Slowing Down 7 – Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter!

We arrive again at our Good Friday, when we contemplate Our Lord being tortured and giving up His life for our salvation.

We’ve talked about slowing down in order to live more mindfully, more conscientiously. By doing so, we can live more spiritually. Isn’t that the true goal of our lives, to be in relationship with our God: Father, Son, and Spirit?

I think about the followers of Jesus, and how they must have despaired to see their Hope die on a cross and be entombed. What is left when even Hope is gone? On that Friday, they must have been devastated and in shock, feeling so very confused.

Then Holy Saturday followed. The numbness subsided and the pain ached, both real and unrelenting. No doubt they felt abandoned and maybe even angry. They’d changed their lives for a dream that now seemed destroyed.

Have you been there? Have you received devastating news? Have you heard a frightening diagnosis, or learned of the death of a loved one, or realized your child was lost, either literally or spiritually? You’ve known your own suffering and death of that dark Friday. You’ve awakened the next day, your Holy Saturday, only to realize anew what you’ve lost. And maybe your Holy Saturday goes on and on for days or months or years.

Yet, we have a gift that the disciples didn’t on Holy Saturday. We know about Easter Sunday. We know there is hope ahead, and that evil and death have been conquered. We will all have our Holy Saturdays that feel like waiting in Limbo, but we are an Easter people. We strive to live mindfully and conscientiously and spiritually. We have faith and hope and love. We know our Easter will come. The resurrection will be ours, too.

Easter is coming! Rejoice!

Thank you for reading these Lenten posts. I hope at least one line has touched your soul.

One last bonus section for your consideration, or maybe amusement: 20 Ideas for Slowing Down Your Overall Pace of Life, from The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, by John Mark Comer:

1. Drive the speed limit.
2. Get into the slow lane. Pray while you drive.
3. Come to a full stop at stop signs.
4. Don’t text and drive.
5. Show up 10 minutes early for an appointment and don’t use your phone.
6. Get into the longest checkout line at the grocery store. (Wise to regularly deny ourselves what we want. We don’t have to get our way to be happy.)
7. Turn your smartphone into a dumb phone. Take email off your phone. Take all social media off your phone. Use your computer and only check at scheduled times. Disable your web browser. Delete all notifications, including those for texts. Ditch news apps or alerts. Delete every app you don’t need or doesn’t make your life easier. Set your phone to grayscale mode for less stimulation.
8. Get a flip phone or ditch your cell phone all together.
9. Parent your phone; put it to bed before you and make it sleep in.
10. Keep your phone off until after your morning quiet time.
11. Set times to check and respond to email.
12. Set a time and a limit for social media (or just get off it.)
13. Kill your TV. Every single thing that we let into our minds will have an effect on our souls.
14. Single task. Be fully present to the moment: to God, other people, work in the world, and your own soul. That’s more than enough to consume your attention.
15. Walk slower.
16. Regularly take a day alone for silence and solitude.
17. Take up journaling. (Or vlog or voice note journal.) The point is to slow down enough to observe your life from the outside.
18. Experiment with mindfulness and meditation.
19. If you can, take long vacations. A study shows it takes 8 days for happiness levels to peak. (The Torah had 3 feasts a year, and were 8 days long, including two Sabbaths.)
20. Cook your own food. And eat in. The anchor point for a family’s life can be the table.

Slowing Down 4 – Enough

Welcome back! We have talked about the need to slow down for our own benefit, but also to be available to our loved ones and to God. We are working on knowing our limits, seeing interruptions as people, and allowing some margin in our schedules.

Today we turn to the idea of Enough.

Have you heard the sayings, “You can never get enough of what you don’t need,” or “What you don’t need never satisfies?” They suggest that focusing on acquiring things or experiences you don’t really need will never lead to true satisfaction or happiness, as those things will ultimately fail to fill a void. Even if we acquire a large quantity of things we don’t need, they won’t provide the same sense of fulfillment or happiness as things that genuinely serve a purpose or are important to us. We need a shift in focus towards appreciating what we already have and finding contentment rather than constantly striving for more.

