When the relationship between God's work and church work becomes unbalanced, I often turn to the writings of Eugene Peterson.  Like a close friend full of wisdom and encouragement, his writings on pastoral theology are an anchor for me.  He reminds all of us pastor-types to keep the main thing the main thing: reclaim our pastoral calling and get back to the business of caring for souls.

This is my Peterson contemplation moment of the week:

Busyness is the enemy of spirituality.  It is essentially laziness.  It is doing the easy thing sintead of the hard thing.  It is filling our time with our own actions instead of paying attention to God's actions.  It is taking charge.

...Busyness has nothing to do with activity, and spirituality is not the absence of activity.  You either enter into what God is doing or you don't.  A busy person is a lazy person because they are not doing what they are supposed to do.

...The pastor's primary work is leading people in worship on Sunday morning, proclaiming the Word of God, being knowledgeable in theology and Scripture, and being committed to pastoral care which does not have the therapeutic model for its structure.  Teh pastor is the one who is available one-on-one through the week to personlaize, to customize, and to deal with the uniqueness of everyone's situation.  Pastors pray a lot.  Prayer is hard work, but prayer should be the distinctive about us.  We should have a deliberate or a conscious intelligent, personal relationship with God which is articulated in prayer.

-excerpt from Peterson, Subversive Spirituality, 1994, 1997

"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.

I spent my Victoria day away from the crowds, building a rock wall while having a war of words with my back, insisting that it wasn’t as old as it was telling me.  Talk about time off: I go from my pastoral desk job to hard labour and call it a holiday.  I can’t wait to get back to work so I can rest my sore muscles.

Canadians like to say that we live for long weekends.  Those three special days in a row taking place oh so rarely spell freedom from schedules, work, and our regular routines.  This is cause for celebration –sometimes too much celebration apparently, as some provincial and federal parks hinted by banning liquour in their parks over the May long weekend.

The dictionary defines leisure as freedom from the demands of work and duty.  It’s a surprise then when we feel so tired after our weekend.  If our leisure time is freedom, why do we seem to need a holiday from our holidays? 

We like to use the word “busy” a lot, though I wonder how busy we actually are.  I mean, if we say we’re busy because of our demands of work and duty, that’s fine.  (Although according to statistics we’re not as “busy” as we think we are at the work place, with Facebook, personal e-mails, and extended coffee times and lunches being the primary culprits).  But when we start throwing out the word busy to describe many of our other activities—our hobbies, our holidays, our down-times—it seems like becomes a vocal cue to speed up the pace of our personal lives.  Busy shouldn’t bleed into our leisure.  Not this much.

Of course it’s appropriate to say we’re busy when our schedule is full with other things outside of work and duty.  By definition, busy is to be actively and attentively engaged in work or a pastime.  In fact, most of our schedules are more than busy –they’re chaotic!  Our whole society is absorbed with filling iphones and Blackberries with appointments of play-dates and birthday parties and sleep-overs.  We book our evenings and weekends long in advance, making sure our kids make it to their soccer practices held at different fields, it would appear, around the globe.  We race to the campground, we run to the cabin, we high-tail it to the Caribbean, or Disneyland, or Alaska.  Time’s a wasting; life is ticking by.  Let’s get it done.

But busyness, even with pastimes, is not leisure.   As society continues to practice its collective Attention Deficit Disorder, opportunities to rest are in steep decline.  We stay up later and sleep less.  We eat often while standing or walking, and often alone.  We have little time to reflect, to really chew on an idea, to be really creative.  No wonder sleep, anxiety and depression disorders are on the rise!  There is no margin, no gap between all of the different components of our lives.  It’s a rat race out there, and the rats are getting tired.

Two particular aspects of Jesus’ ministry have always intrigued me.  The first one was that he was only 33 years old when he finished his mission.  That’s pretty young, or pretty old depending on whether you’ve reached that age or not.  I often remark to people when I find out they’ve turned 33 that hey, they’re the same age Jesus was when he died.  This is sometimes more rattling to people than what I intend, especially those with a messiah complex who now realize that they better get busy with their mandate to save the world.  Most scholars agree that Jesus was probably only “on the job” for 3 years; he packed an awful lot of business into those three years.

