PAY ATTENTION

by Malcom Doney and Martin Wroe excerpt from “Lifelines: Notes on Life and Love, Faith & Doubt”

THERE ARE THESE TWO YOUNG FISH, SWIMMING ALONG, AND THEY HAPPEN TO MEET AN OLDER FISH, SWIMMING THE OTHER WAY WHO NODS AT THEM, AND SAYS, “MORNING BOYS, HOW’S THE WATER?” AND THE TWO YOUNG FISH SWIM ON FOR A BIT, AND THEN EVENTUALLY ONE OF THEM LOOKS OVER AT THE OTHER AND GOES, “WHAT THE HELL IS WATER?”

~DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

IT IS EASY TO SLEEPWALK THROUGH OUR DAYS. Not to notice what’s going on. Our default position, argued novelist David Foster Wallace, is to be centered on ourselves and our own needs. We are worshiping animals, he said, but our reverence is focused not on the mystical, the beyond, but on self-serving deities like money, intellect and power. Gods, that “will eat you alive.” If these are our sources of meaning, we’ll never be satisfied and will want more.

True, they kind of work. We’ve harnessed them to put ourselves at the center of everything. But, said Wallace, there are other kinds of freedom: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to care truly about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways every day.”

We have to explore the water that we are swimming in. Examine it. Paying attention to each other and to the vividness of the physical surroundings that lie beyond our personal murk. We find dividends by focusing in on the detail. In his book Landmarks, the nature writer

Robert MacFarlane notes the words people used to describe features of the landscape, borne out of daily, close observation. This is more than pedantry: It prevents our environment becoming a foggy “blandscape.”

Such generalization is dangerous, he claims, quoting Wendell Berry: “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love…and to defend what we love, we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”

Novelist Patrick Kavanaugh agrees: “To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience...it is depth that counts, not width.”

This is how the parochial opens the door to the universal. The forensic but wonderful naming of the particular, which arises from our attentive embodiment in nature, can, MacFarlane assures us, lead to experiences that are “midway between scientific experiment and sacred epiphany.”

“It is about simple awareness,” says Foster Wallace, “Awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over. This is water. This is water.”

David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life, Little Brown and Company, 2009

Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle, Counterpoint Press, 1985; Patrick Kavanaugh, ‘The Parish and the Universe,’ in Collected Prose, MacGibbon and Kee, 1967

Macfarlane, Landmarks

Parishioner Kathie Meuselbach painted this image in St. John’s Cathedral’s day art class. A bird flew in the sanctuary on Sunday during the morning worship and landed on the Rev. Mark Anderson’s shoulder as he said prayers.