Category Archives: Attentiveness

Learned Captivity

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.

One by One

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.

The Kindness of God

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.”

The Church as a Network of Spiritual Directors

We use the word “church” to mean a lot of things. The people of God. The structure where we meet to pray. The hierarchy that leads. The tradition handed down.

What if, when we said church, our default definition was “a network of spiritual directors”… a tribe bound together by the tender cultivation of another’s (as well as their own) journey to know themselves as loved sacramentally?

If this was the default definition, how would this shift our priorities? How would this shift our inner lives?

Who Gets the First Bite?

Say that each day is a beautifully baked loaf of bread. Twenty-four hours, fresh every day.

What gets the first bite?

Prayer? The cultivation of solitude? The creation of something generous? Attention to our dearest relationships? Nature? Physical health?

The demands of work? Internet platforms that sell your attention to advertisers? Obsessive worry?

We rarely have the ability to control our days. We often have the ability to choose what gets the first bite of our time.

The Truth Will Make You Strange

Flannery O’Connor once said, riffing on John 8:32, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you strange.”

I love this quote.

If what we say in the creed is true, we are going to have a wild journey… an adventure to know God as love and to act out of that knowledge. It will certainly, and thank goodness, be unpredictable, leading us little by little to a profound interior freedom.

If we are not comfortable being strange, neither should we expect to be free.

Student-Teacher Ratios

The first class I ever taught, in rural Uganda, had about sixty students.  My most recent class, some years ago in Chicago, had fourteen.  

Even in the class of fourteen, it was a challenge to shepherd each of their individual journeys toward growth.  

Now think about the challenge of teaching as a Catholic parish.  Maybe there are 3 full-time equivalent positions dedicated to formation and education.  And, say, that there are 1,000 parishioners.  That is a tough ratio for the educators.  How could the staff possibly know what you, individually, need?

To my mind, in this situation the best way for a parishioner to ensure their solid formation is to first develop the capacity to know what they need and then to seek it out.  

What can we do to make this easier?  That is how can we build structures that invite engagement as a kitchen and not a restaurant?  

PS – This is a different point, but here are some brilliant folks working on a development that would be a sea change for how we teach with integrity. Check them out!

The World Does Not Organize Itself

In February, Secretary Blinken made a “Zoom visit” to all serving in the US Foreign Service in Mexico. In the general session, his parting message was to recall that “the world does not organize itself.” The upshot is that if we do not, with wisdom and intention, attend to the justice of international relationships, entropy and/or bad actors will cause chaos in our world.

This is certainly true in the context that he means, and in other places of work, business, and ministry. And, now more than ever, it is true of our interior worlds.

If we do not, with wisdom and intention, attend to our relationships with the stuff of our lives and order it according to what is most important, a crush of inputs will fracture our attention and ability. Overcommitment will overwhelm us. The endless scroll of social media and outraged news leaves with our attention spent and no energy to reorient it.

Our interior world will not organize itself. And, if we do not order them, we cannot effectively serve the justice of our city, nation, and world.

St. Augustine’s Self-Criticism

It took me a long time to appreciate St. Augustine of Hippo, whose Confessions were assigned to us a few times through college and graduate school.

Here was a man who was clearly holy, writing with singular insight about the journey to know God, and, in the same volume, wrote a fantastic amount about how imperfect he was. This appeared to me, at first blush, to be indulgently self-critical.

But some years ago, I heard someone remark that an inescapable part of the journey to holiness is knowing that precious little separates us from truly destructive behavior and self-dilution. And the ability to see this reality clearly liberates us to approach others with deep compassion. We are not, in fact, any better than that person we may feel superior to.

I think that this is what Augustine knew, and why he wrote so much about his imperfection. He knew the particularity of his interior life, his capacity to be self-destructive, and, ultimately, the experience of amazing grace. I believe that it is this completeness of vision that undergirds his holiness and his life of erudite service.