Advice from a dead man at five o’clock in the morning
I woke up at four o’clock this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. As a the biggest non-morning-person in the world, this was an unusual occurrence.
After an hour I finally just got up — I figured I might as well get something done if I was going to be awake. I walked downstairs, feeling groggy and a little down. I was too tired to be very productive, yet not tired enough to go back to sleep. On top of that, I had a bunch of things I wanted to get done today, and now worried that I wouldn’t have the energy to accomplish them all.
I drifted into my office, flipped on the light, and prepared to sit in front of my computer. But just before I sat down, a book caught my attention. Francis de Sales, Jane de Chantal: Letters of Spiritual Direction seemed to jump out at me as if it had a spotlight on it. It was weird because I’d never noticed it before. I don’t even know where I got it.
Anyway, Francis de Sales and I go way back (all my posts on how his wisdom has impacted my life are here). As soon as I saw the book I knew that I was meant to pick it up, and that the first page I turned to would have something awesome for me. I don’t know whether that was the Holy Spirit or just the fact that de Sales has never written a paragraph that wasn’t fascinating; either way, it worked. I opened it to a random page, and my eyes immediately fell on this part of a letter that he wrote to one of the women who’d asked him for spiritual advice:
Soon we shall be in eternity and then we shall see how insignificant our worldly preoccupations were and how little it mattered whether some things got done or not; however, right now we rush about as if they were all-important. When we were little children how eagerly we used to gather pieces of broken tile, little sticks, and mud with which to build houses and other tiny buildings, and if someone knocked them over, how heartbroken we were and how we cried! But now we understand that these things really didn’t amount to much. One day it will be like this for us in heaven when we shall see that some of the things we clung to on earth were only childish attachments.I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t care about these little games and trifling details of life, for God wants us to practice on them in this world; but I would like to see us not so strained and frantic in our concern about them. Let’s play our childish games since we are children; but at the same time, let’s not take them too seriously. And if someone wrecks our little houses or projects, let’s not get too upset, because when night falls and we have to go indoors — I’m speaking of our death — all those little houses will be useless; we shall have to go into our Father’s house. Do faithfully all the things you have to do, but be aware that what matters most is your salvation and the fulfillment of that salvation through true devotion.
After I read that passage, I flipped through the book. I was charmed by all the letters, written by both Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal (Francis was Jane’s spiritual director, and she went on to be a spiritual director herself). The letters collected in the book offer wisdom and encouragement for the little concerns of daily life: one shares advice on how to pray during the exhaustion of pregnancy, another with how to respond to unkind behavior by friends. They also discuss deep suffering; three of Jane de Chantal’s children died, and her beloved husband was killed in a tragic accident on the day she gave birth to their last child, when she was only 28.
What struck me as I read through all these letters, however, was the dates: one from 1604. Another from 1610. The one I quoted above was written on May 19, 1608.
In one letter Francis de Sales commented that he was writing these words before dawn. As I sat at my own desk in the pre-dawn stillness, I felt dizzied by the fact that his words that I could relate to so well, that sounded like something straight out of my own life, were written 400 years ago.
His advice in that first excerpt became even more powerful when I considered the four centuries that separated us. It’s one thing for someone who’s currently living to remind you that earthly accomplishments are fleeting; it’s another to read it from someone who lived so long ago, where you can look back across the timeline of world history and see that they were indeed just players, and the story belonged to God all along.
It was illuminating to consider how my own life might look from such a distance. I imagined a journal entry I might write that morning if I were to do a brain dump of all that was on my mind:
April 27, 2010
Woke up earlier than I wanted to. Ugh! Worried that I’ll be super tired all day. Have been feeling a little stressed about getting those screens on our windows fixed. Also, I’m annoyed by a note I received the other day that had some really unkind criticisms of something I wrote — just wait until I set him straight in my reply! Plus, I need to sign my son up for sports, and should probably get the girls some kind of lessons as well. Really wanted to write something today. It’s going to be so annoying if I don’t have time.
