Haste

Excerpt from an article by Father Ron Rolheiser:

"Haste is our enemy.  It puts us under stress, raises our blood pressure, makes us impatient, renders us more vulnerable to accidents and, most seriously of all, blinds us to the needs of others.  Haste is normally not a virtue, irrespective of the goodness of the thing towards which we are hurrying.

In 1970, Princeton University did some research to determine whether being committed to helping others in fact made a real difference in a practical situation.  They set up this scenario:  They would interview a seminarian in an office and, as the interview was ending, ask that seminarian to immediately walk over to a designated classroom across the campus to give a talk.  But they always put a tight timeline between when the interview ended and when the seminarian was supposed to appear in the classroom, forcing the seminarian to hurry.  On the way to the talk, each seminarian encountered an actor playing a distressed person (akin to the Good Samaritan scene in the Gospels).  The test was to see whether or not the seminarian would stop and help.  What was the result?

One would guess that, being seminarians committed to service, these individuals might be more likely to stop than most other people.  But that wasn't the case.  Being seminarians seemed to have no effect on their behavior in this situation.  Only one thing did:  They were prone to stop and help or to not stop and help mostly on the basis of whether they were in a hurry or not.  If they were pressured for time, they didn't stop; if they were not pressured for time, they were more likely to stop.

From this experiment its authors drew several conclusions:  First, that morality becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases; and, second, that because of time pressures we tend not to see a given situation as a moral one.  In essence, the more in a hurry we are, the less likely we are to stop and help someone else in need.  Haste and hurry, perhaps more than anything else, prevent us from being good Samaritans."



I am a person who is busy, and I cringed when I read this.  While our society values multi-tasking and doing more with less time, resources, and people as the norm, we need to stop and assess.  Why are we in such a hurry?  Who required us to stretch our families so thin that we don't have time for a sit-down meal?  How did one letter texts take the place of a phone call, visit, or hand-written notes?  Stop, take a moment, consider your environment and the people who need you.

Prayer - Lord, you know how we like to keep busy and feel needed.  While we may be doing things that are good, help us to remember that we are human beings, and we occasionally need to just be.  Guide our eyes so we see the needs of those around, our hands so we serve them, and our ears to be attentive to your call like the Good Samaritan.