By Mary Morrell
Lent requires both hands on the wheel
“For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” —Philippians 3:8
Driving to work each day on the highways and byways of New Jersey should be an experience incorporated into the curriculum of every sociology major, for there is no better way to capture an insight into human behavior.
Every day I tell myself I will never see anything more frightening than I saw the day before, and almost every day I am proven wrong.
I am continually amazed at the inconsiderate, short-sighted and down-right dangerous behavior of fellow drivers whom I have seen reading newspapers draped over their steering wheels; chugging breakfast from a two-liter bottle of cola with a cigarette in the other hand; reading a novel propped against the driver’s door; watching a portable T.V.; shaving with an electric razor plugged into the dashboard; using a lap-top; applying make-up; eating lunch.
And of course, there’s the phenomenon of this century, the ever-common, lengthy conversation on a cell phone complete with hand gestures.
However, in retrospect, nothing compares to the day my son and I witnessed a driver who was playing the trumpet. That was an occasion for a double-take!
Now there is no doubt in my mind that many people are competent drivers even with only one hand on the wheel.
When in college, I occasionally dated a young man who only had one hand. His car was specially outfitted with the gears on the left side of the steering wheel and he was an extremely skilled driver.
The difference between him and other one-hand-on-the-wheel drivers was that he focused all of his attention on the task at hand, not allowing distractions to dull his judgment, impede his progress or undermine his opportunities for completing a job well.
We live in a world fraught with distractions that take our attention away not only from the work of driving but from the work of relationship building as well. When the relationship that suffers most is our relationship with our Father, then all other relationships suffer equally.
The truth of the matter was brought home again as my son read aloud excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden while I prepared dinner last evening. This author, who possessed an extraordinarily keen sense of perception for the beauty and orderliness of God’s creation, wrote repeatedly of the necessity of living the simple life if we are to grow spiritually.
Such simplicity of lifestyle is hard to capture when you’re not living in a small cabin in the woods, but creating simplicity of attitude may be the place to start in giving full attention to building our relationship with God.
Simplicity of attitude may begin with breaking our attachment to “things”; by learning to differentiate wants from needs and cutting down on our list of both; by weighing our reactions to life’s challenges to determine if we are assigning more importance than necessary to issues or problems; by looking for God in all the situations of our lives — in the challenges as well as the blessings.
Lent is always a good time to begin again to nurture new attitudes, to eliminate the distractions and focus on our spiritual health. It is a time for seeing clearly, for making sacrifices and making changes, for focusing on God. It is time for an honest assessment of the distractions we allow to creep into our lives and then use as justification for putting God second, or third, or last, on our list of priorities.
Lent is a good time, but not an easy time, if we really use it well — because when we remove the distractions we may become painfully aware of a hunger for God that will require a radical transformation in the way we live our lives.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law