Similarly, in Matthew Kelly’s, Slowing Down to the Speed of Joy, he writes that the secret of life is to want the right things, and “the right things to want are those that lead you and others to flourish.” He says, “Wanting what you need is wisdom, but our desires are not all good for us. (…) Wanting the wrong things can drain and destroy us, prevent us from flourishing, and steal our joy. And the faster and busier your life the more likely you are to want the wrong things.”

In all aspects of life, most of us don’t ever calculate how much is enough. The result is that we perpetually think we don’t have enough. In fact, he insists that “One of the primary reasons we don’t slow down is because we don’t think we have enough. One of the main reasons we are excessively busy is because we don’t think we are enough. (…) Knowing that you have enough, that you are enough—here, now, today—is essential to slowing down to the speed of joy.”

Knowing we have and are enough is a gift, but one that runs counter to this society, which seems to have brought us to an age of discontent. We are encouraged to always want more—more money, more experiences, more luxuries—but still we aren’t satisfied.

If, instead, we realize we have enough, and are grateful, we find contentment.

Kelly says, “Enough + Gratitude = Contentment.”

Sadly, the opposite of gratitude is entitlement, a state of mind that, over the years, each older generation tends to consign to the younger generation. Kelly says, “The more you think you are entitled to something, the less you will be satisfied with it. (…) A person possessed by entitlement is incapable of being grateful. Entitlement and unhappiness are synonymous. If you think life owes you something, you will end up feeling cheated.” Yet, there’s hope. “Gratitude cures so much restlessness and dissatisfaction.”

He adds, “It’s impossible to be grateful and unhappy at the same time. (…) Gratitude is the virtue of rejoicing in what is. It is the quality of being thankful. It expresses appreciation for all that is good, true, and beautiful in our lives. (…) The enough mindset facilitates gratitude, the path to contentment.”

Kelly advises that we “Identify what is essential (the vital few) and focus on that.” If we do so, we can regain control of our choices about how to spend our time and energy.

What is essential for you? He says you can find the answer to that question by asking yourself:

• Who am I?
• Why am I here?
• How do I do that?
• What matters most?
• What matters least?

What is enough? The right amount. Too much is dangerous. Greed will lead us toward too much. Less can be more.

As we choose our “enough” and schedule our days, Kelly advises we reject the idea of FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. Accept that we will miss out on nearly everything because no one can do or have it all. “Just try not to miss out on the things God intended just for you.” He recommends we turn FOMO into JOMO, the Joy of Missing Out.

This brings us back to our need for leisure. We require time to contemplate, to reflect, and to pray, so that we can know how much is the optimal amount of anything:

• Sleep
• Food
• Possessions (Too many become a burden and a source of stress, a barrier to flourishing.)
• Money (Too much and you cease to become a better version of yourself.)
• Entertainment, etc.

“Knowing what to want, learning how to be content, discovering what the vital few are for you and your family, realizing how little we actually need and that there is a right amount of anything.… These are all powerful lessons that make it easier to slow down to the speed of joy.”

Our time is limited. We can’t get more hours in a day or more years in our life. If we think we don’t have enough time, Kelly asks, “What are you attempting to do that you should not be doing?” He says that we have exactly enough time to do what we should be doing. We don’t have enough time to waste, or to procrastinate, to be unkind, or hurtful, or to worry about what anyone else thinks of us. Yet there is plenty of time to flourish, be grateful, be generous, and do what God wants us to do.

“More time isn’t the answer. The answer is: careful selection, prayerful discernment, a grateful heart, and acknowledgment of the reality of our finitude.”

Slow down. Slow down to the speed of joy. Flourish. Do God’s will for you.

“The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.” (Psalm 23)

We are more than halfway through Lent! Blessings on the weeks ahead, and may you gain all that God has in store for you.

Betty

Slowing Down 3 – Leisure

“Come to me all you who are weary and heavy burdened I will give you rest.” Matt 11:28

I don’t know about you, but my life seems to have gotten busier since I started studying Slowing Down to the Speed of Joy. But I’ll keep trying, because I believe Matthew Kelly is right. Being busy, hurried, and overwhelmed runs contrary to living a healthy, meaningful life.

