do-be-do-be-doooooo

Lenten discipline: wrestling with the sin of productivity.

It goes like this:

1. build an entire identity and sense of self-worth based on what you can produce/accomplish;
2. arrange to have a major organ shredded and sucked out through a straw;
3. watch the fun as you try to figure out what "be-ing" looks like.

Call it the Blue Collar Curse, or imagine something deeper, hard-wired. Either way, it's hereditary. My parents were both do-ers. My brothers, too, gauge success and worth each by their own kind of productivity. It's projects for one, financial security for the other--the outcomes look totally different, but the compulsion is the same.

So I do too much. Then hurt for days. Then do it all over again. Even stranded on the couch "resting" and too tired to think, I've crocheted and cross-stitched more in three weeks than I have in the last ten years. Idle hands are the devil's workshop, my grandma used to say.

Did you know you can watch dust accumulate, day to day? Dishes pile up. Cat hair gathers like weather. A month ago, I was too busy to care very much. Now housework is the axis on which my world tilts and spins.

The recliner is both paradise and storm-swept island, rain forest and sagey desert.

Sometimes, I have no choice; I let the phone ring.

Being feels ethereal. At least Doing casts a shadow, implying substance. And it's that craving--to have substance--that has something to do with what happened in the Garden.

And yet, Jesus was both actor and experiencer. The gospel writers cite his acts--healings, signs, wonders--as proof of divinity. But Jesus said, "Tell no one . . ." The do-ing arose naturally from his be-ing. And vice versa. And oh, the God-shaped shadow!