Today’s find: Busyness

The long holiday weekend proved fruitful, for everything except blogging.

I actually thought about recounting a tid-bit or two of ‘found spirituality’ at several different points over the past several days. A neat little blessing would bubble up, and I’d think, ‘I oughta write about that…’

Somehow, though, I never could piece together the block-of-minutes required to do a decent job. A home improvement task here, a chance to visit with family there, a phone call, a text, a Doc’s office visit. And the next thing I know, I’m all the way to Tuesday, a day past the holiday weekend, without having injected a single word of God-praise into the blogosphere.

Ironic, isn’t it – how busyness creeps into even our leisure time? We put so many things on the schedule that we wind up not even being able to think straight…much less write about the things that really matter.

Which, I wonder, if that might’ve been part of the problem with St. Peter… when he sat down to write the passage of the letter we heard proclaimed at Mass today.

First, I heard it. Then I read it. Then I read it again. And I’m still not entirely sure what St. Peter is trying to say here:

Concerning the salvation of your souls the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and investigated it investigating the time and circumstances that the Spirit of Christ within them indicated when it testified in advance to the sufferings destined for Christ and the glories to follow them.

There’s a whole lot of stuff going on in that sentence (even allowing for something getting lost in translation). But when St. Peter settles down a bit, the message gets noticeably more approachable:

…set your hopes completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Like obedient children…be holy yourselves in every aspect of your conduct, for it is written, Be holy because I am holy.

Be holy. Set your hopes completely on grace.

Pretty simple. So simple, in fact, that it’s something even my toddler grandson seems to have mastered. There’s a belovedness implicit in his gaze, in how he sees the world.

Settle down…and see.

As we grow older, there’s good reason for ramping up the RPMs, I suppose. We need to put our talents to work in building up the kingdom. But it’s good to have a reminder, especially on a holiday weekend, that ‘busyness’ is not the same as ‘holiness’.

Grandson, and guru.

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.

IHS