What Are We Busy About?

Everybody seems to be busy doing something or other. I wonder sometimes, just how busy are we?  At times I imagine being busy, or claiming to be, can have its advantages. The Roman Catholic saint, St. Francis de Sales, wrote at one place, While I am busy with little things, I am not required to do greater things.  On that note, it’s quite easy to tell the person who calls us for a favor that we’re too busy at the moment.  Sorry. As Thoreau said, It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

In the gospel story of the talents (Matt: 25:14-30) we are told of three servants to whom the king upon his departure for a distant country, gives talents. To one he gives five, to the other two and to the last one he gives only one. When, at the end of the story, the king returns he discovers that the first two servants have been quite busy as they have taken their talents and doubled them so that the one who had five now has ten and the one who had two now has four. The third servant, however, who only had one talent wasn’t as efficient as his companions and he, with a great deal of honesty, presents the king with the very same talent he was given – nothing more and nothing less. Despite the fact the king refers to this servant as both wicked and lazy I wonder if this servant was really that lazy.

St. Gregory the Great in his homily on this gospel reading points out that the five talents symbolize the five bodily senses. “There are some who,” St. Gregory says, “even without knowing how to probe into inward and mystical matters, use the natural gifts they received to teach correctly those they can reach to strive for their heavenly home.”

The two talents received by the second servant symbolize theory and practice. “They understand the fine points of interior matters and accomplish astonishing things outwardly.” While the one talent received by the last of the servants symbolizes only theory. What he lacks,in other words, is putting it into practice.  But the person with the one talent doesn’t necessarily have to be lazy so to speak.  St. Gregory points out that hiding the talent in the ground means “employing one’s abilities in earthly affairs, failing to seek spiritual profit, never raising one’s heart from earthly thoughts. There are some who have received the gift of understanding but have a taste only for things that pertain to the body. The prophet says of them: They are wise in doing evil, but they do not know how to do good.”

For this reason I make the argument that this last servant wasn’t that lazy at all. On the contrary, I imagine him to be quite the busybody. In fact, I know of quite a few people that could easily be compared to him. They are the ones who have no time for their families, the one that can’t spare a Sunday for church or a few minutes for prayer. They are ultimately the ones who are too busy to help the friend in need or even spend a few minutes to comfort them in their troubles. No, I’m afraid they are far from being lazy people for their daily schedules are demanding and the deadlines they rush to meet are incessant.  What’s more, they are hardly the ones we would identify as having the least number of talents. Instead, they have acquired many things and live a life of plenty.Indeed, they are like the man described in another parable given by our Lord whose ground yielded plentifully and was running out of room to store all his goods.

Yet,  both men and all those who follow them and their habits, while being viewed from  a worldly perspective as successful, will be called fools and wicked and, yes, lazy by God. For in the end, it is, I think, a very good question that Thoreau gives us, one that we should ask ourselves from time to time: What are we so busy about?