Читать книгу An Altar in the World - Barbara Brown Taylor - Страница 11

2. The Practice of Paying Attention

REVERENCE

And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.

—Julian of Norwich

When I was seven, my family lived in Dublin, Ohio, for a year. My father was a staff psychologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital there. My mother was in charge of three small children. I shared a bedroom with my sister Katy, while my baby sister, Jennifer, slept in a crib in her own room. As hard as I have tried to remember the floor plan of that house, I cannot do it. All I can remember is the small wooden deck that opened off my parents’ second-story bedroom, where I lay flat on my back the first time I saw a shower of falling stars.

I did not know then that they were called the Tears of Saint Lawrence, or that they returned every August. All I knew was that my father could be trusted when he told me there was something I needed to see. Some nights that meant looking through a large book of photographs from Life magazine that had arrived in that day’s mail. Other nights it meant climbing in the car with him to go find the fire that was causing an orange glow in the sky. My father was such an accomplished chaser of fire engines that he could tell a brush fire from a house fire by the kind of smoke it sent up into the sky.

On the night I am remembering, he told me to pull the pale blue blanket off my bed and bring it to the deck. The air was sweet and cool. The sky bristled with stars. After my father had folded the blanket in half, he lay down on it with his hands folded behind his head. Katy and I lay down beside him, one under each elbow, where we could smell the Chapstick, tobacco, strong coffee smell of our father. If he explained what we were looking for, I do not remember that either. All I remember is lying there beside him looking into a sky I had never really looked into before, or at least never for so long.

When I breathed in, I seemed huge to myself. I felt as much a part of the sky as a feather on a bird’s belly. When I breathed out, I became so small that I feared I might vanish. What was a seven-year-old girl, under that great weight of stars? When the first one fell, we all gasped and clutched at one another. Did you see that? I did! Where did it go? To the far side of the moon.

More and more stars fell as the night deepened. Some of them made clean arcs across the sky, while others disappeared before they had gone halfway. Watching them, I gained the understanding that the planet I was lying on looked like a star from somewhere else in the universe. It too might fall at any moment, taking me along with it. This understanding made my stomach flip even as it increased my investment in what was going on above my head. When my father woke me later, I could not believe I had fallen asleep. How do you fall asleep, with whole worlds plummeting before your eyes?

I learned reverence from my father. For him, it had nothing to do with religion and very little to do with God. I think it may have had something to do with his having been a soldier, since the exercise of reverence generally includes knowing your rank in the overall scheme of things. From him I learned by example that reverence was the proper attitude of a small and curious human being in a vast and fascinating world of experience. This world included people and places as well as things. Full appreciation of it required frequent adventures, grand projects, honed skills, and feats of daring. Above all, it required close attention to the way things worked, including one’s own participation in their working or not working.

When I used one of my father’s tools, he expected me to clean it with a wire brush and rub it down with a light coat of oil before putting it back where I had found it. My father’s tools lasted forever. If I cut myself with one of them, he washed the wound with hydrogen peroxide and dabbed it with first-aid cream before covering it with a Band-Aid that was exactly the right size. My father’s bandages were works of art.

In the days before guns carried the cultural weight they do now, he taught me how to clean a rifle properly. The gun was my own, a bolt-action Remington .22 with a wooden stock given to me by my Grandma Lucy, which I used to practice becoming the next Annie Oakley. All I ever shot were tin cans at the dump under close supervision, but in my father’s house there was no using a gun without also knowing how to care for it.

The gun-cleaning ritual took place in his basement workshop, where there was room to line up everything we would need to do the job: a long metal rod one size smaller than the gun barrel, round patches of flannel, the can of solvent, a small brush that looked like a caterpillar, graphite, steel wool, fragrant oil, and several old cotton rags. These things were used in exactly this order.

