and why we don’t pray more, is because these activities don’t accomplish anything, produce anything, or practically add anything to life. We feel good about ourselves when we are doing useful things. Contemplative activity, by definition, is pragmatically useless.
Because we are caught up by the demands of our pragmatic culture, we can end up like the people in Luke’s Gospel who refused the invitation to come to the wedding banquet in Christ’s parable (Luke 14: 14–21). The people who were excluded did not turn down the invitation because they were impious, irreligious or morally lax. They simply never showed up because they were so busy buying oxen, getting married, and measuring their land. In pragmatism, contemplation dies, not through badness, but because of busyness.
3. Restlessness
We are a restless people. Perhaps no one word better captures the dominant feature and feeling of our culture than this word—restlessness.
Restlessness is not difficult to define and understand. It is the opposite of being restful. Restfulness is one of the most primal of all cravings inside of us. But today, as our lives grow more pressured, as we become more tired, and as we begin to talk more about burnout, we fantasize more about restfulness. We imagine it as a peaceful, quiet place, like walking by a lake, watching a peaceful sunset, or sitting by the fireplace in the winter.
However, restfulness is more a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is being in ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.
Thomas Merton, journaling during an extended period of solitude, once wrote:
It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying, I live as my fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn gradually to forget program and artifice.7
Today, nothing ever seems to be enough for us. The simple joys of living, as Merton describes, are mostly lost as we grow ever more restless, driven, hyper, and compulsive. Within our lives there is less ease, and more activity; less peacefulness and more obsessive activity; less enjoyment and more excess.
Some restlessness is normal. However, it is like body temperature; beyond a point it becomes an unhealthy fever. Today, our psychic temperature has risen to become a fever. Our restlessness is excessive. When that happens, what does it do to us?
First of all, when restlessness becomes excessive, it is no longer possible to be satisfied with just being a human being. As Merton said, to just be “with one’s own hunger and sleep, cold and warmth, making coffee and drinking it.” What is simple—“the feel of one’s own body and the taste of one’s own coffee,” is lost in an obsessive greed for experience.
Secondly, when restlessness becomes excessive, then greed for experience begins to drive us outward so that our actions do not come from a free center within ourselves, but from compulsion. Our lives become consumed with the idea that unless we somehow experience everything, travel everywhere, see everything, and are part of a large number of other people’s experience, then our lives are small and meaningless. We become impatient with every hunger and every non-consummated area within our lives. Eventually, we become convinced that unless every pleasure we yearn for is tasted, we will be unhappy.
In this posture of restlessness, we stand before life too greedy, too full of expectations that cannot be realized. We become unable to accept that, here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. When this happens, we are unable to rest or be satisfied because we are convinced that all tension and unfulfilled yearning is tragic. Therefore, it becomes tragic to be alone; to be unmarried; to be married, but not completely fulfilled romantically and sexually; to not be good looking; or, to be unhealthy, aged or handicapped. It becomes tragic to be caught up in duties and commitments which limit our freedom, tragic to be poor, tragic to go through life and not be able to taste every pleasure on earth. When we are obsessed in this way, it is hard to be contemplative. We are too focused on our own struggles and difficulties to be very open and receptive.
Thirdly, when restlessness becomes excessive, we lose our sense of interiority. We lose our ability to be reflective which then doesn’t allow us to ask the right questions about life. Socrates once said the “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In our society, because of our restlessness, we tend to examine our lives less and less.
Within our culture, distraction is normal; contemplativeness, solitude and prayer are not. Why is this? We are not, either by choice or ideology, a culture set against the interior life. Nor are we more afraid of the interior life than past ages. Where we differ from past ages, as we saw when we examined pragmatism, is not in our badness but our busyness. Where we differ from them too is in the degree of our restlessness.
Henri Nouwen describes the restlessness of our contemporary lives in an insightful way:
One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like over-packed suitcases bursting at the seams. In fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations . . . .
Beneath our worrying lives, however, something else is going on. While our minds and hearts are filled with many things, and we wonder how we can live up to the expectations imposed upon us by ourselves and others, we have a deep sense of un-fulfillment. While busy and worried about many things, we seldom feel truly satisfied, at peace, at home. A gnawing sense of being unfulfilled underlies our filled lives . . . . The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored at the same time. While running from one event to the next, we wonder in our innermost selves if anything is really happening. While we can hardly keep up with our many tasks and obligations, we are not so sure that it would make any difference if we did nothing at all. While people keep pushing us in all directions, we doubt if anyone really cares. In short, while our lives are full, we are unfulfilled.8
Being filled, yet unfulfilled, comes from being without deep interiority. When there is never time or space to stand behind our own lives and look reflectively at them, then the pressures and distractions of life simply consume us to the point where we lose control over our lives.
When we are unreflective, it is because our restlessness propels us into a flurry of activity which keeps us preoccupied and consumed with the surface of life, with the business of making a living, with doing things, with distractions, and with entertainment. It is then that our actions no longer issue from a center within us, but, instead, are products of compulsion. We do things and we no longer know why. We feel chronically pressured, victimized, and driven. We overwork, but are bored; socialize excessively, but are lonely; and work to the point of exhaustion, but feel our lives are unfulfilled.
This is the unexamined life as Socrates described it. It is also an image of the fruits of a non-contemplative life. Restlessness, without proper reflection, destroys contemplation and, with it, the sense of God within ordinary life. Why? Because when we operate out of restlessness, rather than out of our true center, then, in the famous phrase of St. Augustine,
