Live Attentively

I recently saw a father stop in the aisle of a hardware store, lay down the tool he was considering, squat to his child’s eye level and listen to whatever it was the little boy had to say. It may have been simply one of the tedious “Can we go now?” queries every parent hears from children who are tired of trekking around on adult business. It may have been a request to stop for a snack on the way home. Or it may have been a feeling he’d never have shared if he hadn’t had a parent who was likely to listen.

That dad’s attentiveness came as a reminder in the midst of my own busy morning to slow down and pay attention. I was eager to leave; hardware stores are not my favorite places to spend time, especially looking for specific sizes of screws or exchanging the wrong drill bits for the right ones.

I love the history of the word “attentive.” The Latin, adtendere, means to stretch toward. When we are attentive we extend ourselves—we direct our gaze, we incline our ear, we may lean toward or step into or offer a hand or a shoulder or a lap.   The French attendre generally means “wait,” or sometimes, as an imperative, something like our colloquial “Listen up!” In the highly ceremonial Byzantine Catholic services I’ve attended with awe and deep pleasure, the Bible is lifted high before the Gospel reading and all are summoned to listen more closely with the words, “Wisdom! Be attentive!”

Attentiveness not only opens us to wisdom, it is its own practice of wisdom. Anyone who has known me for a while will have heard me quote musician Roberto Gerhard’s words, which I kept on the wall during the months I worked on my dissertation, and which have, many times since, helped me return from distraction to a place of attentiveness: “Attention—deep, sustained, undeviating—is, in itself, an experience of a very high order.” I love even the commas in that sentence, and the dashes—the way they slow the eye down and invite you to pause over each word—to go in before going on. Attentive is slow. And spacious. Leaning in, ready to act, but poised and pausing to notice the density and texture and complexity of the moment. As one hymn writer described God: “unresting, unhasting, and silent as light.” May the quality of the attention we give me a little more like that in this season of celebrating light that shines in the darkness and is not overcome.