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Tuesday

I'm not sure where Monday went: in a flurry of telephone calls, chauffering community members to various appointments and an inbox groaning with emails and letters, I suppose. All the ordinary things, praying, working, reading, cooking, tend to recede into the background on such days (though it did register with me that I was making apple pies at 9.00 p.m., practically midnight in monastic terms, because of the number of visitors expected at the week-end!).

The trouble with Advent is the difficulty of matching expectations with reality. We want to give more time to God, to prepare thoughtfully for the coming feasts of Christmas and Epiphany, and we know that silence and solitude are important aspects of that. But we can't opt out of the busyness of life which seems so much more intense at this season of the year, and we certainly can't refuse to answer the doorbell unless we have hearts of stone (which perhaps we do: awful thought). The alternative is to embrace the busyness, to see it as part of the preparation. In other words, to stop railing against the demands on our time and energy and accept them as the way in which we are enabled to celebrate properly, a necessary part of our sanctification.

I am a long way from having achieved that myself. I am quite sure I shall continue to go to bed each night mentally comparing my "to do" list with my "have done" list and fretting about the discrepancy. I am equally sure, alas, I shall continue to be grumpy whenever someone asks me if I could "please just" do something or other. I'll continue to wake up most mornings looking like a lemur. BUT, I also trust that somewhere, somehow, in the midst of all this apparent failure, grace will be at work, that even what I see as failure can be transformed; is, in some small way, part of God's plan for my life and the lives of those with whom I come into contact, so that when I come to celebrate Christmas, it will be as a humbler, possibly less selfish, person than would otherwise have been the case. I hope so; I really hope so.