Nothing is more essential to prayer than attentiveness.
—Evagrius of Pontus, On Prayer
In the film Lady Bird, directed by Greta Gerwig, the main character gives herself the name Lady Bird after rejecting her given name, Christine.1 Throughout the movie she rails against traditional limits and wants to escape the deadbeat town of Sacramento to go to the East Coast (“where good schools are”). Toward the end of the movie, she’s meeting with a nun over a disciplinary matter at her Catholic high school. She put a “just married” sign on a car that two of the nuns drive. While meeting, the nun brings up her college essay and remarks, “You clearly love Sacramento.”
Shocked, Lady Bird looks up. “I do?”
The nun continues, “You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.”
Lady Bird responds, “I was just describing it.”
“Well, it comes across as love.”
“Sure, I guess I pay attention.”
The nun ends the scene: “Don’t you think maybe they’re the same thing? Love? Attention?”
In the previous chapter we saw that we become what we behold, and I want us to see at the beginning of this chapter that we pay attention to what we love. Attention starts not in effort but in interest, desire, wanting to know more. Luke Bell argues along the same lines when he insists, “Giving whole attention to Him, whom to know is to love, is to live. This is why recovering a contemplative spirit matters.”2 Contemplation, attention, is the way we love God. It’s the way to the good life.
The contemplative life starts in prayer or in the church, but if your prayer and attention are limited to those fixed hours or moments, then the contemplative spirit is lost. Prayer is meant to extend beyond the set times and expand out into the world as it is—into the fields and parishes and workplaces and art galleries. The material world reveals the spiritual. Creation reveals the Creator. The goal of our times of contemplation is that the practice would turn into our life. This vision is the dynamic at play in the writings of Brother Lawrence, a French mystic of the seventeenth century. He sees everything turn to prayer. In his case, doing dishes becomes close to contemplative ecstasy. God can be found in all mundane work—from doing the dishes to changing a diaper, from studying for a test to completing spreadsheets. Everything can be done with contemplative awareness in the presence of God.
This way of life is sacramental, like the Lord’s Supper. All things reveal God if we have eyes to see. Hans Boersma suggests that “in as much as the natural world around is a self-manifestation of God, he uses every one of the physical senses to draw us into his presence.”3 All the set times of contemplative prayer are meaningless if they don’t affect our ability to see the presence of God in the world. Stop and consider: holiness is all around us. How often are we aware of it?
Since the world is sacramental, it is worth seeing. The astonishing thing about God as the Beautiful One is that he creates all things with hints of beauty. Therefore, even if we live too fast to see it, the world is worth noticing. Chef and author Gregory Thompson, in his quarterly newsletter in Comment magazine, reflects on living with and in nature. He writes, “Contemplation may be understood as a form of confrontation—a struggle to see in the midst of blindness and to love in the midst of neglect. Contemplation is not, despite popular sentiment, a movement away from the world, but a movement toward it with a deepened commitment to love.”4 God is at work in the materiality of world, loving it into existence. We’re invited to pay attention. Norman Wirzba expands this sentiment in what he calls an “agrarian mysticism” that says “God is always with and within creatures as their creating, animating, nurturing, and sustaining Source. There is no such thing as a world without God.”5 That is, God is to be found not up and away but down and around. He is nearer us than our inward selves are. He is mysteriously present in the material world.
If we attend to the world this way, with the understanding that God is immanent within it, the way we treat the world will change. This contemplative vision will address the fragmentation of our lives and our alienation from others. We will begin to see the spiritual oneness of all things—not in a way that flattens the creature-Creator distinction but in a way that enriches the material and relational world. The way we treat the world is the way we treat each other, and it goes the other way around too: the way we treat each other is the way we treat the world.
Here’s the paradox of attention: in prayer, as we give our attention to God, we come to realize that, rather than our gaze resting upon God, God’s gaze rests upon us. John of the Cross says, “Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God.”6 After all, the emotions one has in prayer are not the point. The essential movement of prayer is cultivating a return to the present moment. We return again and again to the God who gazes upon us and who first desires intimacy with us.
CONTEMPLATION
Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from these. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly.
