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What new language are you learning? Have you planted a victory garden? How many books a week are you reading?

It’s amazing how quickly the stillness and simplicity offered (to some of us, it must be said) by this time of staying-at-home is threatened by the stifling encroachment of any number of to-do lists and self-improvement projects that could fill our time. It’s as if our society is collectively aware of Blaise Pascal’s insight that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” But we’re actively, creatively and determinedly intent on avoiding the solution he suggests, no doubt afraid of what we’ll find.

This tendency can be found in Christian circles as well. I was driving back from a parking-lot Mass recently when I passed a church with a display that read, “John Bunyan wrote ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ while in isolation. What will you do?” The implication seems to be that if you don’t produce your magnus opus during the COVID-19-induced quarantine, there’s something wrong with you.

Now, there is a healthy degree of zeal, even holy ambition, that some of us might be able to put into action during this strange time. And maybe, in his providence, God has ordained your stay-at-home time as the opportune period to learn French, or to start that podcast on the theological insights of the music of Selena Gomez. To which I say, if you’re ready, come and get it.

But we need to be on-guard against a kind of busyness for busyness’ sake. Because “being productive” is actually not productive — it doesn’t “lead forth” or “draw out” the person we are meant to become, as the Latin root “producere” suggests — if it comes at the expense of responding to God’s call to a deeper reception of his love and presence.

This is true of prayer as well. You may have more time on your hands, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to double the amount of spiritual reading you’re doing. Stay-at-home order or not, most good spiritual directors will advise doing no more than a few pages of spiritual reading a day. It’s not about the quantity of pages read, but the quality with which you read them, because blowing through 50 pages of St. John of the Cross isn’t likely to facilitate fruitful contemplation on the mysteries of God.

Perhaps the invitation for our spiritual lives now is to do more with less. To savor our prayers, to pray them with heartfelt intensity, not necessarily to multiply them mindlessly, like the babbling pagans Christ warns us about in Matthew 6:7, “Who think they will be heard because of their many words.” The pagans are right if prayer is calculated according to a worldly logic, which says that more is always better. But it’s not. Prayer is first of all a work of God, which means that our first concern should not be the number of prayers we say, but the disposition of openness with which we say them. “The most fruitful human activity,” says Father Jean Corbon, the French Dominican who served as a key redactor of much of the Catechism’s section on prayer, “is to receive from God.”

We don’t like to receive from God, because it involves acknowledging that we are dependent upon him. It requires us to open ourselves up to the apparent void of the unknown, beyond our immediate control and preference.

Yet, this is exactly what we most often need.  I was recently struck by the story of Lisa Fitzgerald, a Harvard Law grad and former atheist who plans on entering the Church at Pentecost in Portland, Oregon. Fitzgerald said that her atheism had never been militant; she was, intellectually, open to the possibility of God. “But,” as she says, “I had never embraced the void. I made myself as busy as possible. I never left any space.”

We might not be atheists. But it’s still probably true that we don’t leave adequate space for God. We avoid, instead of embracing, the void, that place of stillness and silence where God speaks most intimately and profoundly. We can be like Mary Magdalene on Easter Sunday, too caught up in our own preoccupations to initially hear the Risen Lord speaking our name. Or Cleopas, who set off on the road to Emmaus instead of remaining in the uncomfortable ambiguity of Jerusalem with its empty tomb. Though Christ eventually tracked him down, the lesson seems to be that we should remain with Jesus, especially when things are beyond our control.

If we want to make this stay-at-home time truly productive, truly a time of “leading forth” to become who God has made us to be, we can’t start anywhere better than in embracing the void, the experience of our solitude in which we discover our dependence upon Another.

Liedl is a seminarian in formation for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Beginning this month his column, To Home From Rome, will appear under the title Already/Not Yet.