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Take Off Your Hats for Awhile!
by Jo Rotunno

If you are like most parish catechetical leaders or school coordinators that I’ve known, you wear many hats all year long. There’s the fireman’s hat, and who among you has not put out a fire or two—metaphorically or even for real? There’s the construction worker’s hat as you have struggled to build a program that will touch hearts and transform lives. Don’t forget your nurse’s hat—you know you’ve dried tears or called a parent to pick up a sick child or nursed along a great idea until you could get others to embrace it.

How many times this past year did you pull on your referee’s hat to mediate a dispute between two individuals or factions in your parish or school? Most recently, you may have worn the hat of the brave person who directs traffic in the middle of a busy intersection. The task of “directing traffic” for a well-planned First Communion or Confirmation takes no less skill.

There are many other hats you wear over the course of a year, and this is a good time of year to step back and reflect on the many aspects of the role you have played in service to your parish. But there is one last hat I’d like you to put on this summer. It’s the straw hat or sun visor of the person smart enough to lay it all down for awhile and to savor a Sabbath experience.

Some of you are wise enough to plan such moments into your year. You build in reflection time, stealing away for short retreats, soaking in a warm tub now and then instead of taking your usual quick shower, turning off your cell phone when you’re driving and listening to music instead. You emerge from these moments, whether they last for ten minutes or a week, refreshed and clear-headed and a tiny bit renewed.

But others don’t take the time. Some are driven by a sense of urgency, of always more to do. They take a short hiatus around the holidays yet spend themselves further by serving family and friends or planning a workshop or catching up with the in-basket. In the summers, they clean out files, go to school, reorganize their lives again, buy a new calendar to fill up with still more things to do.

Summer reading and coursework give us fresh ideas and can be renewing as well. But some time apart from your work is vital to the success of your ministry. The time taken to put your feet up, smear on sunscreen or seek out a shade tree, pull down your floppy-brimmed straw hat, close your eyes, and just BE will send you back to your ministry in August with a clear head and eyes and a smile on your face. The writer Robert Wicks once observed that if you would spend two minutes a day in solitude, silence, and thanksgiving, it would transform your life. This summer might be a good time to put that suggestion to the test.

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