It was interesting to imagine that same note, but reading it from a distance of 400 years. I pictured this:
April 27, 1610
Woke up earlier than I wanted to. Ugh! Worried that I’ll be super tired all day. Have been feeling a little stressed about getting those screens on our windows fixed. Also, I’m annoyed by a note I received the other day that had some really unkind criticisms of something I wrote — just wait until I set him straight in my reply! Plus, I need to sign my son up for sports, and should probably get the girls some kind of lessons as well. Really wanted to write something today. It’s going to be so annoying if I don’t have time.
That thought exercise was a real thunder-and-lightning moment for me. It made me want to shout to the woman writing in 1610, “Dude, reprioritize! Don’t put so much energy into trivial stuff!” As Francis de Sales points out, it’s not that those little worries of life don’t matter at all — obviously, we have to attend to the duties in front of us — but that we should always strive to keep them in perspective. In the end, they’re not nearly as important as how much we loved, i.e. how well we served God.
Francis and Jane have both been dead for four centuries. I say “dead” as a shorthand for their departure from earthly life — I believe that they’re very much alive, and still interacting with this world. In fact, it was probably their prayers that guided me to that book this morning. (The saints have certainly made bold moves in my life before, as I recounted here and here). As I read through their letters in the darkness of my office at five o’clock this morning, my mind flashed through all the history that has played out in the hundreds of years since they wrote those words, and I could imagine them whispering to me: Eternity is a whole lot longer than a handful of decades on earth. Prioritize accordingly.
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POSTSCRIPT:
I wouldn’t be giving you the full picture if I didn’t offer this update:
My day ended up being a disaster. Normally I get an hour or so of down time in the afternoons when the kids have nap/quiet time, but today all four of the kids opted for “screaming time” instead. When a bowl full of freshly-chopped cantaloupe got shattered on the kitchen floor, I ended up placing one of those “bad day melodrama” phone calls to my husband, where I screeched a litany of everything that had gone wrong that afternoon, ending by noting through gritted teeth that it was exasperating that I couldn’t finish the one simple thing I’d been working on.
“What was it?” my husband asked.
I paused. “It was, umm, a blog post about how we shouldn’t freak out about small problems.”
So, yeah: easier said than done.
Duty before holiness
Early on in my conversion, I was totally freaked out by the idea that the devil can lure you away from God by putting good ideas in your head. “What?!” I thought. “That is so unfair! How can we ever grow in holiness if we can’t even count on good actions to actually be good?!”
Yet I quickly saw how easily it could happen. As soon as I became involved in religious circles I heard archetypal stories of people treating others with scorn in the name of getting more prayer time, parents hardly seeing their children because of over-involvement in ministries, and spouses spending more time with prayer groups than with one another.
I thought that I’d learned from these examples and was all set. I wouldn’t sign up for too many ministries or neglect the kids for prayer time. Done. A few months later, however, I realized that the devil had found a perfect way to lure me down the wrong path in pursuit of faux holiness: reading and writing. As an introvert and spiritual slacker, I was never all that tempted to sign up for group activities or pray too much. But I can’t tell you how many times I was tempted to snap at the kids for interrupting me while I was working on a blog post that I was convinced was going to bring SO MUCH glory to God, or felt drawn to read some spiritually edifying book well into the night that would leave me exhausted and grouchy the next day.
It was clear that I was wide open to this kind of temptation on a larger scale as well. I’m a natural dreamer with a love of drawing up big plans, and I could see how easy it would be for the devil to convince me to slowly but surely begin neglecting the people around me in the name of starting some “very important” project that would be “so good” for God.
So what could I do?! Just as I was feeling doomed to unwittingly stray away from God by following “good” inspirations that would end up negatively impacting my life or the lives of my loved ones, I came across a three-word nugget of wisdom that would end up being one of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve ever heard:
Duty before holiness.
I don’t remember where I first heard it (perhaps from the wonderful Francis de Sales?) but the idea is that each of us has a clear set of duties that we must attend to, the details of which vary by state of life. For example, every Christian is called to show love to others, avoid sin, respect his or her parents, etc. But we all also have a set of duties that comes with our primary vocations (the most common vocations being to the married life or consecrated religious life), and a legitimate call from God would only strengthen our ability to carry out those duties. For example, a parish priest would never be called by God to do something that would make him feel burdened and resentful about his service to parishioners, a husband would never be called to do something that would mean neglecting his wife or children, no Christian would be called to pray instead of lending aid to someone in urgent need, and so on.