He says, “When we’re living too fast and our lives are too busy, our hearts become troubled with the things of this world. The speed creates stress and anxiety. The busyness creates stress and anxiety. Both of these lifestyle choices negatively impact our ability to recognize other people’s needs and to live out God’s mandate to love.”

We’ve talked about slowing down, adding margin to our schedules, and pausing for interruptions. Today we will talk about leisure.

Kelly quotes Josef Pieper, from the book Leisure: the Basis of Culture:

“Leisure isn’t a rest period to allow us to work better. It’s more than that. Leisure is an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to receive the reality of the world.” He asks, “Do we live to work, or work to live? He warns, “If we do not take time for quiet reflection, we are much more likely to make poor decisions, foolish decisions that create the problems of our lives.”

Peiper asserts, “Religion can only be born in leisure, a leisure that allows time to contemplate nature, self, God, and the world” adding that unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.

The examples of leisure that Pieper practiced himself were celebration, worship, contemplation, philosophical reflection, appreciation of the arts and beauty, true rest, play, and the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. Those sound like pretty nice ways to spend time, don’t they? If you need more convincing, both authors say that every aspect of our lives improves when we make leisure a habit.

Leisure:

• Teaches us what is meaningful.
• Expands our capacity to give and receive.
• Brings us into harmony with ourselves, to be still and quiet.
• Allows us to receive the gifts of wisdom.
• Gives the truth and goodness of life an opportunity to reveal itself to us.
• Reminds us of who we are and what we are here for.
• Fills us with energy and enthusiasm to return to the world and carry out what we know in our hearts to be our mission in life.
• Is the attitude of one who opens himself, who lets go.

So, where do we start? How do we begin to bring leisure back into our lives? According to Matthew Kelly, we start with the Sabbath. We start with Sunday.

He writes, “Sunday is the one thing. I promised you one very specific form of leisure that will change your life. Sunday is it. The wisdom of the Sabbath will teach you how to slowdown to the speed of joy. It’s the one thing that will help you to restore your capacity for leisure and lead you to flourish like never before. Sunday will create margin to love like never before and carry out the great human mandate to love God and neighbor wholeheartedly. Sunday is the one thing from which so many other good things will flow. Goodness you cannot imagine yet will flow from authentically embracing Sundays.

“Observing Sunday as a day of rest liberates us from those feelings of hurried, overwhelmed, and anxious. Doing Sunday right makes the other six days better, (…) more focused and meaningful.

“The Sabbath is an invitation to fall in love again—with life, with God, with each other. (…) The sabbath is a giver of gifts. Whatever good things you want to increase in your life, honor the Sabbath and it shall be so. (…) But there is a gift the Sabbath will give you that is beyond compare. If you faithfully observe this holy day, (…) you will become a friend of God.“

To observe the sabbath in a better way:

   1. Don’t let what you can’t do interfere with what you can do. (What CAN you do?)

   2. Identify your immovable obstacles. (Things scheduled on Sunday that you can’t avoid.)

   3. Know that most immovable obstacles are only immovable in the short term. (What can you change in the future?)

   4. Also, some “obstacles” to leisure might actually be leisure if they are soul-nourishing.

   5. Start small if you must. Focus on what’s possible right now, build from there. (Consider sunset Saturday to sunset Sunday as your Sabbath as the Jews did? Or begin with a few hours.)

Matthew Kelly says the biggest obstacle we will find as we try to rethink our Sabbaths is that work is easier than leisure. We know how to work, but we need to learn how to practice Sabbath. Kelly says practicing Sabbath requires:

• Two disciplines:
  • We must learn to do nothing.
  • And learn to enjoy doing things just for the joy of it.
• Two virtues:
  • Humility – to let go, surrender, and receive
  • Patience – to learn to appreciate simplicity, to practice activities that are not productivity-focused, and cultivate inner peace and calm.

Kelly advises, “Do not try to get the most out of each Sunday. Allow the signs and wonders God sends you each Sunday to sink deep into your heart. (…) You will get the most out of these experiences by planning the least.”

And he continues, “Learn to say no, first to yourself. And also to others. Say no ruthlessly to everything that isn’t leisurely when leisure is your aim. (…) Doing too much will stop you from becoming the best-version-of-yourself. Busy will destroy you. Guard against it fiercely.”

