Now that I’m off, and gone, I’m studying
some other ambivalences that are revealing themselves to me. Well-wishers have said, I hope your time away
is restful. I haven’t known how to
respond to that either. I’m not tired –
or maybe by stopping I’ll realize how tired I might really be. But my family and close friends can attest
that time away with me is far from “restful.”
I’m in some place, any place, and I Google places to see and things to
do. I’m at the ruins of a medieval abbey
– and the fact that I revel in strolling through these old stones and imagining
monks chanting by candlelight seven centuries before I got there does not
prevent me from picking up the pace, checking my watch, and dashing off to the
next abbey, or Roman fort, or museum, or seashore vista. The sunset isn’t a thing of beauty so much as
a mandate that we must now stop the dizzying round of touring until morning.
Should I reprimand myself? I envy, and simultaneously pity people who go
someplace and just sit, or relax. My
faith tradition tells me it is good to be still, to rest (which is what the
word “sabbatical” means!). Yet sloth is
a deadly sin; and God did strew this world full of so many wonders that it
seems disrespectful not to get out and notice, and marvel. How to strike any semblance of balance
between being still, resting (even if you aren’t weary), letting time pass,
taking the opportunity simply to be – and a healthy activity, a robust sense of
adventure, soaking in all the world has to offer? I am driven – and yet as I drive to the next
place I discover a joy in the drivenness of which I pray God would cure
me. Ambivalence.
I find precisely the same ambivalence when
I think about working and not working, and being connected and not being
connected. I love work. I think I’d love work if I’d become a chemist
or a lawyer or whatever else I might have become had God not interrupted my
meanderings in college. But doing what I
do for a living: I often say I’d do it
for free, but I happily accept a paycheck.
But my work is invigorating, and meaningful. How lucky:
I get to do something that really matters, or at least I hope it
does.
So I never find myself itching for a few
days or weeks away from work. I miss it
when I’m away. I’ve never settled on
varied hobbies – although I wish could garden or sew or build furniture or hit
a golfball straight. I might confess to
being addicted to work. Is it addiction?
Or a deep tender attachment? I cannot
tell, and I suspect God doesn’t mind my confusion. I’m not ambivalent about work, but my
ambivalence about whether I should feel guilty for digging work so
enthusiastically rattles me once in a while – like when I go on sabbatical and
find myself not working. I miss the
work, but I realize the life of God’s church goes on wonderfully without me,
and perhaps even better: the church I
think needs me so much probably grows strong when I can’t be needed. Maybe I’m not as needed as I’d thought. I think this is a holy ambivalence, and to
resolve the tension would be curiously sinful I think.
And finally the whole issue of being
connected. Today one can be connected
always: in another country, even on an
airplane, I am reachable. My phone can
ring almost anywhere on God’s good earth.
I can text for a nickel, I can see and post Facebook pictures from
Europe, I can answer emails in a hotel or on a city bus. Pundits bemoan this new reality – and I have
echoed their sentiments in several blogs (including “Hamlet’s Blackberry”); I
do suspect that unhealthy, addictive patterns of thought, self-perceptions, and
habits are inevitable. How many have
“liked” my sabbatical photos? Why hasn’t
anybody texted me? And
theologically: if I am always reachable,
if I’m always connected to semi-friends on Facebook or anybody who happens to
get my cell number, then I wonder if I am ever reachable by God?
And yet being connected is the deepest
human dream. God made us not to be alone
but to love, to tell stories, to point and share moments, to converse. I envy people in olden times who travelled,
and mailed postcards, which took days to be delivered; a loved one back then
was simply incommunicado, and perhaps the heart grew fonder as a result. And yet that I can respond now to my wife or
daughter, that I can tell my son on another continent that I saw something he’d
dig: these must somehow be good
things.
I’m ambivalent, and hope to stay
that way. If I blithely stayed connected
and never peeked at the perils, if I never went into any sort of solitude, if I
forgot how to be with the person I’m actually with instead of being perpetually
distracted by the people I am not with, this would be tragic. And yet if I dispensed with the smart phone
entirely, if I never took advantage of the technological miracles that enable
me to speak with loved ones over great distances, if I had no desire to share
with you what I see that you cannot see, this too would be sad. So I live with the awkwardness, the
paradoxical confusion. Maybe I take
mini-sabbaticals within the larger sabbatical to be out of touch, and then
seize other chances to be back in touch.
Holy ambivalence. I think, and hope God is pleased, and that I
can grow by being thrown off balance by these ambivalences.
