I was walking through the parking lot at work this week, getting to campus early to catch up on a few things.  I zipped in and parked at the far end of the lot to get a little exercise  on my way into the office.  While I made mental lists of things to do for the day, I strode purposefully across the lot for several minutes.  Then I passed a young woman, a student, who was stopping to take a picture.  I glanced up at what she was seeing.

Only then did I notice the spectacular sky, the colorful sunrise and the horizon we could see across into Iowa.  It was a wonderful sunrise, with a balmy winter’s day to enjoy it.

When will I learn to watch the gifts God is offering me every day? Why do I get so caught up in things that I don’t notice what is going on around me?

What return can I make for all the Lord has given me?

Image by Vertigogen under Creative Commons license

Maureen Frank, "Neural Pathways"

Nicholas Carr asks what the internet is doing to our brains.  His answer: rewiring it for easy distraction.  He observes that the way we read online–with constant distractions–is actually changing the way our neural pathways work, with the resulting effect of limiting our ability for sustained attention to a long reading.

It is good to remember that spirituality is a series of practices that allow us to pay attention to God.  God’s always there, but we get easily distracted.  And the more we get distracted, the easier it is to get distracted.  Distraction itself has become our practice.

The answer, of course, is the opposite practice of attentiveness.  Pray the Examen every day.  Practice lectio divina.  Practice meditation on icons.  Practice anything that allows you to sustain a meditative, contemplative attention–what Walter Burghardt called “a long, loving look at the real.”

God is in the loving look at the real.  Paradoxically, he’s also in the things that distract us; it’s we ourselves who get lost in distraction.

After sending the seventy disciples out to preach, Jesus listened to what they had to say upon their return.  They recounted many wonders, to which Jesus replied “Blessed are the eyes which see what you see!  For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Lk 10:23-24).

Seeing is not a passive act.  We are not sponges soaking in images.  We see what we choose to pay attention to at any given moment, and our habits of seeing are shaped by our priorities.  Jesus taught his disciples to see things that others missed: the faith of a small tax collector in a tree; the resolve of a woman just reaching out to touch Jesus’ garment; the example of a feisty Samaritan divorcée.  He taught them to see lepers and the blind and the disabled as people who could show God at work.  He taught them to pay attention to fig trees, mustard seeds, vineyards, and sheep for clues about the way God works.  He taught them to look at the temple and its high priests with a critical eye, to question how important government was in the big picture, and to be unafraid even when they were in storms at sea.  He taught them how to see the way God sees.

What a glorious invitation–to see as God sees!  And to begin with ourselves, to see ourselves the way God does, seething with joy at how beautiful are his creations, feeling something of God’s own restlessness.

Yes, seeing is a habit.  Try on the habits of those who are contributing to Picturing God and begin to imagine the way God sees the world.  Enter into that imagination as a spiritual exercise and see what happens.

One of my favorite characters in fiction is Konstantin Dmitrich Levin in Leo Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina.  Levin is an intelligent young aristocrat with a powerful conscience and a strong thirst for truth.  He abandons the Orthodox Christianity of his childhood and seeks an answer to the meaning of life.  He finds none.  For himself (and everyone else) he foresees only “suffering, death, and eternal oblivion.”  His intellectual despair deepens so badly that he hides ropes and guns, fearing that he will take his own life.

One day a peasant tells him about a friend, “He’s an upright old man.  He lives for the soul.  He remembers God.”  The words strike Levin powerfully and cause a rethinking.  He perceives a vast difference between his thinking and his life.  His thinking was a tormented search for ideas that might give meaning to his existence.  Meanwhile he has fallen in love and married a woman who loves him very much.   He actively manages a large estate. He’s responsible for the well-being of his brother, sister, and an extended family.   His son is born.  He is busy with a wide circle of friends.  He takes on civic responsibilities.

How ironic, Levin says.  He thinks that life is meaningless, but the life that he actually lives is busy, productive, and satisfying.  What did this mean? he asks.  “It meant that his life was good, but his thinking was bad.”  His reasoning tells him that life is a pitiless struggle for survival that rewards selfishness and power.  But he doesn’t really believe that, and he certainly doesn’t live that way.  In his everyday life he lives for an ideal of the good. Like the peasant’s friend, “he lives for the soul.  He remembers God.”

Levin may be just a character in a novel (though I’m told that he’s a lot like Tolstoy), but I love him because his story shows how God can be found when we look at life as we actually live it.  This is something Ignatius taught us how to do in the Daily Examen.  I rely on it.  It’s hard for me to think my way to God.  It’s much better to pay attention to how I really live.

Something to think about | “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves. If we concentrate with this attention, a quarter of an hour of attention is better than a great many good works.”

