Friday, March 18, 2022                                              (today’s lectionary) (yesterday’s texts)
Kneeling between games
Some of us have been watching nonstop college basketball and will be watching it again today. I’ve just caught bits and pieces here and there. I see lots of coaches, who should be having a good time, looking worn and miserable, intense of course, but might they also be exhausted, their minds and bodies crying out for rest? Is the performance stress getting to some of them?
Of course it is. But not all. Mike Brey of Notre Dame jumped into the air after the Fighting Irish won in 2 overtimes. He laughed, he was happy. Of course he won. The camera even caught him happy before they won.
Twenty hours later another Catholic school, Saint Peter’s University, won in overtime against the University of Kentucky. BIG upset. “Worst loss of the John Calipari era.” Saint Peter’s is a Jesuit school in Jersey City, New Jersey, and their basketball budget is one of the lowest of Division I schools. But they won, and their coach, Shaheen Holloway, loved it.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose hope IS the Lord. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream.
Sideline reporter Jamie Erdahl asked him, “Was the stress getting to you?”
“No,” he lied.
But then I believed him. “It’s basketball,” he said.
Like a variety show act
I need to keep all the plates spinning …
Caring for those who need my loving help
My presence, my ear, my hug.
Never mind the many other things
I must DO
Or the things I wish
I could DO,
This is my DUTY, my purpose is to live this way …
But sometimes I get so tired
 What matters more than basketball? If I ask the basketball coach at a Jesuit university, he might say, “Ah, funny that you ask. I’ve been asking that myself. And I think I know the answer.”
But sometimes I get so tired
And then I rest in God.
I rest in God’s embrace
Giving care to me.
Perhaps it was not always this way.  I am 72 years old, and still driven. I tell God I want him to drive, but then I drive myself. I read, write, listen, and pray every day, but still I’m driven. The tires are bald, the gas tank is on fumes, but still I’m driven. And it’s not just me. It’s also most, maybe all, those head coaches, Jesuit or not, frowning on camera as their team plays the game.
We didn’t even know what moderation was. What it felt like. We didn’t just work: we inhaled our jobs, sucked them in, became them. Stayed late, brought work home – it was never enough, though, no matter how much time we put in.
Can’t y’all just have a good time?
O Lord, God Almighty, show me how.
When did the collision between our appetites and the needs of our souls happen? Was there a heart attack? Did we get laid off from work, one of the thousands certified as extraneous? Did a beloved child become a bored stranger, a marriage fall silent and cold? Or, by some exquisite working of God’s grace, did we just find the courage to look the truth in the eye and, for once, not blink? How did we come to know that we were dying a slow and unacknowledged death?
Martin Luther and then Bill Hybbels told us we are too busy not to pray. We agreed. But little changes. Too busy striving for excellence, we say.
Mother Teresa told Dan Rather than when she prayed, she said nothing, only listened. Mr. Rather, ever the polite Texan, asked her, “Well then, what does God say?”
“Nothing. He listens.”
Thereby moments of excellence are received, rather than striven for. Jesus doesn’t need my long hours and joyless demands for strength, nor my endless prayers. He wants me to be like him, and live every moment.
We travail. We are heavy laden. Refresh us, O homeless, jobless, possession-less Savior. You came naked, and naked you go. And so it is for us. So it is for all of us.
“Care Giver” – http://clarenceheller.com/march-17/
 “Living Lent,” by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, in Bread and Wine, pp. 15-18.
 (Jeremiah 17, Psalm 1, Luke 8, Luke 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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