341. Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time (B)

Meditations no. 312 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Our love for God and souls leads us to make good use of our time.

Look carefully, then, how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise. How persuasive is this advice of St Paul! Throughout his intense, tightly-packed life he was motivated by love, which moves one to action and mobilises all one’s energies. As St Augustine says, Charity cannot be idle. Show me, if you can, a love which is passive or inactive. Such a love is not to be found.

Love prompts us to work, to spend ourselves for others, just as laziness is a sign of the absence of love, of not living life to the full. St Gregory the Great says: When we stop wanting to do good, little by little we lose the habit of correct thinking. Therefore it is rightly said: “an idle person will suffer hunger.” When the soul does not aspire eagerly to lofty things, it abandons itself lazily to base desires; and by the fact that it dispenses itself from subjection to discipline, it surrenders itself to pleasures. Therefore Solomon again says: “Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep.” A life of idleness has no purpose or aim; it seeks ungodly things to satisfy the heart’s desires. As St John Chrysostom says, idleness is the mother of all vices. In our case our lives are steeped in love, a love which invigorates and moves us and doesn’t let us fall asleep. Christ’s love is urging us. When we realize the urgency of the work to be done we certainly can’t afford to be lazy: time is so short. When I reflect on this, our Father said, how well I understand St Paul’s exclamation when he writes to the Corinthians, tempus breve est. How short indeed is the time of our passing through this world! For the true Christian these words ring deep down in his heart as a reproach to his lack of generosity, and as a constant invitation to be loyal. Brief indeed is our time for loving, for giving, for making atonement. It would be very wrong, therefore, for us to waste it, or to cast this treasure irresponsibly overboard. We mustn’t squander this period of the world’s history which God has entrusted to each one of us.

We need to make the very most of every hour and minute at our disposal. You might tell me, “Why should I make an effort?” It is not I who answer you, but St Paul: “Christ’s love is urging us.” A whole lifetime would be little, if it were spent expanding the frontiers of your charity. The urgency of loving God and of accomplishing all he asks us, leads us to put the Norms of our plan of life in first place and not let ourselves be drawn into hastiness or activism. When spiritual duty calls, no other activity can take precedence. It has to receive our complete and undivided attention.

We need to work at making the most of our time. A single hour, or even a few minutes, can be very full, or empty and meaningless: dead. And what we want is to have life, supernatural life.

Good use of time and sanctification of work.

What God expects of us principally is to work competently and responsibly, doing everything we can to make the best use of our time. Be convinced that our professional vocation is an essential and inseparable part of our condition as Christians. Our Lord wants you to be holy in the place where you are, in the job you have chosen for whatever reason. To me, every job that is not opposed to the divine law is good and noble, and capable of being raised to the supernatural plane, that is, inserted into the constant flow of Love which defines the life of a child of God.

I cannot avoid getting a little uneasy, when someone, in speaking about his job, plays the role of a victim. He talks about how his work takes up so many hours each day, when the truth is that he isn’t doing half as much as many of his professional colleagues are, and they quite likely are only driven by selfish, or at best, merely human motives. All of us who are here engaged in a personal dialogue with Jesus have very definite occupations: doctors, lawyers, economists… Think a moment about those of your colleagues who are outstanding for their professional prestige, their integrity or their spirit of service and self-sacrifice. Isn’t it true that they devote many hours of the day, and even of the night, to their jobs? Isn’t there anything we can learn from them?

Professional competence, responsibility, and effort. This implies having a clearly-defined timetable and a readiness to work hard, finding time where it doesn’t exist. Every day we have to cast an eye over our timetable to see if we can find an extra quarter of an hour for one item, another ten minutes for another, and what we can cut back in order to finish off something more important. St Augustine asks: How did St Paul work? I mean: what time did he have for himself without hindering the preaching of the Gospel? God alone can say. In any case, he said he worked night and day. What the Apostle did was quite marvellous: he worked with his hands, notwithstanding his concern for all the Churches, already founded or yet to be founded, which were under his care and responsibility.

Not to use time well would mean falsifying the very essence of our vocation, because we seek the fullness of Christian life precisely in the sanctification of ordinary work. If a son of mine finds he has time on his hands at any stage of the day, it is a sign that his grasp of the spirit of Opus Dei is sadly deficient. Good use of time is an unmistakable sign of the love which moves us, of the sincerity of our dedication, and of our apostolic and proselytistic drive. If someone were lazy, they would be unable to inspire others with their example. They would put off souls who had forceful characters and a spirit of struggle, and would only attract people who were incapable of understanding our spirit.

Being orderly helps us make better use of time.

When St Paul exhorts us to make good use of our time, he tells us also to behave not as unwise men, but as wise.

To get the most out of the day we need to be orderly, a quality which greatly facilitates hard work. Working according to a plan, perseveringly, day after day, always produces results.

It sometimes happens that activism is really a refuge for laziness: no sooner have we started doing one thing than we break off to do something else, driven all the time by the whim or the enthusiasm of the moment, constantly hurrying and making unnecessary changes to our timetable. Lurking behind all this is generally laziness, and an unwillingness to be tied down to a timetable. Don’t succumb to that disease of character whose symptoms are inconstancy in everything, superficiality in action and speech, scatter-brained ideas… : in a word, frivolity.

And the frivolity - don’t forget this - which leads you to have those daily plans that are so empty (“so full of emptiness”), if you don’t react in time - not tomorrow: now! - will make your life that of a dead and useless puppet.

We need to put order in our lives, because we do not have time to do everything at once. Every day we have to draw up a list of priorities and stick to it. But don’t imagine that, to make that plan, you need to spend an hour thinking about it; that would be idiotic. You just need a few minutes at the beginning of the day.

Being orderly means giving priority to matters which are more urgent, not to the ones we would most prefer to do. We also have to be able to classify things according to their importance, not according to the order in which they arise. Things which arise today may be very important, while things which arose months ago may not be. We have to organize things on the basis of how urgent they are, while at the same time avoiding rushing things, which would be mismanagement. When necessary, we have to be able to tell our subordinates that something they think is urgent is not really so. And our Father continues: we shouldn’t confuse serenity with laziness or with slowness in tackling things. Serenity is complemented by diligence, which is necessary if we are to study and resolve things promptly.

We have to attend to everything, being especially diligent in attending to what the Directors tell us, without making excuses. Most of our reasons for not doing what we are asked are really symptoms of laziness. If there is order in our ideas and in our heart, if we sincerely desire to work for love of God, all the problems disappear. And then our time expands: we manage to do all we have to, and we learn to set the last stones in place. That is what God asks us to do: to crown what we began. Even in the Roman Ritual there is no mention of last stones, our Father has written. All one finds is a blessing for foundation stones. Our allotted role is to work methodically and steadfastly, until we finish the job gracefully and as perfectly as is humanly possible, for love of God.

Let us turn now to our Lady and say: teach me how to spend my days serving the Church and all mankind. My good Mother, teach me, whenever necessary, to hear in the depths of my heart, as a gentle reproach, that my time is not my own, because it belongs to Our Father who is in heaven.