Which leads to the second aspect of intrigue.  Jesus spent a lot of time, by himself, alone.  He would go from being at the center of the crowds to a mountaintop alone, to pray and recharge.  He would go from spending time with his disciples to being by himself, to contemplate and rest.  Imagine that: the Son of God needing down time.  Apparently holy leisure had to exist in order to make holy work more productive and purposeful. 

When I think about these traits of Jesus in the midst of a hectic life, it makes me want to dust off my old WWJD? bracelet and answer the question directly: it’s high time I schedule in leisure—real leisure, the kind that gets us to “let go and let God”—and reclaim the rest necessary for every human soul.

That’s not completely true, of course.  I want her to experience life, to mature and to take advantage of opportunities that come her way.  I know one day she won’t be asking me to catch her at the bottom of the slide, and that’s not a bad thing.  I want her to grow up.  But not too quickly; you only get one crack at childhood, and in the right environment and at the right pace, it can be the best years of a person’s life. 

Childhood shouldn’t be rushed.  It’s worth taking time to learn new things.  Although some parents suggest that the best way to teach a child how to swim is to throw them in the deep end, most kids learn by taking baby steps.  They get used to the water as toddlers, learn kicking and floating techniques as they get a little older, until eventually they are treading water, swimming laps, and practicing life-saving CPR.  Likewise, you don’t throw a 10 speed at a toddler in order to teach them how to ride a bike; you don’t enrol your five year old child in Grade 12 –unless you have one exceptional kid.

This is probably the reasoning that was behind the uproar last week over the introduction and quick rescinding of a new sex education curriculum in Ontario.  There’s nothing new to controversies over sex-ed, but this particular lesson plan ruffled quite a few feathers.  The struggle is due in part to its blunt language, moving from sexual information to descriptions of sexual practices that are a little too uncomfortable for a broad base of parents.  Further, the curriculum was to be introduced at an early age.  Kids as young as 8 were to be taught about “visible and invisible” sexual differences, a strange topic, parents argued, for the vast majority of kids that age that had yet to reach puberty.

The premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, defended the curriculum.  “We [can] provide it in a format and in a venue in which we have some control,” he stated, “or [the students] can just get it entirely on their own and be informed by potentially uninformed sources like their friends at school.”  He must have been surprised by the immensity of the opposition, for a day later he said, “It’s becoming pretty obvious to us that we should give this a serious re-think.”  Scheduled to be introduced in the 2010-11 school year, the curriculum has now been parked on the sidelines for the foreseeable future.

The fact is, many parents believe that it is their responsibility to provide a “format and venue” for teaching their children about sexuality.  And although the argument is held by more than those with religious beliefs, the Archbishop of Ottawa, Terrence Prendergast stated the Christian position clearly: “I think parents are the first teachers of faith and moral issues to children.”  From a Christian standpoint, sexual education is a moral issue, and therefore a parental issue.  Schools can help and support in the educational process, but parents are to provide the primary environment that enables the spiritual and moral formation of their children.  It is in the home, not the classroom, where character is first formed.

It’s fine to protest, but parents then need to realize that the burden rests on them.  For me, I am ultimately the guardian of my daughter, which is an awesome responsibility to say the least.  I want to take this responsibility on with both eyes open, and at a slow enough pace to build her confidence and maturity as she grows up.  Although I’m happy to take advantage of the tools and relationships out there that enable my parental task, I don’t want to outsource my parenting responsibility to anyone else.  I acknowledge that the subject of sexuality is inevitable, but I’m determined that I’m not going to throw my daughter in the deep end to learn how to swim.  It is my duty (and joy) to get her there safely, with the tools not only to survive, but thrive in the strange and uncertain waters of her adulthood.