First my father showed me how to check the shell chamber to make sure it was empty, how to set the safety, how to hold the gun so the muzzle always pointed away from us. Then, with the fingers of a surgeon, he attached one solvent-soaked patch to the end of the rod, sending it through the gun barrel with a sound that made my teeth hurt. He used the brush next, to loosen the gunk in the barrel. Then he let me run more cloth patches through until they came out clean. He used graphite last—to lubricate the barrel, he explained. Then he handed me the steel wool to scour the outside of the barrel. When I had finished, he ran an oil-soaked rag over the gun from breech to muzzle. Never touch any metal on the gun without cleaning your fingerprints off with a rag, my father said. Then he let me put the gleaming gun back in its case, ready for our next trip to the dump.

This ritual, among many others, introduced me to the practices that nourish reverence in a human life: paying attention, taking care, respecting things that can kill you, making the passage from fear to awe. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once said he could not define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. Reverence is a little like that. It is difficult to define, but you know it when you feel it.

According to the classical philosopher Paul Woodruff, reverence is the virtue that keeps people from trying to act like gods. “To forget that you are only human,” he says, “to think you can act like a god—this is the opposite of reverence.”1 While most of us live in a culture that reveres money, reveres power, reveres education and religion, Woodruff argues that true reverence cannot be for anything that human beings can make or manage by ourselves.

By definition, he says, reverence is the recognition of something greater than the self—something that is beyond human creation or control, that transcends full human understanding. God certainly meets those criteria, but so do birth, death, sex, nature, truth, justice, and wisdom. A Native American elder I know says that he begins teaching people reverence by steering them over to the nearest tree.

“Do you know that you didn’t make this tree?” he asks them. If they say yes, then he knows that they are on their way.

Reverence stands in awe of something—something that dwarfs the self, that allows human beings to sense the full extent of our limits—so that we can begin to see one another more reverently as well. An irreverent soul who is unable to feel awe in the presence of things higher than the self is also unable to feel respect in the presence of things it sees as lower than the self, Woodruff says. This raises real questions about leaders, especially religious leaders, who cite reverence for what is good as their warrant for proclaiming whole populations of people evil.

Woodruff posts a number of cautions for those ready to draw a straight line between reverence and religion. While a church service may seem like the most natural place in the world to teach people how to be reverent, Woodruff says, a formal worship service can be a confusing place to look for reverence. “To begin with,” he says, “worship is not always reverent; even the best forms of worship may be practiced without feeling (and therefore without reverence), and some forms of worship seem downright vicious.”2

Some of the most reverent people I know decline to call themselves religious. For them, religion connotes belief. It means being able to say what you believe about God and why. It also means being able to hold your own in a debate with someone who believes otherwise. They, meanwhile, are not sure what they believe. They do not want to debate anyone. The longer they stand before the holy of holies, the less adequate their formulations of faith seem to them. Angels reach down and shut their mouths.

Reverence may take all kinds of forms, depending on what it is that awakens awe in you by reminding you of your true size. As I learned on that night of falling stars in Ohio, nature is a good place to start. Nature is full of things bigger and more powerful than human beings, including but not limited to night skies, oceans, thunderstorms, deserts, grizzly bears, earthquakes, and rain-swollen rivers. But size is not everything. Properly attended to, even a saltmarsh mosquito is capable of evoking reverence. See those white and black striped stockings on legs thinner than a needle? Where in those legs is there room for knees? And yet see how they bend, as the bug lowers herself to your flesh. Soon you and she will be blood kin. Your itch is the price of her life. Swat her if you must, but not without telling her she is beautiful first.

The easiest practice of reverence I know is simply to sit down somewhere outside, preferably near a body of water, and pay attention for at least twenty minutes. It is not necessary to take on the whole world at first. Just take the three square feet of earth on which you are sitting, paying close attention to everything that lives within that small estate. You might even decide not to kill anything for twenty minutes, including the saltmarsh mosquito that lands on your arm. Just blow her away and ask her please to go find someone else to eat.

