A Message for Advent?

"Our life is frittered away by detail.... Simplify, simplify." Henry David Thoreau

"Our life is frittered away by detail." I'll bet that echoes for most of you. Even more than in Thoreau's day, too much of our time is consumed with details. Call it "life clutter"-- all those nagging worries about inessential matters: what brand of soap Tommy said he wanted, which Star Trek episode is a re-run, whether I sent my mother a birthday card or just imagined it. My attention is scattered in so many pieces I can't pull together enough to create dinner, much less the Great American Novel.

Fritter, fritter, fritter, there goes my life.

But we can't rid life entirely of detail. Too often what seems just to be a trivial nuisance turns out to have some significant consequence. For example, consumed with anxiety that I got the wrong brand of soap for Tommy, I forget to send my mother that birthday card. She takes offense and decides not to lend me the money she'd promised that would rescue my new business. The business fails, the bank forecloses, and Tommy and I end up on the street, without any soap at all.
c. 1997 by Alicia Rasley

Ah, the devil is in the details! Such as the little knot that wasn’t on the end of the string which releases the lock to St. Joseph’s vestry where the bread and wine and other essentials are kept. With no knot to stop it the string slipped through the hole and into the vestry where it remains inaccessible. By service time things were in order – no problem! No clerical robes either, but bread from my kitchen and wine from someone else’s. And I’m still locked out of the vestry.