—Rowan Williams, Holy Living
I have a confession: I am a beginner in contemplative practice. You may have picked that up from how I described my desire for productivity. So often, I’m distracted by my own internal monologue or the task at hand that I don’t notice God, who wants to reveal himself in every moment of the day. I’m like a dog who sees a squirrel—constantly shifting attention to thoughts that flow into my mind with ease. If you ever take time to attend, you’ll notice the chattiness of your internal monologue too. Just this morning, as I was spending time in silence, I was also meta-reflecting on my reflection the entire time. I’m trying to attend to the moment, but my internal chatter is reflecting on what I’m doing, wondering if this is working, wondering why I’m thinking about my thinking, unable to do the sanctified shutting up that’s necessary. There’s internal monologue about internal monologue, and then there’s more internal monologue trying to control that internal monologue. It can be exhausting. It’s hard for me to be still and silent.
I’m a beginner, trying to make progress. In the contemplative tradition, we’re all amateurs. It’s not something we master. Here are a few things I’ve learned that have helped me attend along the way.
Contemplation is not special knowledge for elites. All the initiative lies in the loving-kindness of God, who wants to reveal himself to us. The contemplative practice attempts to remove obstacles that stand in the way of communion and encounter. Therefore, this intimate, even experiential, knowledge of God, “far from being something essentially extraordinary, like visions, revelations, or the stigmata, is in the normal way of sanctity.”7 Demanding more than a vision of God or desiring some other imaginative experience is akin to asking for a second incarnation. God has been known through Christ. Therefore, listen to him—which is another way of saying, “Pay attention to him.”8 Contemplation is the way we cultivate attention.
One of the most helpful ways to start is to have a phrase or word to return to. Historically, the Jesus Prayer has been used: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (cf. Luke 18:13). Different traditions include different words (“God,” “love,” “maranatha”). Whichever word or sentence you choose, it has the same purpose: slowing the mind and reigning in straying thoughts in order to achieve focus over distraction.9 Saying the word or sentence in rhythm with our breathing can also bring a somatic unity in which our body and our thoughts are united to bring attention. In contemplation the goal is to return to the love of God that is present in each moment. It’s an astonishing reality, really: God wants to reveal his love to us, and we’re so distracted and busy we hardly notice it. As Thomas Keating suggests, “All spiritual exercises are designed to reduce the monumental illusion that God is absent.”10 Repeating a word or sentence can help us return in order to catch a glimpse of God’s present love for us in a given moment.
Repeating a word or sentence can also be a means by which the Spirit helps us in our weakness to gain understanding. For example, the Jesus Prayer says the truth of who Christ is and who we are. These truths, repeated, draw us deeper into the mystery of the truth of Christ and our sinful state. Commenting on Evagrius, who defined prayer as habitual intimacy, Thomas Merton writes, “This disposes us to accept the idea that prayer is immediate intuitive contact with God, a habitual commerce with God, not a conversation in words or thoughts.”11 Again, the contemplative goal in prayer is not personal expression. There’s a place for that. But in contemplation we seek the face of God in an encounter. We strive to be content in his presence.
To prepare, expect mental distractions and wandering thoughts. Internal dialogue is inevitable, and all the more so as you start off. The important thing is how you meet distraction. As the contemplative writer Martin Laird suggests, “How we meet distraction (not whether or not we experience distractions—this is a given) is what heals and transforms as we move deeper.”12 Laird offers three questions to ponder as we go through distractions.13
1. “ARE YOU YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS?”
As you begin a contemplative practice, attending to God, there will be a roommate who plays music or a neighbor who cuts the grass or a child who walks in. In short, you will meet frustration or anger, because the setting is not ideal. In those moments, you will again face the challenge of inner commentary. “That jerk roommate!” “That inconsiderate neighbor!” “These meddling kids!” But the goal is to meet all these external situations in stillness. You are not your feelings of annoyance. You are not your reaction. You may feel bound by these reactions, but they are not the self. The goal of contemplation is to meet chaos with peace, to respond to distractions with stillness rather than commentary.
When you start out, these distracting thoughts may be prevalent. Moreover, in day-to-day life we often ignore deep feelings of abandonment or issues of self-worth, and when we finally are still, these negative feelings can rise like a tide in our souls. Things long past and seemingly forgotten can storm in and overwhelm us. In silence we learn to deal with them. Rather than justifying these thoughts away, we meet negative feelings with a self-knowledge. We notice them. We ask questions. We let them pass. We are not the sum total of our thoughts and feelings.
2. “WHAT DO THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS APPEAR IN?”
As we move from being our thoughts and feelings to noticing our thoughts and feelings, we change from a victim to a witness. We have agency with our thoughts and feelings. In verbiage from the Psalms, we ask our own soul, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” (Pss. 42:5, 11; 43:5). We have the ability to speak back to our feelings. Why are you upset, soul? Who makes you this way? Why? When? How? To what effect?
