Pay Attention to Your Life
Day 7
We move on to Chapter 2, entitled To See is to Love, to Love is to See. Today’s passage is the opening to this chapter and sees Buechner establishing the foundational significance of attention for the Christian faith.
"When religions like Buddhism and Hinduism look at the world, they see an illusion. Impermanence. Something that has come into being almost by accident. Something circular. The great wheel of the universe that goes around and around and around—you were born only to die and only to be reborn, only to die again. The whole point of those Eastern religions is that the world is to be escaped. That’s what Nirvana is: the snuffing out, the final relinquishing of this awful grasp you will have on the wheel of life into this ineffable bliss of whatever Nirvana might be, something quite different from life. Creation is an accident, the creation of a dream that ultimate reality dreamed. It has no permanence. It has no purpose. It has nothing of any lasting value.
“Not true with the Christian faith. The biblical faith says creation is of enormous importance because God created it. He made it, he sustains it, he speaks in it, he moves in it. He sent the Christ into it, who walked on it, who got sick from it, who ate on it, who wanted a job on it, who preached on it, who loved on it, who died on it. It is of enormous importance. Pay attention to it. It is crucial. Souls are lost and souls are saved in this world; therefore live, watch, pay attention to it as if your life depended on it because, of course, your life does depend upon it. It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else, it is saying that—how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks. Pay attention to where life or God has tried to take you."
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp33-34.
To help you reflect…
What does this passage - and, in particular, Buechner’s framing of biblical faith as centred on paying attention - stir in you? What would shift in your own faith or spiritual practice if you really trusted in the importance of paying attention? What could you lay down? What might you begin to do differently?
Practise attending to your life. Where do you sense life or God has tried - or is trying -to take you?
Attention and intention are closely tied. Wisdom reveals that both create movement towards the Good.