Family
Spirituality
Living Faith:
a collection of columns
from Catherine O’Connell-Cahill that appeared in At Home
with our Faith.
The meaning of time
About this time of year,
a parallel life starts to sound like a great idea. One of me would
spend Advent like this: creating beautiful homemade cards and wrapping
paper, serenely shopping for a few choice Christmas gifts, indulging
in long afternoons of baking with my children, enjoying concerts of
uplifting Christmas music with my husband, purchasing an entire set
of Christmas gifts for a poor family, and going sledding with the
family on a frosty morning. (Perhaps we could invite Currier &
Ives by to paint us.)
The other me would
trek to the store for all of those baking ingredients, cook meals,
go to work, wash Everests of laundry, vacuum up the wrapping-paper
scraps, and make midnight trips to the discount store to avoid the
crowds who are after the same four Batman/Spiderman/Star Wars action
figures that I am hunting.
Instead, I do a little
of both, and I spend a lot of time judging myself on how well I used
my time.
I just found out there’s
another way to do things. Not simply during Advent, but all through
the year. Father Gary Riebe Estrella of Catholic Theological Union
spoke to our parish recently on the Hispanic/Anglo cultural gap. As
someone comfortable in both cultures, he can see the differences with
clear eyes. Here’s what he said about the Anglo culture in the
united States; those who are white see time as a commodity, and one
measure of their maturity as adults is how wisely they use their time.
They cling to their calendars, and the fullness of their calendar
indicates how responsible they are. (This springs naturally from a
culture in which the individual is king, and where children are raised
to become independent of the family.)
The Hispanic culture,
says Estrella, does not see time as a thing, a commodity. You are
not judged by what you do with your time. Time is simply the space
you have to cultivate the relationships that make up your life. (This
view fits perfectly into a culture where identity is founded on your
membership in certain groups–your family, among others.)
These wildly different
views of time can create some trying cultural clashes. Estrella mentioned
the Hispanic who arrives late to a meeting and then goes around to
greet everyone–because time is not a valued commodity. Meanwhile,
whites with their eye on the clock, silently fume. A friend who drops
by a Hispanic house will always be welcomed, even if the timing is
inconvenient.
What a relief to know
that, if I choose, it might be possible to stop grading myself on
how full I have crammed my waking hours, and to abandon the endless
quest to "find more time" by doing things faster and faster.
God didn’t come up with this goofy idea, and with God’s
help I can let go of it. Advent is a good place to start. The scriptural
messages are simple: watch, stay awake, prepare the way of the Lord.
(Not: never a phone call when a fax will do, or always drive 10 miles
over the limit.) If I live the Advent messages, the presents will
still get bought and the meals will get cooked, but perhaps the music
will be listened to, and the Advent wreath will be lit, and maybe
Currier & Ives will even stop by for some Christmas cookies. COC
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