With any luck, you will soon begin to see the souls in pebbles, ants, small mounds of moss, and the acorn on its way to becoming an oak tree. You may feel some tenderness for the struggling mayfly the ants are carrying away. If you can see the water, you may take time to wonder where it comes from and where it is going. You may even feel the beating of your own heart, that miracle of ingenuity that does its work with no thought or instruction from you. You did not make your heart, any more than you made a tree. You are a guest here. You have been given a free pass to this modest domain and everything in it.

If someone walks by or speaks to you, you may find that your power of attentiveness extends to this person as well. Even if you do not know him, you may be able to see his soul too, the one he thinks he has so carefully covered up. There is something he is working on in his life, the same way you are working on something. Can you see it in his face? You are related, even if you do not know each other’s names.

If you cannot go outside, then find a pencil and a piece of paper and spend twenty minutes drawing your hand. Be sure you get the freckles right, the number of wrinkles around each knuckle. If you are old, marvel at what has happened to your skin. If you are young, find your lifeline. Pay attention to the scars, if you have them. On my left hand alone, I can see the gray shadow left by the pencil lead that broke off in my palm when I was nine. There is also a pale ellipse at the top of my index finger from a sewing accident in 1974. I was watching television at the time, when my program was interrupted for a special announcement from the White House. When Richard Nixon resigned, I was so stupefied that I cut off the end of my finger with my sewing scissors.

No one has time for this, of course. No one has time to lie on the deck watching stars, or to wonder how one’s hand came to be, or to see the soul of a stranger walking by. Small wonder we are short on reverence. The artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who became famous for her sensuous paintings of flowers, explained her success by saying, “In a way, nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small, we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”3

The practice of paying attention really does take time. Most of us move so quickly that our surroundings become no more than the blurred scenery we fly past on our way to somewhere else. We pay attention to the speedometer, the wristwatch, the cell phone, the list of things to do, all of which feed our illusion that life is manageable. Meanwhile, none of them meets the first criterion for reverence, which is to remind us that we are not gods. If anything, these devices sustain the illusion that we might yet be gods—if only we could find some way to do more faster.

Reverence requires a certain pace. It requires a willingness to take detours, even side trips, which are not part of the original plan. Early in the Bible there is a story about Moses, who would turn out to be God’s great partner in the liberation of the people Israel from bondage in Egypt. He was not that, yet. He was still a fugitive from justice, hiding out in the Arabian Desert to beat a murder rap back in Egypt.

Moses’s life changed one day while he was tending his father-in-law’s sheep. According to the storyteller, he had led the flock beyond the wilderness to Horeb, the mountain of God, when an angel of God appeared to him in a burning bush. The bush was not right in front of Moses, however. It must have been over to the side somewhere, because when Moses saw it, he said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”4

The bush required Moses to take a time-out, at least if he wanted to do more than glance at it. He could have done that. He could have seen the flash of red out of the corner of his eye, said, “Oh, how pretty,” and kept right on driving the sheep. He did not know that it was an angel in the bush, after all. Only the storyteller knew that. Moses could have decided that he would come back tomorrow to see if the bush was still burning, when he had a little more time, only then he would not have been Moses. He would just have been a guy who got away with murder, without ever discovering what else his life might have been about.

What made him Moses was his willingness to turn aside. Wherever else he was supposed to be going and whatever else he was supposed to be doing, he decided it could wait a minute. He parked the sheep and left the narrow path in order to take a closer look at a marvelous sight. When he did, the storyteller says, God noticed. God dismissed the angel and took over the bush. “When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ ”

“Here I am,” Moses said, and the rest is history. Before God asked Moses to do anything else, however, God asked Moses to take off his shoes. “Come no closer!” God warned him, not because the ground was hot but because it was holy. “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”5

I have never been presented with a burning bush, but I did see a garden turn golden once. I must have been sixteen, earning summer spending money by keeping a neighbor’s cats while she was away. The first time I let myself into the house, the fleas leapt on my legs like airborne piranha. Brushing them off as I opened cat food and cleaned litter pans, I finally fled through the back door with the bag of trash my employer had left for me to carry to the cans out back. I could hear the fleas inside flinging themselves against the plastic, so that it sounded as if a light rain were falling inside the bag.

