June 2008 Rector's Corner: Intentionality
One way to measure the difference between competitive pool players and rank amateurs is that the professionals often have to call their shots. They have to not only put the balls in the pockets, but they also have to tell you how they’re going to do it. If they miss a shot, but the ball goes in anyway from a lucky bounce, it doesn’t count. They have to pull the ball back out. They can’t just aim into the middle, bang the balls around, and hope for the best. They must be intentional about what they are doing.
I’m guessing that you never thought of pool as a metaphor for your life, and especially your spiritual life. That’s my job—to suggest unexpected metaphors. But I’m guessing that for many of us, much of our life is like an amateur playing pool—we just bang the balls around and hope for the best. Everything looks busy, and there is a certain pleasure in seeing and hearing the balls clank together, but from experience we all can attest that few of the balls actually end up where we’d like them. The bang-the-ball-around approach—a lack of intentionality—leaves us where we’d expect: with a lot of noise and flash, and a table that looks chaotic. The spiritual life requires intentionality.
I’ve been acutely aware of this in the past few months as my capacity to lead my own life intentionally has taken a beating. Life has a way of getting so busy, with new jobs, new houses, and new children. All of the discipline, the intentional practices by which I’ve structured my life, falls away. I’ve stopped doing yoga, I make fewer opportunities for silence and prayer, and the few times that I do set aside are often encroached upon by unexpected demands. I’ve been able to be intentional about my time in some areas of my life. I have time for my family and for sermon preparation, for example, but I have less and less time for God. With that depletion, I find that I lose balance and perspective. My life feels like a bunch of pool balls banging around, and I’m contributing more to the chaos than to bringing some order to the whole.
I’ve written and talked before about our need for intentionality in our spiritual life. As we are pulled in so many directions by work, by children, by schedules and roads that are all too full, we must be deliberate about how we live our lives and spend our time. Do we need to find ways to reject all the activities that pull us away from those we love? Do we need to set aside time for quiet, meaningful conversation with those who help us to balance our lives? I hope that we consider God as someone who gives us balance—though to be honest, when we bring God into the conversation we’re as likely to be thrown off balance when God starts calling shots that we never imagined.
But there is a second way that I’d like us to consider incorporating more intentionality into our lives as we move forward this year, and that’s economically. We live in a world that’s currently horribly out of balance, that resembles, all too often, pool balls banging around; only now we’re on the table with the balls and we’re getting banged around with them. Our demands for energy are growing, our earth is warming, and people around the world are starving. What shots do we need to start calling for ourselves in the world in which we live? What are the ways that we can begin to introduce simplicity into our lives, intentionally, as a counter-balance to the excess of life around us that threatens so many with such dire consequences?
There are many venues for us to talk about intentionality in how we live. One that I’ll offer this summer is a lunch book group, meeting sporadically throughout the summer to work its way through a collection of essays, Simpler Living, Compassionate Life. The essays in the book are powerfully written, though the essays themselves won’t be the point. Their chief purpose will be to provoke conversation among us, so that in community we might begin to discern some practices that might lead us and our world more toward balance and wholeness.
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