Paying Attention
Every day we draw upon limited resources for the things we want in life. We choose what we spend our time on, what we spend our money on, and what we will pay attention to. All three of these give us either greater freedom or impose stricter limits on our lives. What we spend frivolously now we will not have to spend on wiser things, life-giving things, and – for most of us – these three resources are not limitless.
As a culture we do not spend wisely. We spend wildly, I suppose wanting to feel unhindered by the very real limits of our resources, unaware that we’re spending ourselves further and further from the freedom we most long for. Nothing has made me more aware of this than watching 5000 people on Facebook. Spending money on things they do not need, time on things they don’t want, and their emotional and creative energies on things they aren’t aware they’ve chosen. And still the resounding echo I hear is: I want more.
No. We want better. But we get them confused. We want better photographs, so we buy better cameras. We want more interesting lives so we buy more interesting things. We want to feel significant so we weigh in on significant issues before we listen. We Instagram the best of ourselves in hopes that it is so, and if we can’t convince ourselves, we might at least convince others. We spend more time on Facebook and various social media, as though our days are without end. And then to our surprise our day does end. As does the week, the month, and my-god-where-did-the-time-go? Our best work remains undone. The legacy of our time not much more than a few social media impressions and half-assed and half-hearted creative efforts made in the margins of our lives.
You’ve heard sermons about time and money from me before. This is about attention. We are not hardwired to absorb everything we expose ourselves to. Like time and money, there is only so much attention we can pay before we’re empty. Much as we’d like to believe our brains have an infinite capacity, that our souls can absorb it all, they can not. We barely have the capacity to love and serve our friends and family with the depth they deserve and to act locally on things that matter to us, let alone to absorb the endless stream of news on terror and Trump, and the darkness that seems to ever wait outside our doors.
Art has long been a way of keeping that darkness at bay. A response to the fears. Whatever the medium, on some level, the artist sits at the workbench, the canvas, the darkroom, making candles against the gloom. When art becomes the first victim of those fears, we have lost. Fear is an auto-immune disease, attacking our very defences, the only cure for which is love and hope expressed.
But you need a certain amount of bandwidth for that. You need something left in your storehouse of attention. You need some measure of hope left un-exhausted, something that’s yet untouched by the cynicism and the hate and the downward-spiral of us-vs-them, the language of which fills our eyes and ears from every direction.
It might be time to turn it off. Time to shut out the news channels with their varied agendas. They aren’t showing us anything new. They aren’t giving us hope. They aren’t changing our minds. But they’re sucking us dry. On any given day we can consume (does it some days feel more like being consumed?) or we can create. We can grow more fearful of the darkness or we can resolutely make our candles, an act of hope and creativity that illuminates not only our way but the path of others. I don’t think we can do both with the resources we have.
Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn writes in a song called Lovers In a Dangerous Time, “you’ve got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.” Here are the first few lines of that song, which read just as well as a poem:
Don’t the hours grow shorter as the days go by
We never get to stop and open our eyes
One minute you’re waiting for the sky to fall
The next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all
Lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
These fragile bodies of touch and taste
This fragrant skin, this hair like lace
Spirits open to the thrust of grace
Never a breath you can afford to waste
Lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
About the title of this song, Lovers in a Dangerous Time, Cockburn once commented, “aren’t we all and isn’t it always?” Time to open our eyes a little wider to the beauty of it all, to find the wonder, to be open to the thrust of grace (my God, I love that line). If the artists don’t do it, who will?
