THE ART OF DOING NOTHING

A Sermon of a Summer Sabbath

July 12, 2002

If there's anything more suspect and subject to the raising of a critical eyebrow in our society, it's doing nothing. Even more wicked than publicly, and without any obvious guilt, consuming a banana split all by yourself, is allowing yourself to appear at any age to be doing absolutely nothing of a manifestly productive nature with one's life and time.

Infants should be aggressively learning to swim under water. One- and two-year-olds ought to be mastering those skills which will admit them to the better pre-schools and thus put them solidly on the inside track for success and admission to the Ivy League.

Five- and six-year-olds, already academically well-developing and ready to read Tolstoy, need now to get busy with soccer clinics and computer word processing. Specialized summer camp programs are a must, and it wouldn't hurt to begin to pick up a foreign language.

And so it goes, through the life cycle of a child desirous of being marked a winner and destined to be included among the well-rounded and successful. First place teams, competitively secured internships in any field, exotic travel, a C-Span appearance beside one's legislator (party in power preferred), a published essay in Foreign Affairs, and a cornucopia of highly-touted extracurriculars, and perhaps a summer stint as a ballboy at Wimbledon-and the chances are looking up, that success beckons.

In our Homes for the Aged, the schedules are no less complete and rigorous. The losers sit still, the winners wake at dawn to take tango lessons, advanced computer programming, study the principles of bio-technology, and are certain to refill both their Viox and Viagra! We are a society which is impressed with busyness and which disparages any lifestyle which appears to be non-productive. And shame on us all!

If I could convince you to read just one book during this summer, it would be Philip Simmon's thought-filled and insightful work, Learning to Fall. You're going to hear a lot about it during the High Holy Days. Simmons, at 30-something, a husband, father of two young ones, professor of English, discovers he's suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease. And in about 200 pages shares an abundance of wisdom-useful observations with his readers. One chapter deals with this "Art of Doing Nothing." Simmons relates:

Many of us do vacations badly, and so in summer we find ourselves in trouble. We may look forward to vacation all year, but when the time arrives, we grow anxious. Will I have enough to do, we ask. Or will I be doing the right things? Can I stand spending that much time with my family? Can I stand spending that much time with myself? Our habits of busyness cannot easily be switched off, and many of us concoct vacations that seem suspiciously like work. . . .

Some of us can't stand to leave off work at all. My wife and I have both been blessed with finding work we loved, and so we suffered through the third week of our honeymoon, during which it became clear to us that two weeks of blissful leisure was about as much as we could take. Wanting to be back home working, we instead had to endure the torment of a week's hiking in the Swiss Alps, ogling glaciers, sleeping in abandoned sheep barns, and dancing to accordion music in rustic mountain huts. Eventually we solved our problems by moving to this small New Hampshire town, a place of mountains and lakes and mosquitoes where you can pretend you're on vacation while working constantly.

We Americans get little credit for doing nothing, so it's no wonder we're not very good at it. We speak of the Protestant work ethic, which derives from that peculiar Calvinist pathology that sees our good works as signs of our election to the ranks of the saved. . . .

Simmons gets us down to the nitty gritty. Don't forget; this is a fellow whose time to communicate is growing to a close, so he isn't about to beat around the bush.

I think if we're honest with ourselves, we can agree that our busyness--whether of body or of mind--is often a distraction, a way of avoiding others, avoiding intimacy, avoiding ourselves. We keep busy to push back our fears, our loneliness, our self-doubt, our questions about purposes and ends. We want to know we matter, we want to know our lives are worthwhile. And when we're not sure, we work that much harder, we worry that much more. In face of our uncertainty, we keep busy. . . .

So where might you and I find salvation? How do we save ourselves from ourselves? We need to stop and recognize something going on within us. Call it a deep notion, buried somewhere within that we are somehow unworthy of enjoying and embracing life. So we work unceasingly and worry ourselves into a pit that can never be filled.

And here's how we escape: we re-engage with the world. Writes Philip Simmons (I told you to read this book!)

. . . [T]he world itself can call us out of our preoccupations, our worries, our lists and agendas. In such moments our attention is arrested, quite literally stopped, and the world seems to say to us: "Don't just do something, stand there." Fear contracts, love expands. Not only our love of the world but our love of other people pulls us into larger versions of ourselves. . . .

On some level we are always searching for our life's work, wanting to align our doing and our being with our highest purposes. At such moments of calm we find, to our surprise, that our life's work is here in our hands, at this very moment; it is here as we gaze into another's eyes, it is here in each breath we receive from and give back to the world.

Perhaps the art of doing nothing comes to no more than this: moments of stillness and attention, small gifts to others, most importantly the gift of our own loving presence.

In his brilliant essay, "The Sabbath" (also prime reading for this summer season), philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us:

Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness of time.

That's what it all comes down to, you know. Recognizing before we die that in the fierce battle we wage between the things of space and the holiness of time, there's really no choice. It's, as they say, a no brainer!

So turn your cell phone off.

Don't answer all your e-mails--don't even read them!

Play hooky once in a while; delight in just being.

Lie back and look up at the clouds. Do you see any animals in their formations?

Says Philip Simmons, and he ought to know, our job is this:

To learn to do nothing, even in the midst of our doing; to let our actions issue from a still center, and to find within ourselves what T.S. Eliot called:

the still point of the turning world.

Why not think about that, "the still point of the turning world," and resolve to further perfect your technique and practice of "The Art of Doing Nothing"?

Amen.