Rushing around, trying too hard - sound familiar? Fr Ron Rolheiser writes thus:

Hurrying can hamper life's sacredness

In Exile By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi Rome

"Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried." Thoreau wrote that and it's not meant as something trivial.

We hurry too much, pure and simple. As Henri Nouwen describes it: "One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like overpacked suitcases bursting at the seams.

"It fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligation."

What's wrong with hurrying? Any doctor, police officer, spiritual director, or over-worked mother, can answer that: Hurrying causes tension, high blood pressure, accidents, and robs us of the simple capacity to be in the moment.

But spiritual writers take this further. They see hurry as an obstacle to spiritual growth. Donald Nicholl, for example, says, "Hurry is a form of violence exercised upon time," an attempt, as it were, to make time God's time our own, our private property. What he and others suggest is that, in hurrying, we exercise a form of greed and gluttony?

Too often we have a simplistic notion of greed and gluttony. We imagine greed, for example, as hoarding money and possessions, as being selfish, hard-hearted, like Scrooge in the Dickens' Christmas tale.
continues