Once I understood this, so many things in my spiritual life became clear.
First of all, it’s allowed me to see God’s hand at work in my life much more clearly than when I was insisting on bull-headedly following whatever I perceived to be a call from God. Many times I’ve felt frustrated that God seemed to put some desire on my heart that was practically impossible to complete given the restrictions of my vocation (a recent example being my great consternation when my fourth pregnancy derailed my plans for the book I felt called to write). Too often I’ve insisted on forcing through my plans for holiness at the expense of my duties — and almost every time all those big plans end up fizzling in front of me, leaving me in a worse place than where I started. Yet on the occasions that I’ve managed to be obedient to my duties first, it’s been stunning to see how God has opened one unlikely door after another to allow me to fulfill those desires within the constraints of my vocation.
It’s also helped me deal with “honeymoon burnout,” i.e. when something I’m called to do is no longer fun anymore and I’m tempted to move on to another, newer, more exciting way to bring glory to God. For example, I have been clearly called to welcome our neighbor girls into our home, and for a while it was different and interesting to have a houseful of kids here every day. Now that it’s been going on for over a year, however, there are days when I’m tired of fixing lunch for so many people and sick of the constant noise level and am sorely tempted to kick everyone out so that I can start up some new, supposedly more holy project. But reminding myself “duty before holiness” (as long as my duty to the girls doesn’t negatively impact my primary vocation, of course) helps me do what God has called me to do here and not jump ship for a “better” way to serve God.
And, oddly enough, I’ve found this concept of obedience to duty to be liberating. I no longer need to spend so much time deciding what holiness looks like, and I no longer feel plagued by the fact that I am so easily tempted away from God by “good” inspirations. I’ve found rest and peace in the knowledge that what God wants first and foremost is that I simply, lovingly fulfill the basic duties he’s set in front of me as a wife and a mother. Now when I get those sudden inspirations to go lose myself in Word of God just when it’s my turn to tackle a sink overflowing with filthy dishes, I can know with confidence that if it is a legitimate call from God, it can wait until the dishes are done.
RELATED
- If you’re interested in this topic, you’ll love the quotes I excerpted in this post about planning to do great things for God.
- More on vocations in the post about how “it’s not what you do, it’s whom you serve.”
7 Quick Takes (vol. 4)
A neat little backstory about the wedding DJ whom I briefly mentioned in the post about our five year anniversary:
Back when I was in elementary school my mom was often in charge of organizing the office Christmas party for her company. I used to tag along to help out, and was always blown away by the spectacular DJ named Baron Bacon who had a gift for getting the crowd moving and making sure that everyone had a rip-roaring good time throughout the event. One time when I was 11 years old I went up to him as he was packing up his equipment after the event and said, “Mr. Bacon, if I ever get married would you be the DJ at my wedding reception?” He laughed and patted me on the head and said yes.
I never forgot him, and the first thing I did when I started planning our reception was to Google his name. And, sure enough, 15 years after that night I asked him about it, he was the DJ at my wedding reception.
How great is this little video of the Litany of the Saints?
I often find myself singing it around the house (especially on rough days). And I’ll just go ahead and admit that I usually get teary-eyed when I watch the video. Just seeing the pictures of some of my favorite saints (Juan Diego, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Francis de Sales) gets me choked up every time.
You know you’re about to have a bad day when you realize you don’t know where your one-year-old is, and it simultaneously registers that you’ve been hearing giggling and splashing coming from the half bathroom for a while.
Do they make antibacterial firehoses for when you find babies elbow-deep in toilet water?
I promised I’d update about trying to make Sunday a day of rest. Here’s the update: it’s harder than I thought it would be.
What this experiment has revealed is that I have more on my plate than I could realistically do in seven days, so to try to take out a day throws everything into chaos. In order to really have a day of rest I’m going to have to make some serious cuts in what I try to get done each week…which is tough. Will update more later.
