Recently, I was drawn to the following from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes: “I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. God has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, God has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end (3:10).”
These lines brought to mind a recent discussion, during which one person voiced a frustration shared by many others in the room: “I don’t have time to pray because there’s always something else needing to be done, like taking out the trash!”
We shared a sense of mourning as we realized that life hadn’t always been, as my friend put it, “caught in a squirrel trap going round and round.” Yet, we had to admit that even in slower, simpler times we avoided prayer beyond a few hurried words or some hasty intercessions by which to fulfill a promise to a friend. Clearly, the amount of activity and the demands of life are not the problem. Rather, it is a matter of our attitude, our posture in and toward life and its myriad of demands.
We have each been given business with which to be busy. This is the mundane, the “if it ain’t one thing, it’s another” part of life. How diligently we seek to escape this very gift — denigrating it, calling it common, secular or even profane. But this gift is nothing if it is not sacred.
Creating the space and time for prayer requires that we move the habitual activity of our lives, and consider seriously which demands are real and valid. Sacred space and time is found in living within the unavoidable tension that exists between our very human, mundane and demanding life, and our desire for a sense of meaning and an experience of the Transcendent found in the silent depths of prayer.
Concretely, we begin at the beginning, with the first baby step. We learn to treat our Blackberry, cell phone and Covey organizer as sacred vessels of the altar. They are tools, not dictators. They are to be maintained and used with mindfulness and humility, for with them we weave the pattern of our days.
We can begin to know the sacred in the mundane as we become mindful of that which is before us. Even the trash becomes sacred as we are mindful of what we put in the trash, of those in our household or office who contribute to the accumulation of trash, of those whose vocation it is to collect the trash, and of those who survive by scavenging through the trash.
Mindfulness, humility and openness in which we cultivate silence and prayer lead to an awareness of the abundance of time — 24 entire hours in each of 364 or five days of each of the many years of our lives. More than enough time to pray, to “Do your work in good time … (Sirach 51:30).”