By becoming aware of the thoughts that bring misery, we can observe them, let them pass like a river running through our mind—here one moment, gone the next—and return to the loving awareness of God. We are not our feelings, even if they seem like they bind and enslave us. We give commentary to our feelings, but we can meet the feeling before the commentary. Watch it come. Watch it go. As Laird comments, “Affliction feeds off the noise of the commenting, chattering mind.”14 So often, I judge myself in prayer while in prayer. Am I doing this right? Will this be fruitful? I remember a certain time of “fruitful” prayer, and I want to recreate it. But that’s more chatter and distraction. Meet all these straying thoughts with a silent, steady gaze.
In the contemplative tradition the self is often compared to a mountain. The weather is the noise of the world, even the noise of our own thoughts and changing emotions. When the noise of weather comes, the contemplative tradition invites us to realize that we need not be swayed by all the noise. So often, we feel lost in the weather, as if the weather is who we are. When it’s cold, we’re cold. When anger comes, we’re angry. But contemplation helps us realize that we are not our emotions or circumstances. All that noise is going on around us, but it is not the self. We can be as unmoved as a mountain. As Rowan Williams writes, “Learning discernment is first learning how to identify and bring to stillness the urge to reduce the world to the terms of my desires; in other words, it is to do with learning to observe and question whatever forms of controlling power I possess.”15 We can notice feelings or circumstances as we notice the weather. We can’t control it, but we can see it; and the weather need not erode us. Mountains don’t change with the weather.
3. “WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THESE THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS, AND WHO IS AWARE OF THEM?”
The last question Laird asks is one that requires deeper consideration. Laird mentions the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who says that whenever you are plagued by distractions, “try to look over their shoulders, as it were, searching for something else—and that something is God, enclosed in the cloud of unknowing.”16 One of the beautiful things I’ve experienced in contemplation is the melting away of my hard heart. It’s hard to be self-righteous and judge others when we can look beyond anger and frustration to see God. Sometimes, when not in contemplation, I focus on a frustrating person or situation but never move beyond the feeling. Contemplation gives me the opportunity to do just that: to look beyond the frustration. Contemplation takes desolation and turns it into freedom. It allows us to enter a vast spaciousness that connects all things and holds them together, a spaciousness where there is a deep belonging at the center of existence that invites us into a transformation that gives us empathy for ourselves and others.
Fred Bahnson describes having such an experience on a journalistic assignment to Mali with Harper’s Magazine. After declining to go to a meeting in a dangerous part of Gao with a monk named Colombo, he reflected on his childhood, which included a three-year stint of living away from his parents as they pursued a vocation as medical missionaries. He says that this distance between family and home was miserable. He cried himself to sleep and learned never to complain, as both he and his parents were “doing it for the Lord.” However, this rationale didn’t comfort the heart of the ten-year-old child. He harbored resentment and pain from those early years, and they came to surface these many years later in the same continent where he suffered as a child. But here’s how he reflected on his pain:
Those years injured my soul, but they’d also given me a gift. Through my childhood experience of solitary prayer and my adult discovery of monastic spirituality, I had found a path that led to a wider expanse. The monastic project showed me how to turn loneliness into solitude. The early monks’ great discovery was that we are each a monos: the walls of the self are the burden of every human. They also discovered that the vulnerability of solitary prayer makes those walls more porous, leading us out of ourselves and into communion with our neighbors. Solitude begets solidarity.17
“Solitude begets solidarity”—that’s a great phrase. He didn’t retreat into himself to find himself. The monastic tradition invites us to be still and to notice that the walls of selfhood are rather porous. We grow closer to other people as we grow closer to God. The walls that separate us from others, the walls on which we stand in judgment over others, begin to crumble. This oneness does not erase the distinctiveness of individual creatures, but it is a recognition that the sustenance and source of all things comes in and through God. Alone, Bahnson became aware of the source of the real and of the life that he shared with all created beings.
I can’t imagine sending my kids away for three years, even for a supposedly noble purpose like serving God. Bahnson’s parents bear some responsibility for the unintentional hurt they may have caused. But he doesn’t let their decision drive him to hate them or consider himself a victim of their choices. He notices the pain, but he does not dwell there. Through contemplative prayer he becomes the mountain that the weather passes around. Or rather, he knows that his “life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3) and that God is the mountain of refuge and strength. In so doing he becomes a more empathetic person as he sees the seeds of God slowly bearing fruit, even in rocky soil.
HOLY DETACHMENT
One of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people in the purity of a selfless love.
—Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
