I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Over the weekend, I finally got some time to sit down and finish the Rule of Saint Benedict. It’s pretty impressive and a lot of what he wrote spoke to my heart. Last night, I started reading Christ the Ideal of the Monk by Dom Columba Marmion. My spiritual director mentioned that I would like it and he was right (as usual. Now, if I could only heed his advice about cutting things out of my schedule!)

I can’t remember the exact passage, since I’m at work posting this, but in the first chapter, Marmion talks about goals. What are your goals during the day, for your life, etc? He specifically looks at people in a big city. Each person is busy rushing themselves around, trying to accomplish something, perhaps running to lunch and back, rushing to the next sales call, rushing to catch the subway. He then mentions that each of these people have little to no interaction with each other and hardly notice the world and what is going on in it. He then mentions one other thing that is going on during this chaos - that of service. Perhaps in this mad dash to the next thing, people don’t realize the Sister of Charity taking care of a poor man on the street, or the priest who has the Eucharist tucked away in his front coat pocket, on his way to serve the weak who couldn’t make it to mass that day.

When I read this, I thought first about films. Think of those scenes in the movies where one person is moving at normal speed but everyone else around them are a blur. Then, I thought about how in my own life, there have been times where I have been in a hurry and someone needed to talk with me or attempted to share something serious with me and I hastened on by. One thing that I have been working on is to become more present in conversations. I don’t like to be the person who pretends to listen but doesn’t hear anything. I know it’s very frustrating to talk to someone like that.

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In other news, I had a good weekend and a nice spring break. I spent most of it hanging out with junior high kids. We even went bowling one day and I proved to the whole world that I can’t complete a spare to save my life. It was very humbling. This weekend, I was invited to a Blue October concert, which was very good. I’m definitely going to buy a cd or two of theirs. Funny, they aren’t listed on iTunes. Go figure. Now, it’s back to work for me. I should probably be doing something productive rather than sitting here, posting stuff on my site.

 
Have a great Tuesday!