Kelly even quotes one of my favorite philosophers. “Sometimes doing nothing can lead to the very best of something,” says Winnie the Pooh.

Kelly says, if we get good at taking back your Sundays, we will benefit in a long list of ways (p. 92) but here are a few of my favorites. We will…

• Get good at setting boundaries.
• Avoid all unnecessary commitments.
• Know our values.
• Prioritize what matters.
• Gladly unplug from technology.
• Discover how to relax, really relax.
• Stop seeing leisure as an unobtainable luxury.
• See our low-grade anxiety dissipate.
• Listen deeply to ourself and others.
• Declutter our space, our schedule, and our heart.
• Be in awe of our productivity when we are working.
• Delight in being able to help someone in need because we built margin into our schedule.
• Feel profoundly connected to the people we love, and they to us.

Begin this Sunday – it won’t be easy, but it will be worth it! Worship. Play. Spend time with loved ones. Admire something beautiful. Learn something new. Ponder. Dream.

Prayers for you in the coming week!

Slowing Down

Slowing Down to the Speed of Joy 1                                    

Welcome to, or welcome back to, my weekly Lenten posts called “4 Minutes 4 Growth.” This year’s topic is slowing down to the speed that allows us to flourish, rather than merely survive. We will consider a different aspect of the challenge each Friday in Lent from Slowing Down to the Speed of Joy: The Simple Art of Taking Back Your Life, by Matthew Kelly.

We are probably all too busy. And aren’t we a little proud of that? Our society seems to see busyness as a virtue. It makes us feel important and gives meaning to our lives. Or does it? Our lives have meaning because we are children of God, not because of what we do. Our lives also derive meaning from how we help and love others. So, the use of our time is more important than how urgent, hurried, or busy we are.

Are we flourishing? Like the Kaiser Permanente commercials ask, do we thrive? Kelly writes that we have become too busy when we are focused on urgent tasks that might not be important, rather than the important tasks God wants us to accomplish. God wants us to love unconditionally: our husbands, our children, strangers, Him, and even ourselves. But being too busy can get in the way of that.

If we are too busy, we’ll miss that our quiet child is even more quiet than usual, or that our talkative child is saying something very important. We won’t notice that our husband is feeling left out and unappreciated, or that our friend’s voice on the phone sounds strained. We need down time, not busy time, to sit with a child who needs to talk or cry, to find out why one of the children seems angry all the time lately, or even to notice that the pain in our stomach has lasted too long to ignore.

Matthew Kelly writes, “Love says, ‘I see you. I hear you. I am with you. I care. Rest a while. You are safe here with me. You are worthy. This cannot be rushed.‘ (…) Someone you love has unmet and unspoken needs. But it is impossible to notice these things when our lives are moving too quickly, so people have to scream to get our attention. What will it take to get our attention?’”

Researchers ask people every year, “What one word would you use to describe how you feel on a daily basis?” Overwhelmed is now the most common answer.

“It’s not just that we are busy, but that we are busy with the wrong things. Busy leads to overwhelmed, overwhelmed leads to weary, weary leads to discouraged, and discouragement leads us to feel resentful and inadequate. Anyone or anything that makes you feel that way is too small for you.”

The truth is, you are already at war with busy, you have been at war with busy for a long time, and busy is opposed to almost everything you value most.”

Peter Kreeft, of Boston College, says, “To win any war, the three most necessary things to know are:

• That you are at war
• Who your enemy is, and
• What weapons or strategies can defeat that enemy.”

“The will to fight comes from being clear about what’s at stake. Busy is an enemy to your physical health, personal finances, marriage, parenting, career, spirituality, peace of mind, mental health, and so much more. And busy cannot be reasoned with. It will destroy you unless you actively subdue it in your life.”

Betty here. We are at war. The enemy is being so busy that we can’t flourish. Let’s figure out what strategies will help us be the best version of ourselves. This week let’s think about how busy we are and how busy we want to be. Let’s use some of our Sabbath time this Sunday to ponder what we can do to slow down to a healthier level.

May God bless your week.
Betty Arrigotti

Author of Christian Love Stories, available at Amazon:

A Slower Advent

Happy Advent!

