To dance with time

"All time is given to you, it shall be asked of you how you have spent it." St. Anselm Watch, then, for "sin is lurking at your door; it's desire is for you---you must master it" (Genesis 4). Prayer is the holding of the heart in time (eternal time, God's time)when the soul is buffeted and even tormented and mauled by the beasts who want to drag you into space. How intoxicated we are with space---filling it up with stuff, things; conquering it, taming it.

You are to be concerned with time. Embracing it. Loving it. But the beasts will draw you out of time and into space, space that's increasingly crowded by obligations, demands, and tasks that will always keep you living from a sense of deficit, scarcity. You will be led to believe you don't have enough time to fill up this space. But you have all the time in the world. You have an abundance of time. Time cannot really be spent, it is eternal.

Anselm, I know what you're getting at, but don't talk about spending time.

We get to dance with time, make love to time.  Prayer is this dance, the marriage bed of God.

Trading gods

If I can keep my mind active and busy with the clutter of competing and distracting thoughts that keep me unbalanced and focused on external matters, surely I can exercise the mind toward active, interior prayer that moves from psalms, prayers, and the recitation of the Jesus Prayer, to the prayer of the heart and watchfulness over my interior landscape. Surely, with God's help, I can trade the primitive "prayer" to the idols that seek my allegiance for prayer that anchors me in Jesus and unites me with the inner life of the Holy Trinity.

Surely, if I can "pray" unceasingly to such false gods, I can pray to the true God---for I have God's help and nothing pleases God more.

January Update: What I've Been Up To

Some of you've wondered why my posts aren't coming as regularly as they once did. In this little video post I explain what I've been up to and that this slow down's only temporary. Soon, my posts will start coming again every other day or so.

Toward a better relationship with time: the Pomodoro Technique

I'm trying out a new way to experience time.  I can get a bit manic at times . . . so engrossed in a project that I don't take breaks.  There's something spiritually deadening about that no matter how charged up I am by the work.  To be more spiritually aware and disciplined about my relationship with time and projects I hope this will help me focus and also to set boundaries . . . and live a little more fully while making space for things like . . . a glass of wine, a walk, my loved ones (!) Here's the scoop on the Pomodoro Technique--

The basic unit of work in the Pomodoro Technique™ can be split in five simple steps:

1. Choose a task to be accomplished

2. Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)

3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper

4. Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)

5, Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

How do you shape your relationship to time?  Is it working?  Have you tried the Pomodoro Technique?

Life is prayer

When distorted, prayer becomes complicated when, in fact, it’s really quite simple. Make too much of prayer and it looses its essential simplicity and beauty. Focus on prayer and you turn prayer into something you must accomplish, something for which you need extensive training, and certain experts to show you the way. When this happens, you distort the experience of prayer into something other than everything that’s not prayer. Prayer becomes something sacred, an act tied to certain religious practices and doctrines.

When this happens, you separate prayer from your ordinary, daily life. As Sunday is different from Monday, the church sanctuary different from your office, home, or car, so prayer becomes something different from washing the dishes, designing a website, driving to work, making love, or performing surgery. I’m as influenced by this distortion as you are. Unfortunately, the confusion is part of sin’s legacy among us.

Prayer, while among the most basic of human impulses, becomes something delegated to super-believers—monks, mystics, and saints, not us sinners.

But Christ reverses all this. In Christ, prayer once again becomes what it should be—the experience of life itself.

For more meditations on the Daily Guide/Rule of Life, click on the blog category, “Daily Guide/Rule of Life”

Click here to read or pray the Daily Guide/Rule of Life