“I don’t know anything about truth,
but I know falsehood when I see it,
and it looks like this whole world you’ve made…
…This mock trial can no more determine my lot,
than can driftwood determine the ocean’s waves,…”
– Elephant in the Dock, Aaron Weiss
These days, I spend a lot of time trying to stem the fracturing of my mind and spirit into splinters of anger, division, and sanctimony, those shards of self our world is hellbent on shattering us all into. The fracturing process is only practical, perhaps. For while fragmented humans might be sharp to the touch and dangerous to draw near to, those isolated pieces are more easily swept along in whichever direction it is deemed most profitable to sweep them.
Conflict is to be expected under these pressures. The urge to “fight back” wells up. But this is also a conditioned response. For the root of this impulse is fear, and fear is maybe the most profitable resource ever extracted from a man’s heart. Fear numbs us to those within our reach: those who hunger, thirst, are estranged and naked, sick and imprisoned, those walking, living, and working beside us. Those we can reach. Fear draws our attention to a world full of troubles far beyond our reach and then sells us distractions from the subsequent distress they elicit.
I do not need to outline what a half-starved, crazed, hollowing manner of living this is. You are swimming in the same ecosystem I am. “This is water”, as David Foster Wallace pointed out years ago. Most everyone agrees they are sick of the water, and yet, right on cue, the next siren call of the news cycle is sounded, and we are exposed as powerless to resist it, sick or not. Broken lives, pain, destruction, and death is produced en masse by our culture yet we view it all as some sort of amoral byproduct, as dispassionately as we view the pollution in our rivers and streams. What can be done? What could we do?
This is not a new question. I am not seeking “the answer”, but rather a different path. I was once wisely told that “what you push back against is what defines you.” Here is a beginning. Maybe we ought to use our being and thinking not to decide what our lives should be “for” or “against,” but rather what we would like our lives to define. And then, where do we have to move, act, and labor in order to live out that definition? What loose shapes are we already drawing in our breathing, singing, toiling, speaking, playing, worshipping, traveling, and socializing? Maybe we have been going about this the wrong way.
Whether we realize it or not, the two most essential elements by which our lives are daily defined is by our presence and attention. Or, to put it another way, through our incarnation and embodiment. Look and see, as Wendell would say. What are the effects of an industry’s, an institution’s, an ideology’s, a group’s, or an action’s presence? Are they good or bad? More to the point, who are they good or bad for? What is the result in my spirit, and thus in my living, and thus in my local community? Here is where presence and attention start.
I’ll give an example from my life. I am “absent” from Amazon, meaning I do not buy from that company. This is not due to my being morally or intellectually superior to anyone. I merely had a choice to make: to be present or to be absent from this endless marketplace of cheap goods. Such a marketplace is bad for my local economy, bad for my soul’s addiction to comfort and ease, and bad for its founder, who hoards so much money and power over society. So I stopped giving my money to them. This is not a binary, unbending rule, however. If I am buying a gift and the desired gift can be found nowhere else but Amazon, I will buy it. My aim is not conspicuous adherence. My aim is to live a life that will not be defined by the lies, waste, and bottomless appetites that Amazon sells. I hope my absence will help to form the outlines of a heart that has refrained from surrendering to every desire to always possess more (though it still feels those urges). As I buy less, I find I want less.
Another example: I have begun to walk weekly the trails of my local land trust, Stringer’s Ridge. The place is not social media-worthy. But it contains my local trees and wildlife, on my local hills, saved by my community’s local efforts and funds, in my local city. I have learned to be grateful for these efforts when I stumble upon them, to see them as the gifts they are, the fruits of a generous spirit now grown rare. Here, I choose to give both my presence and attention. I take my dog and try to slow down. I pray.
The trees there abide, barely growing to the naked eye. They wrap their years around them like thin shawls, only perceptible in their rings. Within these circles there is a chronicle which remembers drought and plenty, heat and cold, sun and cloud. The lengths of the fallen trunks are patterned in sequences of mushrooms decomposing them so other lives may spring from the darkness of this death. These trees’ crowns sway in the breeze but refuse to bend to the headlines’ tyranny. They lend shade in the summer, gold in the autumn, admonishment in the winter, and resurrection in the spring. My hope is that the shade of these faithful witnesses may fall regularly in my presence as well.
Once this line of thinking is pursued it branches out and leads, like a spider’s web, to every corner of my life. And so the threads lead inevitably to hidden areas of hypocrisy and failure. This tempts me to rejoin the collective obfuscation, rationalization, and comparison which is the vernacular of our time. To ignore the personal flaws within my control and focus instead on “their” flaws. But this leaves me back at the start, half-alive and half-mad.
In truth, I control only one hypocrite on this earth: myself. And here, I am returned to sobriety. Despite my best efforts and intentions, my own way of life is plagued by imperfection, ignorance, and foolishness. Presence and attention are not enough. The human condition remains. Grace is required. Grace allows me to accept my limits and weaknesses as a human and carry on growing. Because I cannot live perfectly, I am free to live well. But then, grace insists that I must extend its mercy to everyone else I see. To resist this call is to risk rejecting grace itself. How can I claim it has visited me if I withhold it from my neighbor?
Some will quickly demand to know where grace’s limits lie then. Who is outside of it? I think it is doubtful you have tasted much of the grace I am attempting to describe if your first thought is about where that grace must not go once it has reached you. Not that no such limits exist. Rather, I am deeply suspicious when that is the initial impulse of a soul in debt to unmerited favor.
Wendell talks about this in a letter to his lifelong friend, Gary Snyder, in the wonderful book Distant Neighbors:
“If you don’t see how much badness comes from stupidity, ignorance, and confusion, etc. – if you don’t see how much badness is done by good, likable people; if you don’t love, or don’t know you love, people whose actions you deplore – then I guess you go too far into outrage, acquire diseased motives, quit having any fun, and get bad yourself.”
As I reflect on that warning, I know I am not generous enough. My good faith and good humor are rarely put to use. I find I’m more likely to speak my mind than be silent and listen. Years of this kind of solipsistic excess has made our culture sick, like too much alcohol or food makes a stomach sick. The evidence is found every day in our newspapers, our churches, our internet, and our creeks. We are vomiting it all up, and it is a foul harvest whose taste I recognize in my own heart.
My heart is diseased, but what is diseased may heal. Do we see that need to heal? Our attention is a commodity, and fear always baits it away from such modest visions. I can only speak from the background of my own faith, which is Christian. I have seen that tradition embrace a certainty that can only be accomplished by whittling God down into a manageable deity corralled and tamed by a maze of theological fences. This makes it easier to wield him as a weapon at our ideological enemies. There is far less effort given to wrestling out our relationship with his grace, which is why maybe so little of it seems to reveal itself in our presence and to our attention. Gratitude cannot survive long in such conditions. It is impossible to be grateful to that to which nothing is owed, and we cannot owe anything to what we believe we control. And once gratitude dies in a man, whatever virtues still endure in him will soon wither, leaving only a sapless husk behind.
Ultimately the yearning to capture some small measure of what makes life beautiful, of grace’s miracle, exists in us all. Many of us have just forgotten how. Presence and attention may humbly lead us back to ask what our fallible lives already define, and what they may define instead. Maybe our worst impulses, actions, and mistakes aren’t what define us in grace’s eyes. Maybe in understanding our common state we may be reminded to deal gently with the confusion and stupidity we all harbor and act upon. My wish is to offer my life increasingly to what grace whispers the world one day will be. May my years lend a syllable or two to such rumors.
Image Credit: Edward Henry Holder, “Coastal Scene” (1879)
