on accompaniment, attentiveness, and contribution
Last year, I saw a US Catholic Bishop interacting with his smart phone in a remarkable way.
Before he would unlock it, he would discretely cross himself and momentarily pray.
I did not ask him about this practice (I wish that I had!) but I wonder what his intention or petition was as he prayed.
What might a “prayer as one picks up their phone” sound like?
It’s not a bad idea given the amount of time our devices dominate our attention.
Our sons’ teacher gives her class the following conceptual hook to think about how they speak to their classmates. She asks them, before they address another, to pass the words they are considering through the following “three gates.”
Is it true?
Is it necessary?
Is it kind?
(And kind is not always “nice”… these young people are surprisingly attuned to the need for collegial correction.)
If the words cannot pass through the gates, those words can be revised or omitted.
The gates can encourage communication too. If we have something true, necessary, and kind to say to a person or group, we probably should not keep it to ourselves.
“… then it is a lie.”
Living out of this mentality makes us fragile and reactionary.
The ability to consider the truth of another’s experience, even momentarily and provisionally, is fundamental to an empathic life in community.
This is not a permissive acceptance of everything thought or felt. (So not: “Everything is true everywhere!”) It is an empathic habit that leads to our ability to see the complexity of our world so that we can prudently love within it.
Today, a wonderful line from one of Mark Twain’s personal letters:
“There isn’t time — so brief is life — for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving — and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”
It is possible to live “out of time.” That is, to cling to a moment, season, or epoch and “how things were then” and “how we thought or spoke back then.”
We need not even have experienced this period of time, but have only learned about it. Put another way, it is possible to experience a longing or nostalgia for a moment, season, or epoch that we did not ourselves experience. (This happens in the church today in multiple tribes across whatever spectrum you’d care to map.)
And it is a deeply understandable instinct! When we feel threatened or out of control, we grab on to the things that we know. But, it is not a faithful way forward. Living “out of time” is an attempt to domesticate time, to control the unfolding dynamism of God’s love in the world.
The alternative, then, is to live “in time”… to dedicate sufficient attention to understand that we are on the Potter’s wheel, continually being fashioned and refashioned for a deeper love, for a deepening of God’s life in us.
What shall this day and our current time make of us?
As I consider:
A loved one, as they grow
A well-loved Scripture passage
That one tree
The wonder of our bodies
Our attention is necessarily filtered, often to the detriment of our lives.
So: What is here that I have never noticed before?
(And do I allow myself to slow down enough to hear the answer?)
At school, our six-year-old has a reading buddy. Last week, I got to see them in action. Aside from being outrageously cute, this relationship serves multiple purposes. Primarily, our son’s reading buddy offers near instant feedback on decoding and comprehension.
For an adult, a worthy way to assess the value of our past education is to consider at the books we are reading 10, 20, and 30+ years after leaving school. Saddling up a classic, complex text, though, can be daunting since few of us have access to the background or support to scaffold understanding of the great books.
I’ve struggled with this reality recently, and so have enlisted a reading buddy: a paid-for model of an AI service. (I use ChatGPT Plus, but other models are fantastic, if not better for the purpose I describe.) For the same price as an Audible membership, I now can get shockingly thorough answers to basic comprehension and thematic questions to any book I open.
Here are some examples:
While reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I recently asked: “What was Twain’s purpose in writing Huck Finn?”
Response (distilled for brevity): Well, a few things. First, he challenged what literature *sounded* like, using at least seven (by his count) colloquial adaptations of English. The book is also a satire. It does not have an express social mission, but does mean to hold up a mirror to his post-Civil War society and thereby subvert racial stereotypes. Many regard that he both did and did not succeed. Toni Morrison’s 1996 essay “This Amazing, Troubling Book” is a fine exploration of this. Would you like me to summarize it for you and provide a link to the full text?
Wow.
Here is another.
While reading The Sound and the Fury, I asked clarity on some basic plot points: “I just finished and am still confused about a few points. Where did X get all that money? Who is Y’s father, actually?”
Response (again, distilled for brevity): You are not alone in this confusion! Faulkner’s narration in this book is famously complex, and part of his purpose. He wants you to work for the understanding… and see the decline of the family as if through a shattered lens of the four narrative styles. Now, here is what we are meant to know and what Faulkner leaves intentionally ambiguous…
Again, WOW.
Now, nothing will ever replace the joy of unpacking a text with other human beings in real time. This is one of life’s finest pleasures. AI will never replace this. Never never ever.
AI, though, offers a shockingly high-quality way to further our education. There is no way that I would feel as comfortable as I do to saddle up complex books as I do with the resource. I appreciate this support as I grow (and age) so that I might show up more robustly to in-person reading buddies.
Like a totally normal person (😉), I’ve been thinking lately about one of the essay questions on an English exam my senior year of high school.
The internet helped me find the exact wording. Here it is:
Discuss the notion of morally ambiguous characters—those whose behavior doesn’t allow readers to categorize them as purely good or evil. Choose a novel or play where such a character plays a central role, and explain how that character’s ambiguity is significant to the work.
For teaching the virtue of compassion, morally ambiguous characters in world class fiction is a fine tool.
The point is not to become morally ambiguous ourselves, but to see the ways in which we already are. When we acknowledge our own capacity for deception, destruction, and the like, we can move more wholeheartedly toward a virtuous life and accompany others on the same journey.
(The six short stories that start A Table for Two have a fine cast of characters for this purpose.)
Near the end of one of Wendell Berry’s finest poems comes the advice to
“…Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, / some in the wrong direction.”
The status quo may expect us to seek to maximize our waking hours for pleasure and profit, to always think and speak like our tribe.
Life is richer (and more fun), though, when we are led by the Spirit to walk a perhaps unpredictable path, making tracks in the “wrong direction”.
Near our home is a building boasting a large-lettered sign with the name MarginEdge on top.
I assume this is an office of some sort and I have no experience with with them other than seeing their sign, but what a curious idea that sign calls to mind.
The demands of life (both real and imagined) can lead us to the edge of the margin of our strength and our time. This is not where the spiritual life thrives.
Our story is better written when we are not pushed to the very edge of the paper.
Paul's Blog