"Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected by power, because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world." - Thomas Merton
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote in her
beautiful elegy for her soul mate, “is only a report.” To fully feel life
course through us, indeed, we ought to befriend our own attention, that
“intentional, unapologetic discriminator.”
More than half a century before Oliver, another enchantress
of the human spirit — the French philosopher Simone Weil (February 3,
1909–August 24, 1943), a mind of unparalleled intellectual elegance and a sort
of modern saint whom Albert Camus described as “the only great spirit of our
times” — wrote beautifully of attention as contemplative practice through which
we reap the deepest rewards of our humanity.
In First and Last Notebooks— the out-of-print treasure that gave us Weil
on the key to discipline and how to make use of our suffering — she writes:Attention is the rarest and purest form of
generosity.
This piercing thought comes fully abloom in Gravity and
Grace— a posthumous 1952 collection
of Weil’s enduring ideas, culled from her notebooks by Gustave Thibon, the
farmer whom she entrusted with her writings before her untimely death.Weil considers the superiority of attention
over the will as the ultimate tool of self-transformation:
We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by
will.
The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and
these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of
nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity,
inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of
this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can
only beg for them… Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse?
Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles
which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to
tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the
solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different.Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There
is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud
man. It is the result of a mistake.
Weil turns to attention as the counterpoint to this
graceless will — where the will contracts the spirit, she argues, attention
expands it: Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as
prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If
we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the
whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.
Gravity and Grace is one of the most spiritually
nourishing texts ever published. Complement it with Weil on temptation and true
genius, then revisit writer Melissa Pritchard on art as a form of active prayer
and cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on reawakening our capacity for
attention.
Yesterday at both Good Friday services at the Church of the Holy Communion, we offered the Reproaches as part of the liturgy of the day. I had not encountered them before. This morning I learned that they had almost made it into the 1979 Book of Common Prayer but did not because they were perceived as opening the door to antisemitism. I confess this did not occur to me because I understood them as addressed to the Church rather than to the Jewish people. They recall the great acts of salvation history of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. In them, God asks, "O my people, how have I wearied you that you have treated me so poorly?" This surely stirs repentance in the listener.
The second section- which is in verse- includes these two stanzas:
V. God in pity saw man fallen, shamed and sunk in misery,
when he fell on death by tasting fruit of the forbidden tree:
then another Tree
was chosen which the world from death would free.
R. Sweetest wood, and sweetest iron, sweetest weight is hung
on thee.
V. Bend thy boughs, O Tree of glory; thy relaxing sinews
bend;
for a while the ancient rigor that thy birth bestowed, suspend:
and the King
of heavenly beauty on thy bosom gently tend.
R. Sweetest wood, and sweetest iron, sweetest weight is hung
on thee.
These stanzas brought to mind three things. The first is a text from the Song of Solomon (Ch. 2 v.3 ) "Like an apple tree among the trees of the woods, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down in his shade with great delight and his fruit was sweet to my taste."
The second was a hymn I love greatly - "Jesus Christ the Apple Tree." Most often sung at Christmas, perhaps it should also be an Easter hymn. Below is the text...
And the third, Rev. 22:1-5.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; 4 they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever.
Once again, I understand that the Cross on which Jesus was crucified has become for us the Tree of Life. Thanks be to God!
A Blessed Feast of the Resurrection to you and yours!
In the Episcopal Calendar, we give thanks for the life and work of St. John Chrysostom (387-407) on January 27th, Here is a quote I love.
"“A friend is more to be longed for than the light; I speak of a genuine one. And wonder not: for it were better for us that the sun should be extinguished, than that we should be deprived of friends; better to live in darkness, than to be without friends.”
As the noise of Christmas celebration - which started in October and continues to escalate (!) - I find myself longing for the deep silence of Advent.
Last month I had the opportunity to hear Paul Pearson of the Merton Center speak about Merton's understanding of the relationship between the breakdown in communication and its relationship to communion - that is, authentic relationship with each other. Pearson writes, "For Merton, it is our loss of silence that has led to the breakdown of communication, and consequently to the loss of communion, which is the grave danger we face, and the reason why we must work to restore authentic communication with one another: “To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if [we are] to remain human.” New Seeds of Contemplation, p.55.
This Advent, may we find times and places for silence so that we can learn how to listen deeply, how to communicate and to enter into genuine communion with each other.