I could not wait to be shed of it, which was why I was in a hurry. On my way to the cans, I passed a small garden area off to the left that was not visible from the house. Glancing at it, I got the whole dose of loveliness at once—the high arch of trees above, the mossy flagstones beneath, the cement birdbath, the cushiony bushes, the white wrought-iron chair—all lit by stacked planes of sunlight that turned the whole scene golden. It was like a door to another world. I had to go through it. I knew that if I did, then I would become golden too.

But first I had to ditch the bag. The fleas popped against the plastic as I hurried to the big aluminum garbage cans near the garage. Stuffing the bag into one of them, I turned back toward the garden, fervent to explore what I had only glimpsed in passing. When I got there, the light had changed. All that was left was a little overgrown sitting spot that no one had sat in for years. The smell of cat litter drifted from the direction of the garbage cans. The garden was no longer on fire.

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,” says Shug Avery, one of the wise women in Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple. I noticed the color gold, but I did not turn aside. I had a bag full of fleas to attend to. While I made that my first priority, the fire moved on in search of someone who would stop what she was doing, take off her shoes, and say, “Here am I.”

Reverence for creation comes fairly easily for most people. Reverence for other people presents more of a challenge, especially if those people’s lives happen to impinge upon your own. I live at the end of a dirt road in the country for a reason. I can see my nearest neighbor’s house in the wintertime when all the trees are bare, but for the rest of the year we go about our business with no visual confirmation of each other’s presence. We like each other very much. We also like our distance from each other. I cannot speak for him, but I know that I have an easier time loving humankind than I do loving particular human beings.

Particular human beings hug my bumper in rush-hour traffic and shoot birds at me when I tap my brakes. Particular human beings drop my carefully selected portabella mushrooms into the bottom of my grocery bag and toss cans of beans on top of them. They talk on their cell phones while I am having a nice quiet lunch at Blimpie’s; they talk on their cell phones while I am waiting to pay them for my gas; they talk on their cell phones while I am trying to step past them on the sidewalk. Particular human beings rarely do things the way I think they should do them, and when they prevent me from doing what I think I should be doing, then I can run short on reverence for them.

One remedy for my condition is to pay attention to them when I can, even when they are in my way. Just for a moment, I look for the human being instead of the obstacle. That boy who is crushing my portabellas does not know the first thing about mushrooms. He is, what, sixteen years old? With such a bad case of acne that it has to hurt when he lays his face on his pillow at night. His fingernails are bitten to the quick. He is working so hard to impress the pretty young cashier that it is no wonder he does not see me. But I see him, and for just a moment he is more than the bag boy. He is a kid with his own demons, his own bad skin and budding lusts. I do not want too much information about any of this, but I can at least let him be more than a bit player in my drama. I pay attention to him, and the fist in my chest lets go.

“Heavy stuff on the bottom,” I say, so that the kid looks at me. “Take it easy on my mushrooms, okay?” He cocks his head, grins.

“These things are mushrooms?” he says, hauling them out of the bottom of the bag. “I wouldn’t eat one of those on a bet.”

I have a variation of this practice that I do on the subway, at least if I have a pair of sunglasses with me. From behind the veils of my dark lenses, I study the particular human beings sitting around me: the girl with the fussy baby, the guy with the house paint all over his jeans, the couple holding hands, the teenager keeping time with both knees while he listens to music so loud it leaks from his headphones. Every one of these people has come from somewhere and is going somewhere, the same way I am. While I am sitting here thinking I am at the center of this subway scene and they are on the edges, they are sitting there at the center of their own scenes with me on their edges. Every one of them is dealing with something, the same way I am. We are breathing the same air, for this little time at least. Sometimes I say the Lord’s Prayer under my breath while I look from one of them to the next, but this is optional. Paying attention to them has already shifted my equilibrium. For all I know, one of them is practicing reverence on me.

