Get Busy Living

Many parishes distributed the book Resisting Happiness by Matthew Kelly as Christmas presents. The title and its cover message “why we sabotage ourselves” stop us in our tracks. Who would resist happiness?  Who would sabotage themselves? Yet Kelly writes almost two hundred pages to showhow we really do resist happiness. Each chapter proposes a remedy. Chapter 10 calls the reader to “get busy living.” Really?  Aren’t we always busy? Yet such busyness can prevent our living. Brian Doyle writes “Words and miracles are swift and rude/And they don’t wait.” How many words have we missed today? Have we been deaf to pleading words? Do words uttered without response die, the breath in them sucked out through indifference? And what about the miracles? A prayer answered even before the Amen? A kid who steps out of shyness? Hands clenched in armpits moving outward. A math problem solved in a eureka moment? Reconciliation achieved across a room with forgiving eyes? Attentive to words and miracles, we will be busy living in happiness.