Simone Weil

Back in my coaching days I learned to develop a particular kind of vision: I saw details of my athletes’ performance that others would miss.  This one slouched a bit; that one overreached; and so on.  The vision was the product of careful, attentive, even loving work.  What others saw was just a boat full of rowers, either winning or losing.

I think that the Christian life involves a similar deepening of vision, of attentiveness.  How else can we explain the ways we see the world and do what we do?

A few days ago I was walking from class, in a good mood on a beautiful day.  Spring in Chestnut Hill is absolutely gorgeous, and I was just enjoying the walk.  But I nearly stopped in my tracks when I saw something that moved me, almost to tears.  A beautiful young woman had one arm around the back of a girl of maybe thirteen or fourteen, a student at the Campus School for children with severe disabilities.  With her other arm she was holding the girl’s hand as she stepped up onto a curb after crossing the street.  What struck me was how tender and intimate was this physical contact–in a word, how free.  Christ was right there, in flesh.

Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote about beauty that often goes unseen, “but the beholder wanting.”  How I wish others could have seen what I saw that day!  Such tenderness, such attentiveness to the need of the moment, to the opportunity to love.

Perhaps our prayer, our liturgy, our moral action, our practices of discernment–perhaps all these are simply the practices that make us ready to behold the opportunities to love.  Perhaps the Christian life is about becoming better beholders, better able to see the lighting flashes of divine grace that erupt underneath the flesh of those around us.

When I was in grade school, I was a daydreamer.  I could get lost in the view out of the classroom window, in the display on the bulletin board at the side of the room, or in the stories at the back of my reader—although I was never reading the ones we happened to be working on in class that day.  “Miss McCann! …. Maureen!” was the constant call from Sister to bring me back to whatever we were doing.

I think these days I still don’t always pay attention, but it’s because I get too focused.  I have my list, I cross things off of it as I get them done and I don’t let too many interruptions get in my way.  A few weeks ago I was in the grocery store making my way around the fruits and vegetables.  Two young children were in a shopping cart near their father, laughing and talking to people as they went by.   I am ashamed to say that I hardly paid attention to them as I made my bee-line for the celery, and only later as I played it back in my mind, did I realize that they had tried to engage me as I charged past them.  What finally brought me back to reality was their giggles as an older woman stopped to talk to them.  All three of them were laughing.  The older woman was clearly delighted by them, and they were enchanted by her.  I had missed the chance, not only to make these children happy, but to share in that happiness.

Of course my life with God is no different, and as I dash through my busy, busy life, I don’t always stop to notice the gifts God places in my path: daffodils, a good apple or someone “interrupting” my life to say hello.  When I miss those gifts, I am less aware of God’s presence, although God is no less present in my life.  God is simply waiting for me to slow down, pay attention and say hello.  I suspect that even when I don’t realize it, God is holding me close, laughing a little with great love and saying, “Maureen! Pay attention!”

“Look, listen, and feel.”  These are the basic instructions of any CPR course.  Why?  Because we know from experience that in order to help a person who appears to be in physical distress, it is important first to see what is really going on before intervening, lest one do more harm than good.   Let’s look more closely at the caring act of providing CPR to see what spiritual lessons we might find.

After shaking a person in need and asking:  “Annie, Annie, are you all right?”—to make sure she is not just napping—the helper feels carefully for a pulse.  She then lowers an ear to the person’s mouth with a cocked head in order to look, listen, and feel for signs of breathing.  Can she see the chest rise and fall? Does she feel the victim’s breath on her cheek? Can she hear the sounds of breathing? Only once these questions are answered can the helper decide which course of action is best.

Paying attention to what is really going and checking things out with all the tools at our disposal are important lessons for all of life, but particularly for the spiritual life. It has been my experience as a spiritual companion and as one who has been well-companioned myself, that particularly because things are not always as they seem, it is important to check things out before trying to fix, change, or “improve” something in our lives.

Given the hustle and bustle and demands of everyday life, I wonder if I am attentive enough to what is really going on in my spiritual life?  I wonder, too, if I might need to be shaken up a bit to find out if I am merely sleeping or if I am really out of it. “Eddie, Eddie, are you all right?” I wonder further:  What about my spiritual pulse?   How would I check it?  Am I “breathing?” Does the Spirit’s breath cause my chest to rise from within?

As Catholics near the season of Lent and as all people of good will think about our spiritual growth, we might do well first to exercise a spirituality of CPR before we attempt a remedy for the season, such as giving up chocolate.  If we find out what is truly going on inside us, perhaps we might decide to spend more quiet time alone or more time with our families or to forgive someone or ourselves….

A closing thought:  Since it is often difficult to shake ourselves or check our own “pulse” or even to see if we are “breathing” adequately, we might do well to seek out a spiritual companion or friend who knows how to “look, listen, and feel.”