It is not necessary to invent new practices, of course. Praying for thine enemies is as old as the Sermon on the Mount. So is the laying on of hands, the anointing of the sick, and the bathing of the dead. If you have ever done any of these things, then you know that it is just about impossible to do them without suffering a sudden onset of reverence. They accomplish this, I think, by giving you something so important to do that you are entirely captured by the present moment for once. For once, you are not looking through things, or around them, toward the next thing, which will become see-through in its turn. For once, you are giving yourself entirely to what is right in front of you, and what is right in front of you is returning the favor so that reverence is all but unavoidable.

Simone Weil was a French Jew who died of hunger during World War II. She did not have to die of hunger. Her family was wealthy, she was extremely well educated, and she never fell into the clutches of the Nazis. She remained so affected by what was happening to other, less-protected, people under the Third Reich that she decided to live as they lived. She worked in factories when she could have been teaching in schools. She lived on tinned rations when she could have been eating fresh eggs cooked in butter.

“The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations,” she writes in Waiting for God. Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it. A child may love looking at a shiny red apple so much that she hates the idea of biting into it, but her appetite will win out. What good is looking at a lovely thing when you can take it inside of you? The same instinct drives compulsive shoppers, promiscuous lovers, and petty thieves. “It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at,” Weil guesses, before quoting one of her favorite passages from the Upanishads. Two winged companions, two birds, are on the branch of a tree. One eats the fruit; the other looks at it. “These two birds,” Weil says, “are the two parts of our soul.”6

Weil’s second bird guided her relationship with the church. Although she grew up a secular Jew, she was drawn so strongly to the sacramental life of the church that her desire for baptism became almost overwhelming to her. Yet she declined to be baptized, saying that she could not seek her own soul’s safety in any church that denied salvation to those who did not belong to it. This meant that she spent the rest of her short life regarding the bread and wine of Holy Communion without ever eating them. Regarding them was enough for her, even as they strengthened her resolve to stay hungry with those who were hungry, to remain outside the safety of the church with those who were outside. Weil died in an English sanatorium on August 29, 1943, at the age of thirty-four.

Regarded properly, anything can become a sacrament, by which I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual connection. Take food, for example. Before I moved to the country, I bought my chicken, eggs, and potatoes at the grocery store, along with my bread, celery, and milk. I like white meat, so boneless breasts frequently showed up in my shopping basket, along with the occasional rotisserie chicken. When I moved to rural north Georgia, I inadvertently moved to one of the largest chicken-producing areas in the country. At night, I drove by huge chicken barns lit up inside so that I could see the hundreds of white chickens crowded inside. By day, I ended up behind loud trucks stacked with wire cages full of those same chickens on their way to be slaughtered.

I think the idea is to put them in a state of shock so that they do not struggle so much when they arrive at the abattoir. The chickens are unprotected on the trucks. In bitter cold, they huddle inside the cages while the wind whips their white feathers into a cloud behind the truck. The first time I drove five miles with those feathers glancing off my windshield, the feathers became sacraments for me. I got the connection between them and boneless chicken breasts in a way I had never gotten it before. I saw what dies so that I may live, and while I did not stop eating chicken meat, I began cooking it and eating it with unprecedented reverence.

Other sacraments take more work. But if you are paying attention, even a mail-order catalog can become a sacrament. First, there are the people who produced the catalog—the designers, the photographers, the models, and the copyeditors—along with the people who produced the goods inside. Some of those people live in Mexico and others in the Philippines. In China, where cashmere goats are bred to produce sweaters for American consumers, traditional grasslands are so overgrazed that thousands of square miles turn to desert each year. If you could lay a laminated map of the world on the floor and put a pin in every place where something in that mail-order catalog came from, you might be amazed at how prickly the map became.

Then there is the paper and the ink. I do not know where the ink in all my catalogs came from, but I know something about the paper. Four miles from my house, there was once a sizable forest of pines. White-tailed deer lived there, along with skunks, raccoons, and a flock of wild turkeys. Then one day the loggers came. It took them a couple of weeks to reduce the forest to stumps, but they did it. When I drove by, I could smell the sap as strongly as if it had leaked on my hands.

