Are You Paying Attention?
Be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place,
until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” (2 Peter 1:19)
“Attention” is a funny word. It’s an abstract noun, but we use it all the time. Philosophers and scientists struggle to define it precisely, but the youngest children are expected to know what it means. It’s a noun that’s formed from a verb (“attend”), but we hardly ever the verb “attend” in English when we’re talking about “attention.” Instead we introduce all sorts of helping verbs. In other words, you’ll never hear a teacher in a crowded room of rambunctious children say: “Attend unto me, children!” unless you’re in a bad Victorian novel. Nor do we typically use the adjectival form, as our translation of 2 Peter did this morning: “Be attentive, kids!” No; when we’re talking about where our consciousness is focused at any given moment in time, we’re most likely to ask someone else to “pay attention!”
“Pay attention” implies that possess a certain amount of it and we can spend it on various things, giving some of our attention to someone else and receiving something in return. And that seems odd. When we “pay attention” to our family or friends, we strengthen our relationships with them; but we’re not paying for their love with our attention. When we “pay attention” to the beauty of the world, in nature, music, or art, we sometimes experience a renewed appreciation for the beauty of God’s creation; but we’re not purchasing these moments. In another sense, though, we do spend our attention on things: like time, like money, attention is a limited resource, and when we pay attention to one thing, it means we have less attention left to spend.
We sometimes believe that we can pay attention to many things at once. But let me just say this: In an interview last month about the new Netflix action thriller The Rip, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—I guess a new Damon-Affleck film is a kind of consolation prize for Bostonians after the Super Bowl—Matt Damon observed that Netflix has changed how movies are written relative to how movies were written twenty years ago. They now ask screenwriters to restate “the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because”—on Netflix, unlike in theaters—“people are on their phones while they’re watching.”
So maybe we’re not as good at multi-tasking as we think.
On this last Sunday after the Epiphany every year, we re-tell the story of the Transfiguration, that day when Jesus went up on a high mountain, taking with him Peter, James, and John, “and he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.” (Matt. 17:2) Like the great prophet Moses before him, he was transformed, and the light of God began to shine out from his very face. Moses received the Law from God, shared over the course of forty days and forty nights. Jesus and his companions heard a different message instead: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Matt. 17:5)
And in the Western Christian tradition—among Catholics and Protestants, in other words—this story is often treated primarily as more grist for the mill of analysis and interpretation. Moses and Elijah represent the Law and the Prophets, the two main portions of the Old Testament, which Jesus is said to fulfill. The three tents, perhaps, allude to Sukkot, the Festival of Booths; and so on. At our worst, we use the story to score cheap points in our usual debates. “Look, there’s Peter’s!” the Catholic might say. “That’s the First Pope!” “Well, yeah,” the Protestant might reply, “but his whole tent idea is a total flop.”
But in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Transfiguration is more than the fodder for theology or analysis. It would be fair to say that for the Orthodox, the Transfiguration is at the heart of spirituality itself. In the Transfiguration, the uncreated light of God itself shone forth around Jesus. It was absorbed into the eyes of Peter and James and John, and by seeing it, their eyes were transformed. They began to see the world as it truly was, illuminated by the light of God, and not through the veil that had been over their faces before. And Orthodox spirituality revels in these themes of light, in the splendor of the beauty of holiness, teaching that the light we see, for example, in the gold paint of an icon is not just a symbol of the light that shone around Jesus in the Transfiguration; it is that same light, and by gazing on these holy things we, too, can have our vision of the world transformed.
The work of Christian spirituality, according to this school of thought, is to do exactly what Peter says in the Epistle: to “pay attention to this [light] as to a lamp shining in a dark place.” To pay attention to the light of Christ. To open our eyes, and to see everything else illuminated by that light; to open our hearts, and let them be strangely warmed: to spend some of our attention focusing on Christ, “until the day dawns and the morning star rises in [our] hearts.” The central insight here is that “you are what you eat,” mentally and spiritually as well as physically. The more you pay attention to something, the more deeply it becomes a part of your mind and of your life.
We don’t get to see Jesus transfigured before us, in clothes turned dazzling white. But the light of Christ does shine in the world, in many other ways. The light shines through the words of Scripture, as Peter says, and through our long traditions of music and prayer. The light of Christ shines in the glowing gold of an icon, and in the kaleidoscopic rainbow that the sun projects onto the wall when it shines through stained glass. The light of Christ shines in the eyes of our neighbors, especially when they who find themselves in the circumstances in which Jesus himself tells us he is present: when they are “hungry or thirsty or foreign or naked or sick or in prison,” for “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “just as you did to one of the least of these, you did to me.” (Matt. 25:38-40)
The light of Christ shines in the world like a lamp lit in a dark room, and if we pay attention, it will be attention well spent. When we pay attention the Word of God, we begin to hear things differently in the news. When we pay attention to beautiful things, we begin to see more of the hidden beauty of the world. When we pay attention to one another, our capacities for compassion and grace and mercy grow; when we pay attention to the light of Christ, our minds become more like the mind of Christ.
That’s all kind of abstract, so I want to make it as concrete as I can. In English, we talk about “paying attention” or “being attentive” or “attending to” something. But Peter’s Epistle was written in ancient Greek, and the word he uses gives us a helpful hint to what this means, in a practical sense. “You would do well,” he writes, “to prosekhontes this, as a lamp.” He uses this verb, prosekho. (Not the bubbly kind.) It means to pay attention, to care for something—but etymologically, it means “to have it in front of you.” To pay attention is simply to have something in front of you—to put it right in front of your face.
So if you’re trying to balance the budget of your attention, as Lent begins, you might start there: Let what’s in front of you be the thing that’s in front of you. If the task at hand is walking down the street, try just walking down the street, and looking at the people and the buildings around you, rather than, you know... If what’s in front of you is a member of your family or a friend, be with them and not with a thousand other thoughts; pay attention to the person in front of you, as they are, and not as you want them to be. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the big picture, by news coverage of the state of the whole world, try paying attention to the people God has put around you, in your own neighborhood instead—especially those neighbors who are, as Jesus says, hungry or thirsty or foreign, naked or sick or in prison. Wherever you find yourself over the course of the day, and with whomever you find yourself spending time, pay attention to what’s in front of you; “for,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”
Christ plays in ten thousand places in our world, his light shining through ten thousand cracks; and if we pay attention to the light of Christ, if we are “attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place,” then our eyes, and our minds, and our lives will be transformed, “until the day dawns and the morning star rises in [our] hearts.” (2 Peter 1:19)
