6 Practices: Week 1 - Paying Attention

Jeremiah 31:7-14

John 1:10-18

Let me first say a few things about the new sermon series we’re beginning today.  We’re calling it “6 Practices to Move You Forward.”

So we’ll be looking at six practices - behaviors, actions, things you can do – that will enable you to experience more of God’s goodness and love.  If you want newness in your life, you’ll have to do something different.  We don’t think our way into new behavior.  We act our way into thinking differently.  Patterns of behavior actually rewire the brain over time.

 

These practices aren’t new.  If my leadership involves trying to tell you lots of new things, you should fire me.  These are old things.  Ways of wisdom.  Tested paths.  Hard-won virtues and disciplines.  But the confession of our forebears is that living this way leads to greater satisfaction, peace, and joy.  If we do these things, we’ll wind up more connected to the earth, to others, to ourselves, and to God.

So these are practices that can move you forward.  Notice, we’re not making any silly promises here.  I doubt these will make you rich.  I doubt they’ll help you lose weight.  I’m not even sure they’ll make you more happy (whatever that means).  But they are ways of getting unstuck.  They’re ways of getting out of ruts and onto new paths. 

All of us here this morning have unique challenges.  What it looks like for me to move forward in life will be different than for someone who is retired; or for someone who’s in high school.  Our challenges are different.  What we share is the desire to get more out of life, to live and love deeply, to wake up with a sense of purpose that gives shape to our daily lives.  The six practices are ways to move past your current limits into a fresh opening of creativity, insight, and discovery.

OK, now on to the first “practice” – paying attention.

Jill Warford and I were talking about Gordon Parks several weeks ago.  She directed me to the youtube version of the Half-Past Autumn documentary.  Gordon’s narration begins like this . . .

“I would miss this Kansas land.  Wide prairie filled with green and corn stalks.  Flowering apple.  Tall elms and oaks beside glinting streams.  Cloud tufts spilling across the round, blue sky.  Butterflies to chase through grass high as the chin.  June bugs, swallow tails, red robin and bobolink.  Nights filled with soft laughter, fire flies, and restless stars.  Yes, all this I would miss.  Along with the fear, hatred, and violence we blacks have suffered upon this beautiful land.”

That is the memory of someone rather good at noticing things.  The look of the prairie.  The names of trees.  The way a stream catches the sun.  The way clouds spill and fill a rounded sky.  What tall grass feels like to a child.  Not just birds in general, but swallow tails, red robins, and “bobolink.”  (Which I had to look up – bobolinks are small songbirds related to blackbirds and orioles.  The males have a white back and black chest – it looks like it’s wearing a tuxedo backwards). 

These detailed memories of what his Kansas childhood felt like are all the more impressive when you realize the powerful and menacing racism that Parks and other African Americans experienced here in this little corner of Kansas.  Even when life seems hopeless, there is still the opportunity to take notice.  Even when you’re angry, you can still see beauty.  You can wonder at what’s in front of you, even when you’re in pain. 

If you want to learn how to notice things, you’ll need to look.  Nature writer Annie Dillard might help you do this.  Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) is a place to start.  She writes:

“I am no scientist.  I explore the neighborhood.  An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.  He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn.  In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cock-sure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place.  Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why” (12).

In another place, she writes of rock collector Matt Spireng.  “Matt Spireng has collected thousands of arrowheads and spearheads; he says that if you really want to find arrowheads, you must walk with a child – a child will pick up everything” (90).

When you learn to live this way, to see this way, you become like a child, easily excited, full of giddy wonder about the simplest things, like tulip trees.  “Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts.  Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day.  A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one.  A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes; it splits, sucks, and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling.  No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out ever more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air” (112).

You and I stumble asleep past how many trees each day?  What would happen if we stopped and marveled at every tree we passed?  This is difficult on a walk, impossible from a car.

Or if you have a spare minute this week during an evening, you might look up, and wonder and delight in the pinpricks of starry light.  I don’t want to sound alarmist.  But if you lose your capacity to look up at stars, your goose is cooked.  But if you can look up and still mutter “wow,” you’re still in the game.  The “wow” is about the only thing to say. 

The universe is mind numbingly huge.  We don’t even know much about the little corner of our own solar system.  Our school book diagrams show us poor little Pluto lying out on the furthest edge of our solar system.  And in a sense that’s true.  If you board a rocket ship, it would take you at least ten years to get there.  But here’s the thing – when you get to Pluto, you aren’t anywhere near the edge of our solar system.  Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth the way.  Our nearest neighboring star is the Alpha Centauri cluster – 4.3 light-years away.  To get there by rocket would take 25,000 years.  The average distance between stars is 20 million million miles.  The Milky Way Galaxy of which we’re a part contains maybe 400 billion stars.  And we’re one of about 140 known galaxies.

