The Things of this World

a spot on the beach at Cleggan, Connemara, Ireland

©A. Rutherford

I am always telling my students to pay attention.  Before they get to know me very well, they think I just want them to be quiet and look at me when we are doing the lesson.  They assume their minds and imagination can be anywhere as long as they look like they are attending to me and the work we are doing.

I have to teach them what I mean by paying attention, and at first I might as well be speaking to them in a foreign language.  But eventually they get it, and many have come back later to thank me for the gift true attentiveness has been to their lives.  Attentiveness is one topic I would like to develop in this blog.

To be lost in wonder one way of being attentive.  It is to be rapt in one's attention.  Not in flights of fancy to imaginary places but to really see the everyday stuff of our lives in a deeper, fuller way . . . to be in relationship with our life.

Richard Wilbur, one of my favorite poets, explains this need to be attentive in his poem "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World," as he describes someone waking to the sounds of the everyday work world outside his window.  So easy it would be to get out of bed and walk out into that world without taking time to breath one's soul back into oneself.  Without taking time to bring your spirit and your body together through prayer and meditation, one would be likely not to  pay attention to the things or people or experiences one encounters in that day, at least the kind of attention that allows us to see the beauty and joy that are available to us through our sense of wonder.

And besides we might pass by a "thin place" totally unaware . . . *smile*

Moreover, learning to pay attention to the gifts of God in the world around us aids us in our growth toward being better able to pay attention to our relationship with Him.  Gratitude and true appreciation for His gifts point us toward the Giver.

When we fail in wonder, we fail in gratitude.  The response to wonder is calling attention to the world in order to praise it.   -Esther de Vaal

As another poet explains . . .


In rare moments

when I am at home to myself,

my heart is still,

my pulse a psalm.

I know obscurely

I receive my life

from a power beyond me,

live by a life not my own.

This morsel of life,

its ephemeral beauty, 

its searing sorrow,

is on loan, 

marginal to a greater agency

that always, all ways

engages the darkness,

brings life from death.

My own gratuitousness

itself is a gift,

liberating me

to live in this moment.

to be at peace in a world

that, like me, is passing away,

to love it fiercely,

to let it go.

-Bonnie Thurston

The popular culture cries to us that God is dead or that He is no longer relevant.  But Dag Hammarskjold, who was a Christian mystic and the second  Secretary General of the United Nations, in his book Markings, offers this insight:

             God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, 
             but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady 
             radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond 
             all reason.

Poet William Blake asks us to 

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.”


A visual meditation— Click on the photo at the top of this post to enlarge it.  Look around in the picture.  What small bit of delight might you miss or even obliterate if you were not paying attention to where you were going?  


Now click on the photo below.
Below is the "big picture" this small bit above came from . . . Most of us get the "big picture" and often it is wonderful indeed, but still more wonders are right under our feet.  Think about how that might be a metaphor for other natural gifts of delight and wonder you might be missing.


Practice attentiveness . . . first to the gifts, which will lead then to the Giver.

©A.Rutherford

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