Lent III | To fast from Speed & Rushing
“Why spend money for what isn’t food, and your earnings for what doesn’t satisfy.
Listen carefully to me and eat what is good; enjoy the richest of feasts.
Listen and come to me; listen, and you will live.
”
AN INVITATION To fast from speed and rushing
Do you feel stretched thin by commitments, needs and demands? Depleted by rushing --- yet at a loss to make a change? In our culture, being busy is a mark of a full, desirable life, a measure of our value as productive people. As we speed from one thing to another, we skim over the surface of life, losing that sacred attentiveness that brings forth revelations in the most ordinary of moments.
From the first verses of Genesis, God calls us to another way. Having made all of creation over six “good” days, the Author of Time took a break. God didn’t apologize for it, wasn’t dramatic about it. God rested because God wanted to rest, plain and simple. And this Sabbath day of rest was even better than “good” – God called it “holy.”
… AND EMBRACE SLOWNESS AND PAUSING
Instead of centering work and productivity, we are invited to shift our priorities, to center God as the primary focus of our lives, the source of our value.
The monastic tradition lifts up the simplest of practices: to stop one thing before beginning another. What might it be like to allow just a five minute window to sit in silence between appointments? Or to take five long, slow deep breaths before pushing on to the next thing? Could we plan for holy pauses in which to savor God’s good presence?
We think of our in-between times as wasted moments and inconveniences, yet these thresholds are opportunities to awaken the gifts that are right here with us. (How often do we miss these, waiting on the relief we imagine is out there, beyond our never ending labors?)
Theologian Howard Thurman writes: “One could not begin the cultivation of the prayer life at a more practical point than deliberately to seek each day, and several times a day, a lull in the rhythm ofdaily doing, a period where nothing happens that demands active participation.” This lull of being rather than doing is a holy pause. “The moment of pause, the point of rest, has its own magic,” Thurman assures us.
This third week of Lent, may you offer yourself the gift of small thresholds, those moments when you let go of what came before and prepare yourself to enter fully into what comes next. May you sink into the sheer grace of the moment. Let us all listen to our true hunger for holy pauses: spaces where God can work.
This reflection is adapted from A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding our True Hungers in Lent, Christine Valters Paintner.
** Image of Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry and author of Rest is Resistance.