I usually only post during Lent and about my books, but I wanted to share a talk my daughter Jennifer Friend gave at a ladies’ luncheon at church:

Good morning, everyone,

We have all just heard a bunch of wonderful and beautiful ideas for how to celebrate Advent with your families, and I know I could call on just about anyone in the room to come up and tell us even more ideas we haven’t heard yet…

But this is a busy time of year for moms… in many families it is often the mom making the magic happen for her family in December. It is a joy and a privilege to do so, but it can also be exhausting!

I want to give you permission to do something quite radical this year…

I want to give you permission to do… less.

Jesus will still be born at Christmas if all you do this year is a really intentional Advent Wreath tradition.

Jesus will still be born at Christmas even if all you do this year is a faithful observance of the various saint feast days in December. Or if you just pull out a book to read each day instead of individually gift-wrapping 24 books to open and read throughout Advent!

Jesus will still be born at Christmas even if all you do is a really great Jesse tree. And really, Jesus will still be born at Christmas even if you can only manage a mediocre Jesse tree! If something is truly worth doing, it’s even worth doing badly!

Maybe you have a new baby! Or perhaps you lost a loved one this year! Or someone is searching for a job! Or you are a grandma for the first time this year!

Emmanuel…     God with us…   Emmanuel is not diminished by the season of life we are in!

A couple of years ago we pulled out our Advent tub and tried to do it all. Each kid chose a different Jesse tree, we had a new Advent Wreath program for readings, various grandmas sent us new Advent calendars, we had fancy paper ornaments for each saint feast day to print out and color and then cut out and assemble, not to mention more secular traditions for December! We would get up each Advent day and go through each Jesse tree, one kid putting up a sticker, another a magnet, another something on the fridge, another hanging up a tiny book, and none of the readings lined up with each other, then we had to update each Advent calendar, and we were too busy to enjoy the coloring of the saint ornaments, and too tired to assemble them, and then we had to get ready to head to the next December event for the day!

It was tiring, and I was probably not the most patient mother that year.

This year, dare to be different. YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO IT ALL! If your little ones are still young, and you have ideas for 10 different traditions you have heard this morning, you DO NOT need to start every single new tradition this year! Try ONE! Write the rest of the ideas down on a piece of paper and tape it to your Christmas or Advent tub to look at next year!

If you are a grandma, you don’t have to think of every tradition you’d like your grandkids to grow up with. Don’t pressure your adult children to continue every tradition they grew up with. Let them try to do less this year, if they need to. Let them establish their own traditions. It doesn’t mean that they don’t treasure the childhood traditions you chose for them growing up!

If your kids are somewhere in between… not tiny, but not yet grown… get them involved! Ask them to help you choose which 1 or 2 Advent traditions they would like to try this year! What a healthy life skill to be instilling now!

Saying no to something good this year doesn’t mean you are saying no to it forever! You can take a break for a year and decide again what to try next year!

I am going to borrow some wisdom from Sarah Mackenzie and encourage you to keep in mind three beautiful missions this year. They are true for a healthy homeschool, and I think they apply beautifully to any family and any liturgical season…

1 – DO LESS,

2 – AS CONSISTENTLY AS YOU ARE ABLE, and

3 – PUT RELATIONSHIPS FIRST.

That’s all. Consider these three as you make decisions about how to celebrate Advent with your family this year. Do less, as consistently as you can manage in the season of life that you are in and be sure to keep relationships on the front burner, not the back burner. Relationships not only with your family and friends, but also with the God who so desperately desires you to slow down enough to see Him.

Give your family the gift of a Mama that isn’t staying up until midnight or beyond stressing over the next day. Give your family the gift of a more rested woman who chose to focus her energy on doing one or two things well, rather than trying to do it all and having no patience left for the people she loves. If you’re married, give your spouse the gift of a wife who isn’t 110% focused on the kids at this time of year. Find ways to make it a little easier on yourself, so that you too get to enjoy the ‘waiting in hope’. So that you get to enjoy the season as well, and that you will have room at the inn of your heart for Jesus to be born this Christmas.

The Advent that your family experiences this year will be greatly enriched if they get to see you slow down and cherish this beautiful season for yourself. Do less, as consistently as you are able, and put relationships first.