Some food for thought for you on this fine Friday. As we enter into the weekend, may our eyes be opened to God at play with us and creation. – Jessica

Kathleen Norris On Workaholism & Worship:

Workaholism is the opposite of humility, and to an unhumble literary workaholic such as myself, morning devotions can feel useless, not nearly as important as getting about my business early in the day. I know from bitter experience that when I allow busy little doings to fill the precious time of early morning, when contemplation might flourish, I open the doors to the demon of acedia. Noon becomes a blur — no time, no time — the wolfing down of a sandwich as I listen to the morning’s phone messages and plan the afternoon’s errands. When evening comes, I am so exhausted that vespers have become impossible. It is as if I have taken the world’s weight on my shoulders and am too greedy, and too foolish, to surrender it to God.

…Worship grounds me again in the real world of God’s creation, dislodging me from whatever world I have imagined for myself. I have come to believe that when we despair of praise, when the wonder of creation and our place in it are lost to us, it’s often because we’ve lost sight of our true role as creatures — we have tried to do too much, pretending to be in such control of things that we are indispensable. It’s a hedge against mortality and, if you’re like me, you take a kind of comfort in being busy. The danger is that we will come to feel too useful, so full of purpose and the necessity of fulfilling obligations that we lose sight of God’s play with creation and with ourselves.

– An excerpt from The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work,” pp. 25-26

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