Sister Doreen’s Reflections
Proverbs 22:17-18 “Pay attention and listen to the sayings of the wise; apply your heart to what I teach, for it is pleasing when you keep them in your heart and have all of them ready on your lips.”
“Being attentive is giving honor to others rather than drawing attention to yourself”. (See Proverbs 25:6–7.)
One of the greatest encouragements found in the Bible is the promise that God is attentive to the prayers of each of us. “Before they call, I will answer; while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” (Isaiah 65:24) Another nugget of encouragement from Isaiah 65:24” Before we utter a word, God answers”.
In my Heart Meditations of years ago I spent some time thinking about an attentive heart as one that feels the presence of others and feels the call to respond to that presence. But how, I wondered, in the aftermath of confusion and fear? As I wandered through my wilderness of healing, reading Exodus and thinking, I wrote that an attentive heart lives in relationship. It cannot be purchased, discovered quickly, or by instant formula. It grows slowly from nurturing and practice, from long and difficult practices of mindfulness and intention. Looking back now I can see that the route of wandering in my own wilderness, the route out of the trauma of slavery (fear) was indeed one that called me to be watchful for opportunities to be more fully alive, more attentive to the daily gifts. It was not so easy for me, as it was not easy for the Israelites; it was so much easier to just drift along, half awake and half asleep to the miracles around me that were calling out ‘look and live’. Being attentive woke up all the feelings surrounding the struggle back to health of body and mind. I wanted an attentive heart, one that became and was fully alive, but I found my mind seemed to be naturally slippery, shy! It was so agile at drifting and so ready to dart off in any new direction!
It was a time for making a conscious effort, securing a time of silence, beginning again and again, to be present to God who is always present to me, and to begin once again to cultivate an attentive heart. To put my shyness away and find the courage to reach out. Maggie Ross in her book ‘The Fire of your Life’ wrote: “Our only task is to seek willingness. This radical willingness will, if we are faithful to it, shatter every idea we have about ourselves; about our inner growth and transformation; about living the Christian life; about contemplation and our relationship to the world; about God.” I, who was already shattered, found it a struggle to take the step into wanting what she was offering by radical willingness – and an attentive heart.
One of the noonday demons of the attentive heart I discovered was apathy or indifference and it was rooted in sadness. I carried a lot of sadness into my journey with the Israelites in the desert. Sadness, perhaps called compassion fatigue or burnout! It seems to me now that over the long haul in a wilderness experience, stamina and hope are worn down by the sheer length of the journey. “Our souls become discouraged because of the way” like the Israelites in the desert. (Numbers 21:4) and we are tempted to give up.
I also knew that like the blind beggar (Mark 10: 40-52) I too was longing to cry out, begging Jesus, from the depths of my heart, for the restoration of my sight. I wanted to see into the heart of things, to see beyond, to have that God-given way of seeing, of being attentive, not to possess and to control but to stand back in wonder and gratitude. I knew that deep looking and listening in the power of silence and stillness were the prerequisites for any attentive awareness, for any real presence, real relationship. As I look back, I realize now what a gift the struggle was to become aware of the essence, the ‘is-ness’ of whatever lies in front of our eyes. This attentive heart carried with it the gift of encouragement.
I pondered the question: what is an attentive heart for me? Some simple thoughts came – a heart concerned with being present; a heart concerned with singleness – whole, healthy, simple, sincere and generous; a heart that out of solitude can live in relationships. These were all deep desires that I knew were what I wanted, and this healing journey in the wilderness pondering my desire for an attentive heart … one that could reach out again from my fear and trauma in openness and vulnerability. The journey was one of encouragement, that I could do this because I wanted this and because I knew that God was also leading me into a renewed place. The Servant Song in the hymn book Common Praise of the Anglican Church of Canada #500 took on a new priority for me from my desert place. An abridged paraphrase of that hymn “Sister / Brother let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you; pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.”
As I look back, I can see that what was important in my heart meditations was a renewed understanding that an attentive heart was able to move from a multiplicity of concerns to an ever-clearer focus on what was essential. This was and remains such a gift. To be able to let past obstacles to attentiveness be transformed or discarded (fear, inadequacy feelings, hurt, all the sludge that gathers …) because the spiritual discipline, the hard work of growing, of attentiveness is, in a certain sense, about emptiness. What I wrote then, I value today:
- The attentive eye is emptied of distracting images, to be bathed in the transparency of light, to see through to the real presence at the heart of things.
- The attentive ear is emptied of distracting sounds, to be filled with the resonance of silence, to hear the sounds of the real presence at the heart of things.
- The attentive heart brought to newness of life gradually through my walking journey moved towards the emptiness of simplicity and transparency and into the real presence at the heart of things.
A life with no space, no still point, no emptiness at its centre may need some hard pruning if it is to grow to its proper space, its own integrity, its own reality. In spiritual terms, the opposite of simplicity is duplicity, or increasing today, multiplicity. We find ourselves distracted by everything that draws us from one single aim and object in all that we do. I could see in my desert journey, and I can see today, that often simplicity is threatened by the ‘hypocrisy of insincerity’, the duplicity of having two ends and yet trying to harmonize these ends to justify or to hide this duplicity. These were pondering thoughts.
In my wilderness journey I saw the attentive heart, the simple heart as one that seeks one aim and end, which is to welcome the love of God, to be at home in the heart of God, to live in the Real Presence of each other and our world. Our soul is simple when this is our aim in all that we do or desire. We fall down and we get up, over and over again, in our desire to be single-minded, of acknowledging the presence of others and the call to respond. “Before you call, I will answer, I will hear” – and we get up once again and begin again! A journey into encouragement for an attentive heart.