Pine is the cheapest, most renewable source of pulpwood for paper. I use paper, and I know it has to come from somewhere. I just hate thinking that a whole forest came down for one run of a mail-order catalog, especially since I saw so many copies of that catalog in the trash at the post office. From there, they will go to the landfill, where wastepaper is the number one problem. The sacrament of the catalog creates more than reverence in me; it creates painful awareness of my part in the felling of the forest. It weaves me into the web of cause and effect, reminding me of my place in the overall scheme of things.

I understand why people snort at thoughts like these. I have laughed the same kind of laugh when people start talking earnestly about things I would rather not talk about. Reverence can be a pain. It is a lot easier to make chicken salad if you have never been stuck behind a chicken truck. It is easier to order a cashmere sweater if you do not know about the Chinese goats. And yet, these doors open onto the divine as surely as showers of falling stars do. To open only the doors with stars on them while leaving shut the doors covered with chicken feathers is to live half a life, with half a heart.

As painful as reverence can sometimes be, it can also heal. I know for a fact that it is possible to survive great grief by hauling a mattress outside on a clear night and lying flat on your back under the belly of the sky. Holding a baby also works, or a stunned hummingbird if you are lucky enough to find one. I knew a woman once who was not sure she wanted to go on living. She was old. She lived alone. She was afraid to go to sleep at night for fear that she would not wake up in the morning, so she lay in her bed waiting for the sun to come up before she dared to shut her eyes.

Then someone who loved her suggested that as long as she was awake, she might as well start listening for the first bird that sang each morning. Before long, the sound of that bird became the bell that woke her heart to life again. She named the bird. She discovered what such birds like to eat and put feeders full of seed in her yard. Other birds came, and she learned their names as well. She began to collect birdhouses, which she hung from the rafters of her porch until she became the mayor of an entire bird village. She still does not sleep well, but she is no longer afraid of her life.

The practice of paying attention is as simple as looking twice at people and things you might just as easily ignore. To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird. Why should anyone do such things? I cannot imagine—unless one is weary of crossing days off the calendar with no sense of what makes the last day different from the next. Unless one is weary of acting in what feels more like a television commercial than a life. The practice of paying attention offers no quick fix for such weariness, with guaranteed results printed on the side. Instead, it is one way into a different way of life, full of treasure for those who are willing to pay attention to exactly where they are.

This chapter began with a passage from Dame Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century English visionary who was thirty years old when she received the first of several revelations of divine love. She thought she was dying. For three days she had been mortally ill. On the fourth night a priest came to give her last rites. As she was looking at the cross he held in front of her face to comfort her as she died, all of her pain suddenly vanished and she felt as well as she had ever been. In short order, she saw two things: the face of Jesus, with blood flowing down his face from his crown of thorns, and something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in her hand.

“What can this be?” she wondered to herself.

“It is everything which is made,” was the answer she received. She held all creation in her hand, as round as a nut. Looking at it, she understood three things: that God made it, that God loves it, and that God preserves it. Fifteen years and fifteen visions later, she was still asking God what it all meant when the answer came to her: “What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end.”7

Julian never said so, but I doubt she ever looked at as much as a peppercorn the same way again. How could she, once God had shown her the whole world in the palm of her hand? Paying attention to it, she learned how God paid attention to her. Holding it, she learned how God held her.

Like all the other practices in this book, paying attention requires no equipment, no special clothes, no greens fees or personal trainers. You do not even have to be in particularly good shape. All you need is a body on this earth, willing to notice where it is, trusting that even something as small as a hazelnut can become an altar in this world.

Notes

1 Paul Woodruff, Reverence : Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4.

2 Woodruff, Reverence, 46.

3 Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Random House, 1990), 270.

4 Exodus 3:3.

5 Exodus 3:5.

6 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, tr. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 166.

7 Julian of Norwich, Showings, tr. Edmund Colledge, O. S. A., and James Walsh, S. J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 342.