ATTENTION FOR THE HOLY
The Rev. Robert Fruehwirth, Rector
Some decades ago, I heard from a priest that esteemed mentor told him back in the ‘60s that while he thought he was going to ‘make people Christian’ in going into parish ministry, he would spend most of his time ‘helping people to become more human.’
When I heard this, I found it offensive. It struck me as elitist clergy thinking that they minister over the hoi polloi who need remedial formation.
While suck elitism is always offensive, today I consider myself one of those people who would like to become more human, and recognize that need in myself for nurturing my faith. I want to enrich the soil of my humanness to be a place where the seed of faith can germinate, put down deep roots and yield 100, 60, or 30 fold (or maybe just 2!) as the Gospels put it.
In past years, at the start of summer, I’ve written about the desire to slow down (see The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer) live with greater mindfulness (see Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, a Buddhist classic by Thich Nhat Hanh) and keeping the sabbath (see Sabbath as Resistance by Walter Brueggemann). All these are exercises and practices to deepen our human capacity for relationship with each other and with God. This summer, to this trio of ‘personal slowth’, mindfulness and keeping sabbath, I’d like to add attentiveness.
I wrote a chapter about the mystery of attentiveness in the book I wrote over sabbatical. If you’d like, you can preview a rough draft of this chapter here. For years I’ve been amazed at the experience of paying deep attention to something as a profoundly spiritual and even mystical practice. Recently, through an Ezra Klein podcast Your Mind is being Fracked, I was encourage to pursue this more insistently in my life and our communal life.
The miracle of offering attention to something other than ourselves is that in our held-open attention the object, the other, has an opportunity to open and reveal itself in greater complexity, poignancy, and uniqueness. The lineaments of its life and its peculiar living story emerge. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, quoted in the podcast mentioned above, described attention as infinite waiting such that the object of our attention can the complex web of its connectedness to us, and in doing so, allow us to experience the complex web of our connectedness as well. Attention allows the life of something that is not ourselves to unfold for us, and as we follow the movements of its, we at the same time experience more clearly our own. I find this continually miraculous — and in short supply in our culture.
The capacity for attentiveness is important to Christians because our faith is centered on allowing God — who is not us — to speak to us, God speaking in myriad ways but starting and ending with the Incarnate Word in Jesus, meditated in the Gospels. With grace opening our attention to God, held open in infinite waiting before the Holy Word we can get a sense of the push and pull, the movement of God’s Spirit in us and the community. We get a sense of God’s desiring and even of God’s suffering for and with us, and God’s delighting in us.
The church is ideally a place, a refuge, a sanctuary, of stilled attention, a place of infinite waiting on God, a sacred place held open for God’s self-articulation. And our ability to come and hear that strange divine Word speak in us and to us on Sundays is contingent on our capacity for attention gained through all the rest of our lives. This capacity is something we grow whenever and however we practice giving our attention to something that is not ourselves: gardening, the arts, immersive reading, committed time for relationships, mindfulness, meditation with scripture, forest bathing, writing about the world around you or even the foreign world inside you (which is often a strangely ‘other’ place). The slower time of summer is an ideal time to practice this, with God’s grace. I encourage you to visit the website of the Friends of Attention, also highlighted on the Ezra Klein show, if you’d like to explore this more. I will end with a quote from one their 12 Theses for Attention, describing sanctuaries for attention and describing St. Matthew’s.
“Sanctuaries” … for true attention already exist. They are among us now. But they are endangered, and thus many are in hiding, operating in self- sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms. These sanctuaries can be found, but it takes an effort of attention to find them, and this seeking is also attention’s effort to heal itself. This attention-which-seeks often takes the form of an intense and near-devotional expectation and anticipation that refuses to know what it expects and anticipates.