on accompaniment, attentiveness, and contribution
All the World, by Liz Garton Scanlon
Cat Goes Fiddle-i-Fee, by Paul Galdone
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems
Hooray for Hat, by Brian Won
I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More, by Karen Beaumont
Penguin Problems, by Jory John
Silly Sally, by Audrey Wood
They All Saw a Cat, by Brendan Wenzel
What a Wonderful World, illustrated by Tim Hopgood
The one that starts: “Advice that we offer to others tends to be autobiographical.”
I find it to be remarkably true.
I have a friend who actively seeks out media that communicates a worldview that he does not encounter very often or necessarily share. This is a unique and, I think, indispensable virtue for our times.
If we were in an ethics class, what would we call this virtue? Generosity of mind, perhaps? Self-interrogation? Active open-mindedness?
He is a principled person, certainly, and not swayed by every argument. Indeed, the utility of his virtue would be much diminished if he believed everything, or worse, nothing that he heard.
This generosity of mind makes him into a person capable of expansive relationships. This expansiveness represents a tremendous asset to our culture and helps him build a more just world.
Mary Ann Evans (under the pen name of George Eliot) wrote the following about the subtle conformism woven into the psyche of the town in Middlemarch.
The town’s citizens, largely, assumed that, “[s]ane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.” (a few pages into Book 1, Chapter 1)
The characters for whom this (brutal) sentence is true, are eminently manipulable by unstated expectations. They run from anything but “the accepted way” and they don’t really recognize how they circumscribe their lives in the process. If we live, consciously or not, by the same maxim, then the same is true of us.
But if we courageously develop the capacity to think,
and then to think about our thinking,
and then to think about how we think about our thinking,
then we are on the way to deep cognitive empathy and the ability to develop meaningful relationships with those with whom we might have otherwise considered silly, or worse, enemies.
This takes courage, the fortitude to be strange and free.
If I swipe right on my iPhone, I can see the “Screen Time” widget, an itemized graph that shows me exactly how I spend time on my phone.
If we could access a similar report for our minds, what would it show? Chunks of time in the flow of generous creation? Obsessive analysis? Active listening? Beholding nature? Beholding a child? Learning something new? Prayer? What else?
Attending to how our mind attends to the world is occasionally frightening but certainly an enlightening and worthy endeavor.
I spend a good deal of time reading children’s books, thinking about culture, and interacting with my smartphone.
Yesterday, our older son and I visited the library and found a simple little book that made me think a bit differently about all three.
I recently heard the following story of a tiger who spent years in a zoo. Its habitat was tiny, about the size of a modest living room. Eventually, the staff at the zoo found a comparatively enormous space for the tiger to live, some three or four acres.
When the tiger was relocated, it feared this new space, and retreated to a corner of its new home. It paced around this patch of its new world, wearing out the grass in exactly the same square footage as its previous habitat. It had internalized the bounds of its captivity.
Our minds can learn a similar captivity as we rehearse and grasp onto limiting narratives. New relationships go unexplored. New worlds remain undiscovered. We are capable of binding the potential expansiveness of our lives.
I occasionally like to challenge myself with the following questions, regarding my relationship with the church.
In the past year, how much commentary have you offered? That is, your opinion about what someone else was doing or creating?
In the past year, how much creation have you offered? That is, you showing up and offering generous leadership, an educational experience, a moment of beauty, a sacred space. Something that helps us thrive.
I am certain that we need more generous creation. I am not sure that we need more commentary.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I walked into a concert venue that had been converted into a COVID vaccine clinic. The volume of vaccines that this place could and has administered is enormous. All of this work was done one shot at a time.
In a world where so much happens so fast, we do well to remember that a great deal of the important things happen slowly, even tediously. Administering vaccines. Teaching a young person to read. Learning to articulate oneself in spiritual direction. Offering time in prayer.
Since this is the case, the way to make a difference, then, is to show up each day and attend to each interaction. One by one.
When my wife and I worked in Egypt, we lived on this street. After living there for almost a year, I learned that the translation of the street name is “the kindness of God.”
I have considered this name quite a bit since, and how it was not named “the niceness of God.”
I often try to live in “the niceness of God.” That approach has the disadvantage of being illusory. Far better, then, to tune to “the kindness of God.”
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