze. I’ve naturally fallen into the habit of only dealing with breakfast and cleanup before Lauds, waiting until after prayer to start any to-do list tasks. Having a clear time at which I must stop to pray also motivates me to pick up the pace a bit, moving purposefully instead of shuffling my feet as I did when I felt like I had a daunting amount of unstructured time stretching before me.
Probably the biggest difference I’ve seen in this area, however, is at Vespers (Evening Prayer). I will be shocked if I don’t keep up with commitment #2 for the long haul, because it has already brought more peace to my life than any habit I’ve ever adopted.
The commitment I made was that every evening at Vespers I will keep the ancient tradition of that being the prayer said at the lighting of the lamps: I will light candles, and though I will continue to keep the lights on as needed, I will use the lit candles as a symbolic gesture that the day has ended, that all work from the day must wait until tomorrow. Though dinner, post-dinner cleanup and bathtime happen after Vespers, all projects and tasks from the day are off-limits until the next morning (creating the rhythm and hard stops I talked about here).
Every evening, as the sun is setting and I see that the time for Vespers is approaching, I glance around the house to see if there’s anything I need to do before I light the candles. And I see tons of stuff, every time. My knee-jerk reaction is to fall back on my normal mantra: “Later.” All the kids toys I hadn’t yet had them put away? “Later.” That data entry I need to do at the computer? “Later.” The sheets that needed to be changed that I hadn’t gotten to yet? “Later.” I did not realize how much I say this until I tried to stop.
Having the workday cease at Vespers has drastically reduced my use of the word “later.”
What used to happen was that I would keep saying “later” until I finally had to give up and go to bed in defeat when it got ridiculously late. Now, every day around sunset, a few minutes before I light the Vespers candles, I make a conscious decision about what will and will not get done. I finish the tasks I’m able to, and get the others to a stopping point for tomorrow. As usual, I often find that I don’t have time to accomplish all that I wanted to do. But here’s the difference: now it is an active choice, whereas before the decision would be made for me when I ran out of time and it was way past my bedtime. Now I feel in control, whereas before I often felt defeated and overwhelmed at the end of the day.
This rule also helps reinforce the realization that I can’t do it all: when I felt like I had an indefinite amount of time in which to work, I tended to pile more on my plate. This week of forcing myself to make time for prayer, to observe the natural cycles of work and rest that my body so deeply craves, has meant that I haven’t gotten everything done that I wanted to do…but it’s also meant that I’ve actively decided what won’t make the cut rather than simply running out of fuel at the end of the day. It’s meant that the work I did was done with a peaceful sense of purpose, energized by the knowledge that I only have a very finite amount of time to work until a period of prayer and rest begins.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I’ve been gliding through my days on Cloud 9 since I’ve been praying so much more often. I’ve experienced plenty of the usual ups and downs of daily life. What I can say, however, is that in terms of bringing a sense of order to my life, in terms of establishing a sense of control over my to-do list and peace at what I can and cannot do, in terms of finally living in a way that reflects the priorities I’m always talking about, putting prayer first has worked better than I ever thought it would. Obviously, it remains to be seen if I’ll keep up with it for the long haul. Let’s just say that my hopes are high in that department.