In St. Ignatius’s rules for discernment, the pilgrim is warned that too much of a good thing, even spiritual work, often leads to desolation. This is one of those rules that’s easy to understand on paper, but harder to put into practice. Personally, I have a bad a habit of wanting to add some shiny, new, and DEFINITELY “good” thing to my plate when I’m bored, or tired, or just plain over the tedium of what’s in front of me. At other times, the pace and challenge of daily life, the American cult of business and productivity, can make an underfilled plate look a bit… well, sad. What’s a spiritual director with only a few directees? Or a blogger who only posts every once in a while? Or a mom whose kid is only in one activity at a time?
Saner? More able to focus? Dare I say, happier?
I came face to face with a massive “too-much-of-a-good-thing” crash this summer. Between parenting, finishing my spiritual direction degree, teaching full time, and trying to a “good wife/mom/Sunday School teacher/spiritual director/daughter/scholar” I pretty much wanted to get in the next car, start driving, and maybe stop when I ran out of money. Everything that I normally enjoyed doing felt like swimming against some massive current, dragging me further from where I thought I’d been going.
I’m going to say that I don’t need a spiritual director to tell me that state of mind is NOT God’s dream for me or my life. What I heard God saying loud and clear was something like, STOP, take a deep breath, and don’t EVER let yourself get this tired again. I heard Jesus saying, “I will give you rest,” not, “Look, here’s another retreat you might develop.”
There’s no shorter ticket to desolation, that feeling of spiritual malaise and distance from our true Source, than fatigue and overwork. And yet so many of us say yes to things based solely on their potential goodness. If teaching catechesis is great on Sunday, what’s so bad about adding in Wednesday, until our schedules are a block of text and our hearts are the anemic engine that powers this frenetic do-ing.
As I get ready to start another school year, I’ve been trying to take forward the lessons of this Summer. The first is to honor the Sabbath, not just by going to church (where, yes, I do teach Sunday School), but to create a real space of rest in every week. I wonder why this isn’t a commandment that we take a seriously as, say, “thou shall not kill.” Maybe it’s because the the Sabbath honors life in a different way – by letting it be. By asking us to pause, and breathe, and know that God’s got this.
This week, take a look at your schedule – or how you spend your time? Is there a space where you let yourself waste time with God? Where you could do one thing fewer and give yourself the space to be? To rest? To take a walk, or watch the skies, and listen to where in life God is really calling you?
— Alison Umminger Mattison