The little box of CDs wedged between the front seats of our car contains labels such as Mozart’s Piano Concertos 18 & 19, The Vigil service of the Kiev Monastery, Tomaso Albinoni’s Cantatas from Opus 4, and “The Best of the Beach Boys.” (“That’s Daddy,” my kids sigh, rolling their eyes toward heaven.)
When I’m tired or on a long trip, though, I usually forego this heavy stuff and tune in to Charleston’s “Cat Country!” at “107.5 on yo’ dahl.” Tim McGraw (yeah, and Faith Hill!), Alan Jackson and “Alabama,” that kind of thing. I’m not sure why this appeals to me, besides the fact that it churns up the decibels that keep me from drifting off at the wheel. I think it has to do with the pop-philosophy that every once in a while lifts country music to nearly sublime heights.
There’s one line from the group “Alabama” that comes back to me, maybe too often. It’s a lament for our time, a plaintive cry of resistance and caving in, which expresses both fatalism and frustration in a world that’s out of control.
“All I gotta do is live and die, / But I’m in a hurry an’ I don’t know why…”
I recall the first time I visited a Trappist monastery, located in a remote area between Normandy and Brittany on the north coast of France. A Catholic friend introduced me to an elderly monk, dressed in white shirt and black pants, who was coming out of the ancient stone chapel. The office was over. He had laid aside his monk’s robe and was coming back to the little building near the monastery entrance, where he welcomed visitors. He was subdued, yet radiant. There was a quiet peace about him that you could almost touch and see, an aura of gentle holiness that set him apart from the rest of us.
For the next few hours he would sit in that tiny space, thinking, praying and exploring his own inner space, as he waited for pilgrims to pass by. We talked for a few minutes, and I learned that this is what he did virtually every day. Two hours before dawn reading and meditating in his cell, six to eight hours in the chapel, four in his little welcoming hut, one or two in the refectory and “chapter,” then a little time for sleep. Whatever was left over, usually two or three hours a day, he spent working on the grounds, cleaning up after guests, pulling stray weeds, and watching the wildlife.
All the time his inner space was attuned to higher things: beautiful, transcendent things that suffused his entire being with a quiet joy and often brought him to tears. He didn’t tell us this last part; we learned it from our friend, who had known him from childhood.
The world is filled with souls like this Trappist monk. To many of us, their routine would be a mind-numbing waste of time. They don’t DO anything! They are willfully, wantonly, scandalously unproductive. All they’ve got to do is live and die. And to what end?
All I’ve got to do, too, is live and die. All God asks of me, and all of us, is to assume the stewardship of our life, acknowledge that we belong to Him and owe our entire being to Him, and then die in peace, in His time and in the way He intends. That’s all.
But I’m in a hurry, and I don’t know why. I’m driven by some odd compulsion that makes me feel I’ve always got to DO something: to perform, accomplish, create, whatever. I’ve bought in to the competitor-consumer mentality of the world I live in, and I can’t ever do enough to buy my way out. If I make more money, achieve some goal (usually suggested by somebody else), work hard enough to merit a few strokes from those above me, or simply keep busy enough so I don’t feel guilty at knocking off for a few hours, then my life is worth while, then I’ve succeeded.
But of course I can’t ever win that frantic race. It’s not just because there are too many others ahead of me. It’s because I’m in the wrong race to begin with.
“Take time to smell the roses,” they tell us. No, take time to plant, cultivate and cherish those roses. Take time to make warfare against frenetic activity and compulsive over-achievement, time to take stock of values and virtues long lost in the dust of “doing things.”
Take time like that Trappist monk, to pray, meditate and think. Take time to wonder at the beauty of creation, to welcome those who pass through the gates of your daily experience, to “sing a new song” from the depths of your heart to the One who calls us to live and to die in Him, filled with His peace, His love and His purpose.
All this I say to myself, knowing full well that I barely listen. Yet every once in a while I can turn off Mozart or McGraw, slow down and just BE. Then, somehow, I’m no longer hurrying about madly in a meaningless world, no longer just living to die. Somehow, for a few minutes at least, I’m able to hear and appreciate St. Paul’s words, addressed to Christians living in the noise, the busyness and the stress of ancient Rome:
“If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”