2010 Colloquium
This is a time of turmoil in my spiritual life. I won’t go into more detail, but it’s something that is causing me to lose a bit of sleep. And what little hair I have left.
What to do?
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My colleague Tony made this observation in a discussion last week:
It really struck me as an important concept, one that I need to constantly remember on my journey of life.
There’s so many problems, so many things to be fixed. We live in fear of what is and what’s to come. And meanwhile, we spend our lives constantly focusing on the future. Here’s the deal: Your presence is in the present. And if you can’t enjoy and appreciate what God has given you in the present, you will reside in constant misery.
Daunting is a relatively weak word for what it feels like.
This can be especially true in a church context, because there are significant power relationships at work, and deep emotions. Both of these are even more exaggerated for church musicians. Jesus has been reaching out to every one of us, every day, with a tremendously simple message. It’s not rocket science, folks, or it wouldn’t be accessible to all. “It is for us to make the effort. The result is always in God’s hands.” – Mahatma Gandhi In our culture, we are very focused on results. Goals, money, achievement – things that represent the crowning results from our work. But you might notice that this leaves little room for God to work in our lives. I had the opportunity to sing Compline with the schola from another parish last night – a wonderful and prayerful experience. But earlier in the week, the director tangentially referred to me as “the professional.” Say what? I mean, I’m a neophyte at this chant, and have only been working on it for a few years. No college training in music.
That’s a huge change from the way we usually think. We tend to focus on what organizations do through their employees, and by money changing hands. But in fact, the new economy is doing more and more based on volunteers. Let’s think about this for a moment. You spend, say, 40 hours a week doing things that someone pays you for. That’s 24% of your 168 available hours in the week. Let’s say you sleep 8 hours a night – that’s another 33%. So this means that 43% of your time during the week – 72 hours – is available for doing things that nobody’s paying you for. And because we’re massively connected, you can make a difference to people who are anywhere in the world. Presumably much of your time is spent on contributions to your family and maintaining your mental, physical, and spiritual health. But for the remaining time you have, here are my questions:
These kinds of questions can help you to put some laser focus onto your precious discretionary time and effort. And when you team up with others who share similar goals, amazing things can happen. World-changing things. I love the vibrant sacred music community over at www.musicasacra.com because they’re focused on achieving amazing things for the Catholic Church – almost entirely just building on each others’ volunteer efforts. And when you’re a volunteer, you get to make the contribution that you decide is most important – unconstrained by the power of the paycheck. |
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