life we are given — the only one that you or I will get — is ordered and sustained on the Almighty Affirmation of the Creator. The ever-expanding universe exists and grows through the force of one all-encompassing and wholly intentional idea of YES. “Let there be life” and then bang! — or a more slowly evolving baaaang! Everything came to be, including you and me.
By your very creation, you and the giftedness that has been bestowed upon you (because we all get at least one gift) have been invited to be a part of the ongoing world: to engage, to grow, to create, to explore; to take everything that comes your way — the good, the less-good, even the mundane — then filter it through your strengths, and share what you’ve gleaned from it all, with the people around you.
The procrastinator looks at the daily invitation to engage and says, “Mmnnyeah, no” or “I have a thing; now’s not a good time” or “Monday. I’ll start that on Monday.”
“Your first words were not ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada,’” my husband has said to me. “Your parents wanted to believe you were addressing them, but you were actually saying ‘Mañana, baby,’ because with you it’s always ‘mañana.’”
He might be right. Mañana is just a way of saying no until circumstances absolutely force you to say yes. And that’s a tepid sort of response to an invitation from God, isn’t it? It might even be called “cold.”
Is it a sin to say no to God? I’m writing this on the feast of the Annunciation — a day commemorating the visit of the archangel Gabriel, who appeared to the young virgin, Mary, and told her that God’s plan for her, were she amenable, was to put her at risk to doubt, ridicule, possible death-by-stoning, and a lifetime of things she would never fully understand:
In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” But Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” And the angel said to her in reply, “The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God….” Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her. (Lk 1:26-35, 38, NAB)
The Annunciation is the feast of Mary’s great fiat, her wholehearted yes, which put into earthly motion the entire pageant of our salvation. I’ve often wondered, what if she had said no? What if Mary had listened to Gabriel’s words and said, “Say, whuuut? You’re telling me I’m going to be unwed, and pregnant, and have a crazy-weird life? You can get yourself another girl!”
We know that Mary was gifted with an abundance of graces. Trained in faithfulness, those gifts very likely left her entirely disposed to place herself at the service of whatever God, through his messenger, would propose. Her response was a choice, yes, but one that the intensity and richness of her gifted graces might not have permitted her to reject under any circumstances. (“She believed by faith,” wrote St. Augustine, and “she conceived by faith.”)
Still, though, for the sake of argument, suppose she had said no. Would it have been a sin?
My instinctive answer would be no. Beyond the gift of our life itself — the one gift so sacred that it is not ours to refuse or end — God’s gifts are freely given and ours to use, misuse, or altogether ignore. Had Mary said no, God could have gifted another.
Then again, God had a plan for Mary, and her gifted graces were meant to help her conform to the plan. All she had to do was access what she had been given, and use it.
Which she did. Mary’s yes was immediate. She didn’t hem-and-haw. She didn’t suggest Gabriel come back at a better time. She didn’t say, “Let me think about this for a year….” She didn’t look for a means of supernatural contraception to ensure that nothing happened until she was good-and-ready for it, if ever.
Mary said yes, and then she immediately engaged, heading off to visit her cousin Elizabeth and pronouncing her Magnificat with perfect trust in God’s plan.
I think procrastination is a manifestation of fear that betrays our lack of trust. We believe God has plans for us but still put off doing what it takes to allow the plan to unfold, because we cannot perfectly control the outcome, or control how others will respond to our efforts, or even how we will respond to our own success or failure.
Quintilian said, “We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.” Yes, it is easier to say, “This is hard to do,” than to bruise our pride by admitting, “I am afraid.”
Because that is true, we stew in our little sin of procrastination. We wait for circumstances to force us out of this cousin to sloth, and then, finally, thrust into projects we have been reluctant to take on, we begin to make our efforts.
And what happens, once we begin? Nine times out of ten, we find ourselves enjoying the thing we’ve finally gotten around to doing, and that’s precisely because we are engaging with our own giftedness, and in a very real way, that is a cooperative engagement with God. We discover, not for the first time, that the thing we’d been putting off was not anywhere near as difficult as we thought it would be. In fact, the most difficult part was simply beginning. Once started, the undertaking we had been dreading became a source of fulfillment.
St. Augustine, who famously asked the Lord to make him chaste, “but not yet,” would agree, I think. It was when he finally began to embrace his long-delayed chastity that his faith, and subsequently his theological thinking, flowered into its fullness.
I have found this to be true all of my life: whether it involved schooling, a dental appointment, or a big writing project, the hardest part of my undertaking was always just settling down to actually doing the thing I had been putting off — and in the end, the job was usually a snap. I feared I was terrible at science and could never pass an anatomy and physiology class, until I actually took the course and found myself so fascinated that studying and pulling off an A turned out to be a delight and a breeze. I put off having a cracked tooth filling replaced because when I’d gotten it 30 years earlier, dentistry was a lot less pleasant than it is today. When I finally kept my appointment, the thing was done painlessly, in two shakes, and I remembered why I liked my chatty dentist too.
Oh, yeah, and writing. Writers are the biggest procrastinators in the world, because that blank page before us holds a world of possibilities within all of that co-creative engagement — and who can guess where that opening line will lead? The great unknown is terrifying. You can tell how much work a writer has to do by how much time he or she is spending doing other things. My house, for instance, is never cleaner than just before I absolutely, positively must begin to write for a deadline.
When we procrastinate, we make excuses about why so many other things need to be done before we can do the thing we’re called to do — the thing we are probably made to do. How often have you heard someone say, “Sure, I want to have kids, right after I do this other thing?” It is just so much easier to go do something (or nothing) else, rather than face our fear with Mary’s perfect trust and say, “Behold, I am the hand-servant of the Lord,”
