THE HOLY WEEK IS OVER. Everybody is back to normal life and schedule with fond memories of vacation spent with family and friends as well as a certain feeling of nostalgia for moments of prayer and recollection during Holy Thursday and Good Friday.
It is an experience of many Christians that the life after Holy Week seems to go back to what is profane and repetitive cycle of life without a daily awareness of a felt presence of God. Ronald Rolheiser has indicated the reasons why many of us feel the absence of God in our daily lives. He gives three factors that affect our relationship with God while immersed in the world, namely, narcissism that is marked by excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism that locates the human's sense of worth in achievement and in work; and unbridled restlessness that is marked by being driven, compulsive and hyper.
Narcissism is a word that comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus. Narcissus was a man of beauty and vanity that he fell in love with himself and became obsessed with his own beauty while drinking water at a certain pool. Narcissus, turned inward and paralyzed by his obsession with himself, withered away and became a flower. Sigmund Freud picked up this myth and used it as a technical term in psychoanalysis, which means excessive self-preoccupation. Many men and women today are unconsciously narcissistic because what matters to them are the ego and its satisfaction. There is a self-centeredness and individualism expressed in minding one's business without reference to others. Thus, for a person what matters is "my heartaches, my headaches, my problems, my chronic shortage of money, my tasks, my worries, my family." It's all about 'myself'. God would find it difficult to have a space in one's daily life marked by such an excessive self-preoccupation. There is a need to acknowledge that my way to God is through the other, through my neighbor.
Pragmatism is from the Greek word pragma, which means business thus connoting efficiency, sensibleness, and practicality. A pragmatist holds on to a philosophy and a way of life that asserts that the truth of an idea lies in its practical efficacy. The truth for a pragmatist is that what is true is what works. Worth lies in achievement. Things and persons are good if they work, and what works is considered good. There is danger in this kind of life in which everything is centered on work. One has to work well but not to the point of forgetting the God of work in one's daily life.
Unbridled restlessness is about a life on a rat race in which time becomes the most precious commodity in today's world. In fact, "parents have to make an appointment in order to spend time with their children, how for many reasons the demands of remaining on top of their careers take all their time and energy" with people becoming very successful yet remaining unfulfilled and un happy. It is a perception that because of restlessness people are less patient and unable to concentrate on anything for very long. There is a lot of time but people have really no quality time spent with family and God.
I believe that Thomas Merton is perfectly right in saying that the problem of people today is not so much "badness" but "busyness." The challenge is to find rest amidst the activities of the day and Merton says that it is being in "ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough."