ATTENTION, CONTEMPLATION, AND DETACHMENT
To pray is to pay attention or, shall we say, to “listen” to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, he is praying.
—W. H. Auden, “Work, Carnival, Prayer”
Nothing is more essential to prayer than attentiveness.
—Evagrius of Pontus, On Prayer
In the film Lady Bird, directed by Greta Gerwig, the main character gives herself the name Lady Bird after rejecting her given name, Christine.1 Throughout the movie she rails against traditional limits and wants to escape the deadbeat town of Sacramento to go to the East Coast (“where good schools are”). Toward the end of the movie, she’s meeting with a nun over a disciplinary matter at her Catholic high school. She put a “just married” sign on a car that two of the nuns drive. While meeting, the nun brings up her college essay and remarks, “You clearly love Sacramento.”
Shocked, Lady Bird looks up. “I do?”
The nun continues, “You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.”
Lady Bird responds, “I was just describing it.”
“Well, it comes across as love.”
“Sure, I guess I pay attention.”
The nun ends the scene: “Don’t you think maybe they’re the same thing? Love? Attention?”
In the previous chapter we saw that we become what we behold, and I want us to see at the beginning of this chapter that we pay attention to what we love. Attention starts not in effort but in interest, desire, wanting to know more. Luke Bell argues along the same lines when he insists, “Giving whole attention to Him, whom to know is to love, is to live. This is why recovering a contemplative spirit matters.”2 Contemplation, attention, is the way we love God. It’s the way to the good life.
The contemplative life starts in prayer or in the church, but if your prayer and attention are limited to those fixed hours or moments, then the contemplative spirit is lost. Prayer is meant to extend beyond the set times and expand out into the world as it is—into the fields and parishes and workplaces and art galleries. The material world reveals the spiritual. Creation reveals the Creator. The goal of our times of contemplation is that the practice would turn into our life. This vision is the dynamic at play in the writings of Brother Lawrence, a French mystic of the seventeenth century. He sees everything turn to prayer. In his case, doing dishes becomes close to contemplative ecstasy. God can be found in all mundane work—from doing the dishes to changing a diaper, from studying for a test to completing spreadsheets. Everything can be done with contemplative awareness in the presence of God.
This way of life is sacramental, like the Lord’s Supper. All things reveal God if we have eyes to see. Hans Boersma suggests that “in as much as the natural world around is a self-manifestation of God, he uses every one of the physical senses to draw us into his presence.”3 All the set times of contemplative prayer are meaningless if they don’t affect our ability to see the presence of God in the world. Stop and consider: holiness is all around us. How often are we aware of it?
Since the world is sacramental, it is worth seeing. The astonishing thing about God as the Beautiful One is that he creates all things with hints of beauty. Therefore, even if we live too fast to see it, the world is worth noticing. Chef and author Gregory Thompson, in his quarterly newsletter in Comment magazine, reflects on living with and in nature. He writes, “Contemplation may be understood as a form of confrontation—a struggle to see in the midst of blindness and to love in the midst of neglect. Contemplation is not, despite popular sentiment, a movement away from the world, but a movement toward it with a deepened commitment to love.”4 God is at work in the materiality of world, loving it into existence. We’re invited to pay attention. Norman Wirzba expands this sentiment in what he calls an “agrarian mysticism” that says “God is always with and within creatures as their creating, animating, nurturing, and sustaining Source. There is no such thing as a world without God.”5 That is, God is to be found not up and away but down and around. He is nearer us than our inward selves are. He is mysteriously present in the material world.
If we attend to the world this way, with the understanding that God is immanent within it, the way we treat the world will change. This contemplative vision will address the fragmentation of our lives and our alienation from others. We will begin to see the spiritual oneness of all things—not in a way that flattens the creature-Creator distinction but in a way that enriches the material and relational world. The way we treat the world is the way we treat each other, and it goes the other way around too: the way we treat each other is the way we treat the world.
Here’s the paradox of attention: in prayer, as we give our attention to God, we come to realize that, rather than our gaze resting upon God, God’s gaze rests upon us. John of the Cross says, “Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God.”6 After all, the emotions one has in prayer are not the point. The essential movement of prayer is cultivating a return to the present moment. We return again and again to the God who gazes upon us and who first desires intimacy with us.
CONTEMPLATION
Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from these. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly.
—Rowan Williams, Holy Living
I have a confession: I am a beginner in contemplative practice. You may have picked that up from how I described my desire for productivity. So often, I’m distracted by my own internal monologue or the task at hand that I don’t notice God, who wants to reveal himself in every moment of the day. I’m like a dog who sees a squirrel—constantly shifting attention to thoughts that flow into my mind with ease. If you ever take time to attend, you’ll notice the chattiness of your internal monologue too. Just this morning, as I was spending time in silence, I was also meta-reflecting on my reflection the entire time. I’m trying to attend to the moment, but my internal chatter is reflecting on what I’m doing, wondering if this is working, wondering why I’m thinking about my thinking, unable to do the sanctified shutting up that’s necessary. There’s internal monologue about internal monologue, and then there’s more internal monologue trying to control that internal monologue. It can be exhausting. It’s hard for me to be still and silent.
I’m a beginner, trying to make progress. In the contemplative tradition, we’re all amateurs. It’s not something we master. Here are a few things I’ve learned that have helped me attend along the way.
Contemplation is not special knowledge for elites. All the initiative lies in the loving-kindness of God, who wants to reveal himself to us. The contemplative practice attempts to remove obstacles that stand in the way of communion and encounter. Therefore, this intimate, even experiential, knowledge of God, “far from being something essentially extraordinary, like visions, revelations, or the stigmata, is in the normal way of sanctity.”7 Demanding more than a vision of God or desiring some other imaginative experience is akin to asking for a second incarnation. God has been known through Christ. Therefore, listen to him—which is another way of saying, “Pay attention to him.”8 Contemplation is the way we cultivate attention.
One of the most helpful ways to start is to have a phrase or word to return to. Historically, the Jesus Prayer has been used: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (cf. Luke 18:13). Different traditions include different words (“God,” “love,” “maranatha”). Whichever word or sentence you choose, it has the same purpose: slowing the mind and reigning in straying thoughts in order to achieve focus over distraction.9 Saying the word or sentence in rhythm with our breathing can also bring a somatic unity in which our body and our thoughts are united to bring attention. In contemplation the goal is to return to the love of God that is present in each moment. It’s an astonishing reality, really: God wants to reveal his love to us, and we’re so distracted and busy we hardly notice it. As Thomas Keating suggests, “All spiritual exercises are designed to reduce the monumental illusion that God is absent.”10 Repeating a word or sentence can help us return in order to catch a glimpse of God’s present love for us in a given moment.
Repeating a word or sentence can also be a means by which the Spirit helps us in our weakness to gain understanding. For example, the Jesus Prayer says the truth of who Christ is and who we are. These truths, repeated, draw us deeper into the mystery of the truth of Christ and our sinful state. Commenting on Evagrius, who defined prayer as habitual intimacy, Thomas Merton writes, “This disposes us to accept the idea that prayer is immediate intuitive contact with God, a habitual commerce with God, not a conversation in words or thoughts.”11 Again, the contemplative goal in prayer is not personal expression. There’s a place for that. But in contemplation we seek the face of God in an encounter. We strive to be content in his presence.
To prepare, expect mental distractions and wandering thoughts. Internal dialogue is inevitable, and all the more so as you start off. The important thing is how you meet distraction. As the contemplative writer Martin Laird suggests, “How we meet distraction (not whether or not we experience distractions—this is a given) is what heals and transforms as we move deeper.”12 Laird offers three questions to ponder as we go through distractions.13
1. “ARE YOU YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS?”
As you begin a contemplative practice, attending to God, there will be a roommate who plays music or a neighbor who cuts the grass or a child who walks in. In short, you will meet frustration or anger, because the setting is not ideal. In those moments, you will again face the challenge of inner commentary. “That jerk roommate!” “That inconsiderate neighbor!” “These meddling kids!” But the goal is to meet all these external situations in stillness. You are not your feelings of annoyance. You are not your reaction. You may feel bound by these reactions, but they are not the self. The goal of contemplation is to meet chaos with peace, to respond to distractions with stillness rather than commentary.
When you start out, these distracting thoughts may be prevalent. Moreover, in day-to-day life we often ignore deep feelings of abandonment or issues of self-worth, and when we finally are still, these negative feelings can rise like a tide in our souls. Things long past and seemingly forgotten can storm in and overwhelm us. In silence we learn to deal with them. Rather than justifying these thoughts away, we meet negative feelings with a self-knowledge. We notice them. We ask questions. We let them pass. We are not the sum total of our thoughts and feelings.
2. “WHAT DO THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS APPEAR IN?”
As we move from being our thoughts and feelings to noticing our thoughts and feelings, we change from a victim to a witness. We have agency with our thoughts and feelings. In verbiage from the Psalms, we ask our own soul, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” (Pss. 42:5, 11; 43:5). We have the ability to speak back to our feelings. Why are you upset, soul? Who makes you this way? Why? When? How? To what effect?
By becoming aware of the thoughts that bring misery, we can observe them, let them pass like a river running through our mind—here one moment, gone the next—and return to the loving awareness of God. We are not our feelings, even if they seem like they bind and enslave us. We give commentary to our feelings, but we can meet the feeling before the commentary. Watch it come. Watch it go. As Laird comments, “Affliction feeds off the noise of the commenting, chattering mind.”14 So often, I judge myself in prayer while in prayer. Am I doing this right? Will this be fruitful? I remember a certain time of “fruitful” prayer, and I want to recreate it. But that’s more chatter and distraction. Meet all these straying thoughts with a silent, steady gaze.
In the contemplative tradition the self is often compared to a mountain. The weather is the noise of the world, even the noise of our own thoughts and changing emotions. When the noise of weather comes, the contemplative tradition invites us to realize that we need not be swayed by all the noise. So often, we feel lost in the weather, as if the weather is who we are. When it’s cold, we’re cold. When anger comes, we’re angry. But contemplation helps us realize that we are not our emotions or circumstances. All that noise is going on around us, but it is not the self. We can be as unmoved as a mountain. As Rowan Williams writes, “Learning discernment is first learning how to identify and bring to stillness the urge to reduce the world to the terms of my desires; in other words, it is to do with learning to observe and question whatever forms of controlling power I possess.”15 We can notice feelings or circumstances as we notice the weather. We can’t control it, but we can see it; and the weather need not erode us. Mountains don’t change with the weather.
3. “WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THESE THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS, AND WHO IS AWARE OF THEM?”
The last question Laird asks is one that requires deeper consideration. Laird mentions the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who says that whenever you are plagued by distractions, “try to look over their shoulders, as it were, searching for something else—and that something is God, enclosed in the cloud of unknowing.”16 One of the beautiful things I’ve experienced in contemplation is the melting away of my hard heart. It’s hard to be self-righteous and judge others when we can look beyond anger and frustration to see God. Sometimes, when not in contemplation, I focus on a frustrating person or situation but never move beyond the feeling. Contemplation gives me the opportunity to do just that: to look beyond the frustration. Contemplation takes desolation and turns it into freedom. It allows us to enter a vast spaciousness that connects all things and holds them together, a spaciousness where there is a deep belonging at the center of existence that invites us into a transformation that gives us empathy for ourselves and others.
Fred Bahnson describes having such an experience on a journalistic assignment to Mali with Harper’s Magazine. After declining to go to a meeting in a dangerous part of Gao with a monk named Colombo, he reflected on his childhood, which included a three-year stint of living away from his parents as they pursued a vocation as medical missionaries. He says that this distance between family and home was miserable. He cried himself to sleep and learned never to complain, as both he and his parents were “doing it for the Lord.” However, this rationale didn’t comfort the heart of the ten-year-old child. He harbored resentment and pain from those early years, and they came to surface these many years later in the same continent where he suffered as a child. But here’s how he reflected on his pain:
Those years injured my soul, but they’d also given me a gift. Through my childhood experience of solitary prayer and my adult discovery of monastic spirituality, I had found a path that led to a wider expanse. The monastic project showed me how to turn loneliness into solitude. The early monks’ great discovery was that we are each a monos: the walls of the self are the burden of every human. They also discovered that the vulnerability of solitary prayer makes those walls more porous, leading us out of ourselves and into communion with our neighbors. Solitude begets solidarity.17
“Solitude begets solidarity”—that’s a great phrase. He didn’t retreat into himself to find himself. The monastic tradition invites us to be still and to notice that the walls of selfhood are rather porous. We grow closer to other people as we grow closer to God. The walls that separate us from others, the walls on which we stand in judgment over others, begin to crumble. This oneness does not erase the distinctiveness of individual creatures, but it is a recognition that the sustenance and source of all things comes in and through God. Alone, Bahnson became aware of the source of the real and of the life that he shared with all created beings.
I can’t imagine sending my kids away for three years, even for a supposedly noble purpose like serving God. Bahnson’s parents bear some responsibility for the unintentional hurt they may have caused. But he doesn’t let their decision drive him to hate them or consider himself a victim of their choices. He notices the pain, but he does not dwell there. Through contemplative prayer he becomes the mountain that the weather passes around. Or rather, he knows that his “life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3) and that God is the mountain of refuge and strength. In so doing he becomes a more empathetic person as he sees the seeds of God slowly bearing fruit, even in rocky soil.
HOLY DETACHMENT
One of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people in the purity of a selfless love.
—Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
The contemplative life starts in desire. We desire to know and see and encounter Christ. We want to see his face. We love him. Yet desire, unavoidable though it may be for humans, is dangerous and often gets people into trouble. Desire is the root of many horrible sins and tragedies in our world. So, then, what are we to do with our passions, and how do they fit in with faithful contemplation? It’s a question I’ve thought about a lot because I live with and in passion. Ever since I was young, my passions seemed uncontrollable—as much a part of me as the color of my hair or the pigment of my skin. In playing sports, I “wore my heart on my sleeve,” as the saying goes. Nobody had to ask how I was feeling; they knew. I was distraught if we lost or ecstatic if we won. That was my authentic self. Later, when my passions overwhelmed me and those around me, I learned to push my passions down and never bring them up again.
In our modern world, passion plays an elusive role. Are my passions my truest self, the most authentic me? Should I express them no matter what and decide that it’s not my fault if others don’t like them? Or, like Elsa from Frozen, should I conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know? Or should we let it go?
There’s something in Ignatian spirituality called “holy detachment.” We are born with passionate desire, yet to experience God we must put to death selfish passion and self-centered desire. In essence, holy detachment invites us to care only about the things that help us love God and love neighbor. In all other things we should be passionless, detached, in some ways indifferent to whole swaths of human existence. Desire isn’t to be rejected; it is to be discipled. This discipleship process requires a rejection of the self-directed and reactionary passions. As Rowan Williams puts it, “The holy person is one ‘free from passion’ because he or she is the person free from having their relations totally dictated by instinct, self-defense—reactivity, as we might say these days.”18 A free person is one who has passions but who is not controlled by those passions in a reactive cycle.
Imagine for a moment what it would be like if you stopped caring what other people thought of you. You may think that would be rude; part of a life of love is caring about people and their feelings. But imagine that you stopped trying to make good impressions, that you could walk away from an encounter and not play over in your mind how you came across. Imagine that you didn’t care about what your friends thought of you. What jokes would you not make? What posts would you make (or not make) on social media? Would you care about social media at all? How much do you currently do for others’ approval, to fit in? What do you refrain from doing so that your friends will still think you’re cool? What would you not post about if you weren’t concerned with being on the right side of an issue? What would it be like if you didn’t desperately care about what grade you earned? And maybe part of your motivation to earn the grade you’re striving for is really about appeasing your parents or teacher. Put all those passions aside.
How would you relate to a spouse or significant other if your passions weren’t primary, and you could see her as a gift in her own particularity, and you related to her as God relates to her? Being emptied of your preferences, what would it look like for you to love your children without trying to manipulate or control them, instead caring for them and seeing them as uniquely bearing the image of God in their own giftedness?
What would it look like for your church to live in holy detachment, to love others without interest in their own passions but, instead, for the mutual love of God?
What if we rejected our own passions in order to gain the passions that help us love God and love neighbor? Holy detachment does not mean that I’m passionless for my kids or wife or neighbors. But I lay down the demands my passions make and regard others as God sees them. I lay down my passions and take up the “passion”—in the other sense of the word, the sense of suffering—of Christ, which is the way of the cross.
This may sound like a quasi-Stoic or quasi-Buddhist ethic—the goal of life is one of detaching oneself from the world and from cares. The Buddha himself left his own family in pursuit of a detached life. Even the attachment to family was a hindrance to a holy life. But holy detachment does not veer into the unhelpful notion of placelessness and namelessness. It is not that God loves us without distinction. He loves the essence of us as it relates to his own essence. We share in bearing God’s image in unique ways with our unique personalities and makeup. In the same way, in Christ, adopted by God, we are to love others in their own particularity and from our own place. We are free to recognize the interconnectedness of all—that this person shares God with me through our mutual bearing of the divine image. Yet we still maintain a distinction of particularity in how each Christian displays the essence of God in themselves. Christians are like each other in significant ways, yet their own distinctions make them different in more profound ways. Those differences can be causes for consternation or reasons to rejoice. The call to love one another is a call to love people without reference to one’s own preference or affinity but rather in a way that reflects the indiscriminate love of God. God has a general love for the whole of humanity, but what makes God even more amazing is that he has a particular love for each one of us.
After all, prayer is not about us. It is about God. When we express all our concerns to God, we call God to attend to us. There are times for that. But our goal is to be detached from our concerns so that we turn from our interests to the goodness and love of God. It’s only in prayer that we can start to lose grip on our own passions and become passionate about something beyond the self. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel commends, “The purpose of prayer is not the same as the purpose of speech. The purpose of speech is to inform; the purpose of prayer is to partake.”19 Those who have reached a holy detachment can care about the things that God cares about and can begin to partake of him.
TRANSFORMATION
In a fascinating article about bourbon and spiritual formation, art professor Matthew Milliner tells a story of his visit to Kentucky’s bourbon country. This isn’t to say that bourbon is helpful to spiritual formation, and in certain contexts and times, it may be detrimental to spiritual formation. But he compares the process by which we are formed with the process by which bourbon is produced, and he uncovers interesting parallels. Through his travels he had a realization: bourbon country is also God’s country. In Kentucky, spirits and the spiritual sit side by side. Historic basilicas and convents are located near modern distilleries. The sacred and the secular seem inseparable. Considering these twin realities, Milliner concludes that distilling bourbon requires the same steps as spiritual formation: purgation, illumination, union.20
PURGATION
The first step of transformation is purgation. Just as the corn for bourbon is harvested, crushed, and fermented in its own death, so a Christian spirituality requires a type of death. Saint John of the Cross writes, “I would not consider any spirituality worthwhile that wants to walk in sweetness and ease and run from the imitation of Christ.”21 In the Christian tradition, theosis, or partaking in the divine nature, starts with a self-emptying. Holy detachment is a kind of self-emptying; it starts with a right passion of mourning for the ways in which we’re not like God. It’s right to feel sorrow for the ways we’ve destroyed life and well-being in ourselves and those around us and, most particularly, for the separation from God that is the consequence of sin. As we’ve seen, the modern person attempts to discover their “authentic self” outside of conversation with God, which typically leads to exemplifying the false self—that self that seeks to win approval, to satisfy ego, to win at all costs. Thomas Merton comments that such people “try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and other men who have less than they, or nothing at all.”22 In other words, modern people try to go within themselves by attempting to identify what makes them better than everyone else.
But the path of the authentic and true self is actually one of death by self-giving: “The renunciation of existing-for-oneself is man’s most authentically personal act and so also man’s most Godlike act.”23 Or as Thomas Merton posits, “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.”24 To become divine, like Jesus, we empty ourselves of the passions that wage war within us and become nothing, so that, like Jesus, we can rise to life with God. The real authentic self is found in killing the alleged authentic self. Our ambition ceases as God becomes more in us.
Jesus compares transformation to a seed that goes into the ground to die so that it may rise to new life (John 12:24). But by being buried and dying, the seed becomes more like its true and ideal self, not less so. The same is true with humanity. We need to be purged of ourselves to become our true, redeemed self. Being like God starts with emptying ourselves of our passions that strive for dominance or control or manipulation. It starts with detachment. Transformation requires death.
ILLUMINATION
The process of transformation doesn’t end in death. If we stop at purgation, we become masochists. If we stop at purgation in the bourbon world, all we have is what distillers call “slop.” The slop is nothing. Making the slop into something requires heat. In the next step the slop is heated to induce the evaporation process, leaving only the truest, most authentic form of the grain or corn. Distillers call what’s left “white dog”—a pure and potent liquid.
Illumination is coming to know and become one’s truest self, becoming comfortable in one’s redeemed skin. Robert Farrar Capon puts it this way:
It is Jesus who is your life. If he refused to condemn you because your works were rotten, he certainly isn’t going to flunk you because your faith isn’t so hot. You can fail utterly and still live the life of grace. You can fold up, spiritually, morally, or intellectually and still be sage. Because at the very worst, all you can be is dead—and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.25
The heat of this realization creates an acceptance of the process that God is enacting. Dying is incomplete, but it’s the first step. Many Christians undergoing this refinement process find a growing comfort in it. God is working with you to make you something. You are God’s handiwork, poiēma (Eph. 2:10), created in Christ Jesus for good works.