But of course, most nights, we never look up.  There is Facebook, and TV, and laundry and teeth brushing.  It’s hard to find the time.

I’ve been talking so far about paying attention to the intricate beauty of the natural world.  But the practice is far more useful than that.  It can also help you fix things.

I was talking to Tim Randles recently about what a mess my garage and basement are.  Henry likes to tinker, disassemble, and fix things, which is good.  But the downside is that tools and parts and bits of wire and pipe and hinges and springs are everywhere.  Tim is a mechanic, among other things.  So he’s comfortable tinkering and fixing.  So he sympathizes with Henry.  And Tim was gently scolding me for complaining about the messes.  It’s the only way for a person to find out how things work, Tim suggested.  To be perfectly honest, I don’t always want to know how things work.  I just want them to work.  For a person like me, taking things apart is the last thing on earth I want to do. 

“It’s easy to figure out how things go back together,” Tim said.  “You just have to pay really close attention when you take them apart.”  Ah, yes.  People who fix things are able to summon a gentle, patient, unhurried posture in the face of some complexly working thing.  There is no fear, no anxiety.  Just an ability to look on with curiosity, and to take notice. 

You might be thinking – Jared, paying attention seems kind of basic.  I’m not sure it will make all that much difference.  And I’m not at all sure yet what it has to do with faith, Jesus, or church.  Ok, so let me put it a little differently.  The practice of paying attention is just a way to talk about living with wonder and delight in what’s around you.  It’s a way of talking about being present where you are rather than wishing you were somewhere else.  God has come to visit you in your flesh, but what good is that going to do if even you aren’t there?

John 1

The gospel reading for the Second Sunday after Christmas is from the beginning of John’s gospel.  This gospel, like Mark, has no stories of Jesus’ birth.  But we do get a theological reflection that is full of wonder.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  He came to the world, and the world did not recognize him. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” 

Jesus is the Word of God made flesh.  Yes, there’s meant to be some surprise.  What?  The God responsible for creating the world showed up within it as one of the fragile creatures?  We’re invited to see that God isn’t far off or far away, but the Love dwelling with us quietly and mysteriously.  You don’t have to jump out of your ordinary routines to find God.  Your flesh, the flesh of others, the dirt and color and movement of ordinary things are places where God will be present.  Just pay attention.  Notice.  Delight.  Wonder.

Your everyday surroundings are a realm filled with light and significance.  Wherever you are – your neck of the woods - is blessed by God as our dwelling place, holy and worthy of our best attention.  Of course many people don’t see it.  According to our reading, you have to be born of God.  Then you’ll begin to see things you never saw before.

Since we’re talking about a new practice, let me offer a few practical suggestions.  Here are a few things that might help you pay attention:

1.     Watch out, be on guard against all generalizations and stereotypes.  When we say or believe things about all men or women, all white, black or Hispanic people, all young or old people, all Christians, Jews, or Muslims, rich or poor, Democrat or Republican, American, Mexican, or Arab – what is said next will always be false.  Trafficking in stereotypes and generalizations about people is lazy.  They’re just ways of avoiding paying attention and taking delight in others.

2.     Slow down, especially when you eat.  Enjoy the food you eat.  Look at it, smell it and taste it.  If you pay attention while eating, it will become practice for paying attention to other things.

3.     Spend more time outdoors.  Take a walk.  Notice things.  Even in the cold winter there are beautiful things to see.  Blue jays and cardinals.  Evergreens and moss.  Holly bushes and hay bails.

4.     Practice some form of quieting yourself.  You might need to be still for this.  Or you might need to be moving.  It depends on you.  But free yourself from distractions as best you can.  Don’t reach for a device.  Don’t turn on the TV.  Just be there, noticing the river of stuff that rushes through your mind and heart.  And do this every day.

5.     Find a mentor who helps you pay attention.  Some people are wise guides – they notice more than you do.  They see things you miss.  They might be a friend or neighbor or colleague.  They might also be an artist of some kind – a novelist or painter or poet.  When you find one, learn to see the world like they do.

6.     Write a little bit if you can.  Keep a journal.  Jot down what you’re noticing around you and what you’re noticing that’s happening inside you.  Paying attention to your own life is difficult work.  Most of us avoid it by distracting ourselves.  But if you practice listening to your life, you will find God there.  By paying attention to your own motivations and fears, you will discover the places where God wants to lead you out further and deeper.

I’ll close with the quotation from Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamozov:

Love people even in their sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all of God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.