SABBATH LITURGY:
Paying Attention

Loni is the office administrator at the church where I’m a pastor. Recently, she enrolled in a community college poetry class. Her motive was to enhance her already considerable skills as a songwriter, to bone up on a few tricks of diction, a ruse or two with rhyme. She went to the first class weary, wary, cranky. She resented that she’d booked herself one more night out. She had a growing skepticism that the class would be of any practical use.

Before the first night finished, she was hooked.

Two reasons: the teacher, a gifted poet himself, had an infectious love, not just for words and poems, but for life itself. He relished mystery and simplicity, the quirks of the human heart, creation’s whims and flukes and feats. He was childlike with wonder, exclaiming over ordinary things that, for most of us, have become familiar to the point of invisibility.

The second reason Loni was hooked was that the class, at bedrock, was about one thing: going and doing likewise. It was about paying attention. Live with curiosity and wonder and hunger. Notice cracks in the sidewalk, the way the earth’s aliveness subverts our man-made things. Notice beetles, the iridescent glaze on their hard, dark backs, their strange mix of clumsiness and agility. Notice the rubbery mottledness of a dog’s nose, the fiery ribbon of a car’s taillights, the way clouds one day mound thick like boulders, the next scatter thin like feathers, the next drape heavy as wet wool.

Loni rediscovered the world. She came into work the mornings after her class almost shivering with joy, eyes wide enough to swallow the sky. All things were becoming new. Here is “The Brief Fall,” one of her poems that came out of her experience:

An off the cuff nudge shapes a
brief flight through the air.
The thumbtack’s life now rolls in makeshift figure eight circles
as books are set on the seat to the left.
A fingernail sized spike, vital to the life of a bulletin board,
converts into a hazard
a few feet below.

Stone faced,
it lays in the comfort of the cushion in the pale green waiting room;
waiting on its prey:
adult or child,
even a toddler.
It has no conscience, no remorse.⁶

It is the simplest thing, to pay attention. But it is easily neglected. I suggest you make this a key Sabbath Liturgy, a wide bridge you build to cross from your life now—which, if it bears any resemblance to what mine can be, is marked by frantic busyness and chronic distraction—to a life of restfulness and wonder.

Have you ever written a poem? Poetry is the first art form, the primal, almost instinctual way humans try to reflect and make sense of the world’s bigness and wildness and danger and beauty. Failing that, our next reflex is just to box up the world, to categorize and file it. One writer was asked when he first became a poet, and he answered something like this: “I think we are all born with a natural desire to discover and create. We’re all born poets. The real question is, when did you stop being one?”

Why not return to it right now? Why not write a poem?

Stop. Look. Look close.

Notice the sun falling slantwise through the window, the dust’s slow dance in it. Or touch the threadbare edges of your chair’s upholstery, and remember that day it arrived new, smelling synthetic, clashing a bit with the paint on the walls. Ah, now look at the intricate folds of your child’s ear, the way light bleeds through the thin, taut flesh of it. Gaze outside and see the wind spin larch leaves like fish lures. Watch the darkness sift down the hillside and gather in the fir boughs.

See it all. Like Adam, name it.

Resolve to live this way more often.