Too busy to be Catholic?

Last Thursday night, I walked over to Dillon Hall’s famous milkshake Mass for the first time with a bunch of my friends. We had a great time — the chapel was beautiful, there was a gorgeous violin and choir, and there were so many people in attendance, we had to sit on the floor. I remember thinking, “It’s so convenient that Mass is such a short walk from my dorm and that I have such wonderful friends to go with.” As I stood in the hall after Mass, chatting and sipping my milkshake, it felt easy to be a good Catholic.

Flash forward about 12 hours to Friday morning. I had just finished class for the day, and I had a ton of homework to do. Back at the dorm, I unzipped my bag, starting to take out my laptop and notebooks — and immediately remembered I was supposed to go to adoration. At that moment, it would have been so easy to skip it and get to work on my long list of assignments instead ... and just like that, it was suddenly hard to be a good Catholic.

I feel like faith can feel this way for a lot of people: easy one moment and difficult the next. With our busy schedules and constantly being pulled in different directions, it takes a committed effort to make time for cultivating our relationship with God. That being said, it’s important to remember that faith and the activities in our lives don’t have to be mutually exclusive; in fact, if we learn to approach them the right way, the things we do can actually grow our faith in miraculous ways.

This Wednesday, we celebrated the feast day of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, an incredible woman from late 1800s France who provides the perfect example of using the busyness of our lives as a tool to grow in holiness. Despite having relatively little time on Earth (she lived just 24 years) and living a simple life, Thérèse is still considered one of the great Doctors of the Church. She is famous for her “Little Way,” a method of working toward sainthood in which every task in our lives, no matter how mundane, becomes a way to serve God. Activities like washing the dishes, doing homework and listening to a friend pour out their troubles, for example, are acts that may seem ordinary on the surface but, as Thérèse knew, are actually quite priceless spiritual opportunities. We can consecrate our work to God, offering up our efforts to Him, and in doing so, engage in a powerful form of prayer and sacrifice. With this method, even the most unpleasant tasks become desirable as a way to suffer for the Lord. We can even use these small sacrifices to pray for certain intentions. After all, not all our prayers have to be vocal; as 1 John 3:18 says, “Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.” What great spiritual power there is to be found in simple everyday actions. Imagine our great loss if we were to let all the seemingly mundane tasks of our lives slip away without taking the opportunity to serve God in each one.

With that, I advise you against obsessing over routine activities like going to Mass, adoration and the sacraments as the only ways to practice your faith. While they are certainly good and essential to a life of faith, if we relegate our relationship with God to these devotional encounters alone, we are essentially dividing our lives into times to be Catholic and times to not. We cannot cram our time with God into a one-hour period of Sunday Mass and expect to grow as a Catholic when that spiritual devotion does not trickle into other areas of our lives. Keep the sacraments and keep the Mass, but also make an effort to transform your daily activities into sacred endeavors. Follow the “Little Way” of St. Thérèse, and you will be surprised at how spiritually fruitful your life becomes.

One last thing to note: We are human, and we are flawed creatures. We will inevitably fail. Therefore, I encourage you to take advantage of our intercessors in Heaven: the saints. Like us, they were once living people on this Earth, their lives filled to the brim with struggles, activities and stress. If anyone understands how difficult it can be to practice our faith in this world, it’s them. The saints constantly inspire us because despite the challenges they faced, they overcame and are now reaping the eternal rewards. Pray to them often — it is good to have friends in heaven to guide you in your quest to holiness. Learn all you can about them and the way they lived, as it will help you understand and apply what it means to be faithful in your everyday life.

The next time you find yourself “too busy” to practice your faith, say a quick prayer to St. Thérèse and ask her to help you remember her “Little Way.” Then, take up your cross and commit to serving God in whatever activity presents itself to you, no matter how arbitrary or unpleasant it seems. In the words of St. Thérèse, “Remember that nothing is small in the eyes of God.  Do all that you do with love.”