Today, I read the following quote from a blog I visit occasionally: “The urgency of slowing down – to find time and space to think – is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
It seems I just can’t get away from this idea of ‘going slow’. In the quote above, I am struck by how often ‘going slow’ is associated with an individual action or decision, and certainly in one sense it is. We, as individuals, need to step back from the distractions that so easily amuse and satisfy us to take the time to more deeply reflect on the ultimate values we should be pursuing.
However, our individual driven lifestyle must also be addressed by connected relationships or community. We suffer from “crowded loneliness”, as one writer put it. We exist, we live, but unconnected, isolated from others and deep relationships.
We need others and they need us. That’s why so much of the New Testament is about “one another-ing” each other. Life in Christ is found and experienced in community. Now we just need to ‘go slow’ to create that community and live out of it.
Filed under: Community, Reflection | 2 Comments »
