Rest, attention, and other disciplines that teach us to receive the presence of God
Whenever I begin to pay a little attention, a vortex opens up and draws everything in, all things seeming related, relevant; all conversations tying together. If I am too lazy to make the connections finish—if I just move on instead of taking notes and thinking longer—eventually they stop. The world is disparate again and “the centre cannot hold”.1
I have been disconnected from certain tethers for the last month. We celebrated Christmas later than normal, didn’t celebrate the New Year or Tim’s January birthday at all, and then left for almost two weeks of vacation. My normal week of slow entry into a new year, that glorious time between Christmas and January 1, was lost.
Obviously a long vacation was nice and we had a wonderful time, fully relaxing into sugared beaches and clear, salty waters. We snorkeled and napped, swam and explored, walked a lot, and renewed rhythms of prayer and reading that we needed. But there has been no big-picture planning for the year ahead, no review of the past year, and no chosen focus for the next few months. These aren’t world-ending issues, but it has felt like a lack of attention for me. Since we’ve been home though, I have been furiously writing notes and connecting dots.
I am busy but not overly so, and I am learning to not be ashamed of the fact that my day to day life generally has space and solitude and margin. I don’t live at a frenetic pace. Even when we were in the thick of homeschooling and sports and my work tutoring, there could almost always be an hour found if I needed it badly enough (4 a.m. works for awhile). I know people who live their whole life in a frenzy, who seem to naturally operate with too much on their plate and who tell themselves they thrive that way; people count on them; people dump responsibilities on them; people avoid them because they feel stressed around them, or lazy, or incompetent. My mission is to be a counterbalance and evangelize for a quiet and peaceable life.
The exception to this was the first couple years of getting the deli up and running. I think my body is still recovering with the help of some bloodwork and supplements and a doctor who listens, but my mind is taking more time. My attention is taking longer to return.
There is a difference between a frenzied mind and a mind restfully employed, and in between those two spaces is probably something like a mind on a treadmill, continually going nowhere but afraid to stop. The treadmill seems better because it contains the frenzy, focuses the action. The mind shifts down to auto-pilot. Some important things get done. We look busy, and busy is a fruit of the spirit of the age.
But the key to being on a treadmill is to not pay attention to the world around you. Noticing things will remind you how miserable the treadmill is. You have to look at what’s right in front of you, and that is all.
I don’t live at a frenetic pace and my mind has rarely been frenzied, but the treadmill is a comfortable metaphor for the place I hang out when I am overwhelmed or can’t think of what to do next. The downtime at the beginning of a new year is usually time for me to refocus, and I know I’m off the treadmill when my attention starts to magnetize.
In Slow Theology, A.J. Swoboda and Nijay K. Gupta write about the “disciplines that teach us to receive the presence of God”. Discipline sounds like a bad word but its root is disciple, which means a student, and I love being a student. The authors contend that the discipline we need in order to receive the presence of God (or, I would say, to notice and pay attention to the presence) may not be found in gritting our teeth to read the Bible more. Rather, it’s in becoming the type of person who cultivates a “lifestyle and a rhythm” that doesn’t prevent us from hearing God when we do read the Bible.
On a treadmill, it’s pretty easy to cultivate a lifestyle and rhythm that prevents me from hearing God. It’s pretty easy to have my phone in my hand. It’s easy to numb-out. It’s easy to be formed by the times, as Elizabeth Oldfield writes about.
All that keeps me from hearing God because it employs my mind in a way that feels pseudo-satisfying, just like being on an actual treadmill will check the exercise box but absolutely not fill the need for fresh air and sunshine and birdsong. Just like telling someone in a crisis “let me know if you need anything” feels like being a good friend but doesn’t actually require much of me and therefore, isn’t real friendship.2
“Silence, solitude, introspection, grappling with questions, embracing discomfort, observing Sabbath rest, and learning to wait patiently aren’t the things we add to reading the Bible. They are the practices we do so that we can hear God in the Bible. These are the disciplines that teach us to receive the presence of God.”
Silence, solitude, and introspection are easy for me, or at least they are desirable, as my natural tendencies. But rarely do my own inclinations actually produce godliness in me and if I lean into all the contemplative practices I so easily gravitate towards, without grappling with questions, embracing discomfort, and learning to wait patiently (ugh it’s the worst), my attention will be numbed and I may just be formed to the apathy or rage of the times. Reading the Bible becomes a box I check.
As Oldfield writes,
I want a more hopeful apocalypse than the one Yeats gives in his poem The Second Coming, but there is truth in the lines:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Paying attention is exhausting and I don’t want to fall prey to the passionate intensity that is spouted by the worst of us. I need the reminder from Oldfield that I can choose who I pay attention to, and that will shape who I become.
And in the face of Yeats’ doom that the “centre cannot hold”, I grapple with discomfort and questions, pay attention to my attention, and receive the presence of God in the very center of me.
I am taking notes. The center does hold, and it is magnetic.
Ouch
"There is a difference between a frenzied mind and a mind restfully employed, and in between those two spaces is probably something like a mind on a treadmill, continually going nowhere but afraid to stop.
The treadmill seems better because it contains the frenzy, focuses the action. The mind shifts down to auto-pilot. Some important things get done. We look busy, and busy is a fruit of the spirit of the age."
And this is why I read Tresta.
Thank you for taking notes my friend. And thank you for sharing them with us.
Wow, Tresta, I felt so much...peace reading this. Rather than shame or finger-pointing, you painted a beautiful picture for us that makes us say, I want that. I too have certain busier seasons, but I too am always able to find time to do the creative things I love. (And in fact, I am not well if I cannot!)
I also wanted to say that your opening paragraph is summed up in a Charlotte Mason phrase: "the science of relations." As our kids narrate their readings, we begin to expect them to consider what else it reminds them of with the hopes of them seeing that all of life is interconnected if only you have eyes to see.