UNION
The last step is union. The white dog must now sit in oak barrels for years. The barrels swell and shrink with the changing seasons. The wood expands under the humidity of Kentucky summers and contracts as winter winds blow. There’s an organic breathing process that occurs. After each season, more and more liquid evaporates as the oak seeps into the bourbon, giving it its brown hue. After many years the union of white dog and barrel is complete. The swelling of barrels creates a union of substance. They bleed into each other.
Milliner, drawing on Merton, concludes the parallel between bourbon and spiritual transformation:
“We must ‘empty ourselves’ as He did. We must ‘deny ourselves’ and in some sense make ourselves ‘nothing’ in order that we may live not so much in ourselves as in Him. We must live by a power and a light that seem not to be there. We must live by the strength of an apparent emptiness that is always truly empty and yet never fails to support us at every moment. This is holiness.”
Such is the paradox of bourbon: The less there is of it, the better. As a truly great bourbon reaches its peak, the amber liquid increases in richness, hue, and complexity while decreasing in quantity. The greatest sip of bourbon must therefore, necessarily, be the barrel’s last solitary drop. Emptiness is perfection.26
As we pour ourselves out in service, as we become detached from ourselves and attached to God, as we become less ourselves and more like God, we become our finest selves. Theosis is complete. We become the completion subsumed in God.
CONCLUSION
The rock band Florence and the Machine filmed a music video in Ukraine in 2022, during that country’s ongoing conflict with Russia. The song they perform in the video is called “Free.” Following Florence around is an actor, who serves as a symbol of her anxiety. This actor controls her and is a constant presence and burden. Her emotion, she sings, “picks me up” and “puts me down a thousand times a day.” She’s seeking freedom, but she seems bound by her feelings.
She reveals that some of her anxiety comes from living with the constant pressure of suffering and death. How is she supposed to keep singing with such raging emotions and anxieties? But she continues, “There’s nothing else that I can do except to open up my arms and give it all to you.” The identity of this “you” is ambiguous. But the song emerges from her anxieties, lifting her up and putting her down to the dancing refrain of “I am free.” She leans her head up against her anxiety. She becomes friends with her feelings. The actor symbolizing anxiety puts her arm around Florence. Florence is the mountain. She notices the anxiety, yet she’s free.
I think it’s a beautiful picture of the things we’ve discussed in this chapter. Where attention to the self and urges for control can be all-consuming, holy detachment invites attention to different concerns—namely, to those things that concern God. It requires a contemplative purgation, which leads to union. This union is perfect freedom, a receptivity to the world rather than an imposition of power upon it in an attempt to manipulate and manufacture the things we want. God transforms our wants. In such a contemplation we are, like Florence, free.
1. I use this example in an article on education and attention. See Sosler, “Attentional Arts and Beholding Beauty.”
2. Bell, Meaning of Blue, 84.
3. Boersma, Seeing God, 219. On the sacramental nature of the world, Boersma writes, “Christian contemplation, therefore, is a sacramental way of seeing: It means we approach creation and the Scriptures as filled with the presence of Christ” (Seeing God, 232).
4. Thompson, “To Inhabit the Earth.”
5. Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit, 115.
6. John of the Cross, “Maxim on Love, 88,” 674.
7. Garrigou-Lagrange, Three Ages of the Interior Life, 1:103–5.
8. The language of “paying attention,” which uses monetary terms, is interesting. It’s almost as if we owe certain things attention and we pay for it. Contemplation may cost us something.
9. As Thomas Keating has suggested, “the goal of contemplative prayer is not so much the emptiness of thoughts or conversation as the emptiness of self” (Keating, Intimacy with God, 125).
10. Keating, Intimacy with God, 73.
11. Merton, Course in Christian Mysticism, 63.
12. Laird, Into the Silent Land, 76.
13. Laird, Into the Silent Land, 77, 80, 89.
14. Laird, Into the Silent Land, 106.
15. Williams, Looking East in Winter, 192.
16. The Cloud of Unknowing, 55.
17. Bahnson, “Guardians of Memory.”
18. Williams, Holy Living, 119.
19. Heschel, Between God and Man, 202.
20. Milliner, “Becoming Bourbon.”
21. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul 2.7.8 (Lewis, 97).
22. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 47.
23. Williams, Wrestling with Angels, 14.
24. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 60.
25. Capon, Between Noon and Three, 292.
26. Milliner, “Becoming Bourbon.”