Like most clergy, I find myself extremely busy in the course of a typical day, but not necessarily with the sort of things you might expect. For instance, since arriving at 7 A.M. I've spent about 1h 10m saying liturgy (Mass + Morning Prayer + Evening Prayer). And I spent about 30 minutes installing Dreamweaver on our Admin. Assistant's Computer. Then spent about 1h 30m giving her a tutorial on how to work with our website. She was very excited with what I was showing her, and I'm sure she'll be making all kinds of progress quickly. After that, I spent a few hours tweaking our website, mostly by cleaning up a few subtle design issues here and there and adding some fresh photographs (which meant editing them first with Photoshop).
After that I spent about 1h 20m on the phone doing pastoral care. Then I stepped out for about 2 hours to do some church errands (mostly dropping off some archive VHS tapes to be transferred to DVD). The weather outside is absolutely horrible, and even the subway was experiencing grid lock (let alone the streets). So I managed to make it back to the church just in time to send/answer some e-mails and write this blog. Evening Prayer is just around the bend.
So this brings up an interesting question: why do clergy end occupied with some many little projects like this? The immediate answer may be that we don't have anyone else to do them and feel that they need to be done. But a scary reality is that a lot of clergy keep/make themselves busy because it makes them feel as though they are accomplishing something. It's hard not to feel guilty spending a few hours reading, for instance, even though this is VERY important to good ministry. But shoveling a sideway (as Fr Harold just finished doing) makes you feel like a real man!
And yet there is some deeper level to all this that I have yet to penetrate. More on that when I get some insights...
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