“Hold fast, daughters, for they cannot take from you the Our Father and the Hail Mary.”

— St. Teresa of Avila

One of my professors in grad school, Dr. Timothy O’Malley, once commented on people’s state of busyness. “Hey, how are you?” someone will ask. And we often reply, “I’m good, I’ve been really busy.” Somehow, “being really busy’’ has become a status symbol, a means for quantifying our life. Why? Well, busy people are successful, busy people do not lead boring lives, busy people have drive and ambition. Or so we’ve been led to believe. “What would happen,” O’Malley asked, “if we stopped answering people in this way? What would happen if we stopped basing our worth, and the worth of others, on busyness?” And then he moved on with his lesson. It was a tangent to the bigger discussion we were having, yet four years later, it has stayed with me.

A little over a year ago everything we know about our daily routines and life came to a crashing halt. The busyness was stripped from our lives, from our homes. A month into our stay-at-home orders, I talked to my students about this (via Zoom). We were trying to find the light in the darkness, asking what graces have come out of this time. Over and over again, each of them commented on things that were grounded in a repeated theme — stillness, slowness is good. There was time for family dinners, time for family game nights. There were runs with siblings, conversations with neighbors, an increased appreciation for nature. The slowness of Sunday (which was usually packed with traveling around to sports games) was restored and families were watching Mass or praying together. Another thing my students often commented on was that they didn’t distract themselves from their emotions; they had time to think and feel, time for meaningful conversations, time for prayer. With the ceasing of busyness came a restoration of sabbath, of holy rest.

This is the latest installment of the series, “The genius of my sister.” Read other articles in the series to learn more about Catholic women throughout history and how they can inspire us today.