To add to the list of Things I’ve Learned the Hard Way: It’s a dangerous combination to have spell checker auto-check your emails before sending if you frequently write while distracted and in a hurry. I barely caught an email to my friend Arpita that, after I hastily accepted a suggested change from spell check, began, “Hey Armpit, good to hear from you!” And I lamented to my husband yesterday that “I feel like a schema” for forgetting someone’s birthday, when actually I felt like a schmo.
Yesterday while waiting to pick the kids up from Mother’s Day Out I saw a mom with a one-year-old, waiting to pick up her child. I overheard her mention to a friend that she needs recipe ideas for a dinner party she’s hosting as part of a dinner club she and her friends do — every month they get together and have a family dinner party, rotating houses each time.
Taking the opportunity to make a grand, unfounded assumption in order to indulge in needless self-pity and validate my own laziness, I thought, “I’d love to do something like that, but [dramatic sigh] there’s no way. But I’d be all over it if I only had two kids like she does!”
I ended up striking up a conversation with her and found out that she had pregnancies at almost the exact same times I did, only one of them was twins. So when her youngest was born last year she had four under three. Consider me humbled.
I actually never intended for every post like this to have exactly seven tidbits. It’s just so happened to work out that way every time so far.
"Start by carrying the crosses you already have"
When I first realized that the claims of Christianity were true, I could hardly wait to go tell the world about it. Like many new converts, I was on fire about the idea of evangelization. I realized that overt evangelization efforts often come with a cross to carry — the world doesn’t want to hear what you have to say, people will think you’re a fool, etc. — but I was ready! I would gladly accept that cross to bring glory to God!
Just as I was gearing up to find the nearest rooftop from which I could shout about this good news, I came across the following quote:
Do not ask for more crosses until you have borne well those already given you.
I don’t remember where I first heard it, but it was exactly what I needed to hear as a new believer.
It made me realize that before I could embrace this future cross of doing whatever theoretical things I was going to do to tell people about God, I needed to take a look at how I was handling the crosses I had in this moment, right now. In the explosion of excitement I felt after realizing that all this Christianity stuff was true, I’d felt a frantic rush to go tell everyone about it before I stopped to really allow the teachings of this religion to transform my own life first. I was ready to boldly carry the cross of stating unpopular truths in the name of proclaiming the Gospel…while becoming exasperated by the little crosses of daily life. Not that I interpreted this to mean that I had to be perfect in order to evangelize, but it made me realize that I could probably do as much to bring glory to God by turning to him in calm trust when caught in an unexpected traffic jam as I could by telling someone about the historical case for the accuracy of the New Testament.
Probably because my conversion was almost entirely for intellectual reasons, I’d confined God to my head. God was something to be thought about, Christianity something to be contemplated. It was this advice — start by carrying the crosses you already have — that first snapped me out of my pontificating rut and made me see that this religion provided not just a series of truths about the universe and the human existence, but a way for each of us to have a living relationship with our Creator.
I began to see the drastic difference between thinking approving thoughts about suffering inconveniences gracefully and actually suffering inconveniences gracefully: I saw that it was the difference between seeking God with your head and seeking God with your heart. It was the difference between having an idea of God and having a relationship with God.
This was to be one of the first, most important lessons I learned in terms of what it means to fully live my Christian faith in daily life. And though the lesson was particularly timely as a brand new convert who was disproportionately more on fire for talking about faith than truly living the faith, I find that it’s something that I still struggle with every day. Over and over again I face the temptation to embrace future, theoretical crosses as I bemoan every inconvenience that’s set in front of me. As I attempt to grow in my newfound faith, I have found few things to be more true than this:
Anything is easier than carrying the cross that’s in front of you right here, right now.
And yet, as difficult as it is, I’m starting to think that it is when we start doing this, when we begin to calmly accept whatever cross stares us in the face at this moment, we will find ourselves on a fast track to true, deep conversion.
RELATED POST: “What does it mean to carry your cross?“
A COUPLE NOTES: Thanks to Meta’s comment here for reminding me of this quote and pointing out that it’s from the amazing St. Francis de Sales. Also, I apologize if there is anything incoherent in this post. I was unexpectedly interrupted approximately 5,972 times while trying to write it over the past couple of days. I actually found myself getting angry because I kept getting derailed from writing my blog post about carrying the crosses that are put in front of us. It’s a good thing you can’t die from irony overdose.