Embracing Slowness: Overcoming Hurry in Spiritual Life

yeah i was uh autobiographically i was basically a quintessential stressed out mega church pastor having an early midlife crisis and i yeah you're way too young for that yeah no or not and i had come to willard's kind of corpus of writings and they had already had a tremendous impact on me and just kind of raising the horizon of possibility for human personhood to jesus original vision but i was still fairly stuck in my kind of day-to-day life and of course the concept of hurry uh doesn't come from me it comes from kind of willard's mind through your life and your biography and relationship to him [00:02:29]

and when you first told me that story i can't remember if i read it in your book or if it was in our conversation but you know where willard said to you hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life yeah if you haven't heard many many years ago i've gone to a church in chicago i was real busy and asked ellis what do i need to do to stay spiritually healthy and alive long pause you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life from your life yeah and and he called hurry the great enemy of spiritual life in our day right [00:03:17]

and so my first thought was like wait hurry hurry's the great enemy but then bewilderment went really fast to like best analogy i could think it was like a uh you're a musician like a tuning fork you ever hit a tuning fork and if you're close enough to it your bone will will like resonate with the and it's your bone is coming into contact with middle c and you know music theory like uh musical notes are literally woven into the fabric of creation like man didn't invent middle c it's just there like gravity like light and you just you can you can access what's there or not and make something with what's there [00:04:14]

and so it was like this tuning fork kind of reality where i think it put the finger on the pulse of not the symptom but the root and the symptoms in my life were a lack of love and shorthand irritability exhaustion chronic anxiety but the root ouch anybody yeah or at least or at least one of the core roots was hurry and just the very simple idea and maybe if this is a one thought for the day thing maybe the very simple idea is if in jesus teachings and vision the most important thing in life is becoming a person of agape of love as defined by jesus hurry and love are as you would say incompatible [00:04:52]

and so recognizing that there's that japanese theologian kusuke koyama who has a beautiful little essay called three mile an hour god oh i don't know and i had to google it apparently three miles per hour is the speed of walking and he has this beautiful like short two-page meditation where he just says that god has a speed and it's a speed of love and love is a slow speed there's an internal speed as a pace to agape and the reason that god doesn't go quickly in our lives or in human history or in evolution or in the universe is because god is love and love has a speed to it [00:05:32]

so when the monks are against sloth and oversleep i think maybe they have a different definition of oversleep than we do so not eleven and a half hours just ten so you get up to pray you know so for people who are facing a day-to-day and you find yourself tempted to feel overwhelmed rushed you have too many things to do you're worried about them dallas had a little note on his refrigerator his wife jane said when he died it was on there and he had different words in addition to hurry that were connected with a hurlybury and harriet and you find yourself feeling that way let's take a breath right now [00:07:57]

you know it's it's the simplest things are always the hardest things but you know so much i think of spiritual formation comes at some point down to self-awareness and the ability to kind of see yourself and see how you are in the world and so i think it's sometimes it's just a matter and i don't have this down like by the way never write a book on ruthlessly eliminating hurry because if you're human and you have three children and you live in a city and you lead a church through covet and every time you feel hurried you will just feel like the greatest of all hypocrites you know apparently writing a book about something does not make it true of you [00:08:58]

but that that that habitual coming back like you know mindfulness they teach you when your mind wanders you don't berate yourself about it right you just you just notice it and you gently come back to your breath and i think with hurry which is a form of like christian mindfulness when you notice that you're hurried or harried or stressed or rushing don't berate yourself or judge yourself of course the whole world around us is designed to hurry you and designed to make everything as fast as it possibly can be so it's just a matter of noticing that and then coming back off into your breath so sometimes it'll just be like oh wow i'm really hurrying right now [00:09:39]

and yes look at the attendant sensations of anxiety of anger irritability all signs that i'm not in love because i'm not in flow because i'm not because i'm hurting and so what does it look to just kind of sometimes i'll just try to gently come back to my breath and just kind of take a deep breath and try to slow down my body and it's it's been forced me and this is not the the kind of vein of the christian church i grew up in but to a more ancient kind of orthodox historic view of christianity which they would call it embodied spirituality and viewing your body in biblical language as the temple of the holy spirit [00:10:11]

and really trying to this is why i think westerners like can't comprehend fasting for example because it's not cartesian you don't do fasting with your mind you're like not eating your way into maturity like we don't even have a paradigm like i can listen to podcasts i can read a book i can watch a devotional but not eating how is that but it's so transformative it's body based it's somatic so i think like trying to as willard would say let your body become an ally you know rather than an enemy and gently work with your body to cultivate the presence of god through just breathing in god's spirit and it really is possible [00:10:56]

so now we all get to practice that uh three miles an hour don't be in a hurry to turn off your cell phone don't be in a hurry to do whatever you have to do next today ruthlessly eliminate earth and when you forget just stop and eliminate it again thank you very much it's a gift god bless you john [00:11:44]