Made You Look

In an ideal world, we’d all spend the month of January sleeping. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the New  Year – they’d all be behind us with their music and parties and food and drink and shopping and ritual and social  visits and we’d collapse into our beds for a month of quiet. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, Earth provides the  cold and ice, pushing us indoors, attempting to make our worlds smaller, simpler, maybe a little less frantic. Our  bodies enter a state of semi-hibernation naturally it seems, so all we need do is turn everything off, and give in to  rest.  

Our culture, though, this civilization we’re so proud of with its booming economy and free market, really  doesn’t care if our bodies need to slow down. There’s money to be made, and we need to get to it.  If we want time to rest, time to get quiet, we’re on our own. The creation of noise is a necessary part of  21st century capitalism. We are all commodities in the Attention Economy. Pulling the shades or shutting down  our phones are not viable options if this fast paced world is going to keep going around. Because today, nothing can happen without attention. It used to be that if you wanted to build something,  you needed infrastructure, labor, capital. Today, you need those things, and you need attention. You need people  to know what you’re doing, to support it, to love it, publicly. Everything is public. Everything is up for discussion.  And without attention, there is no support, there is no capital, nothing is built or designed or created.  It's true large and small scale. We’re trying to build beloved community right here. We have labor,  infrastructure, and capital. But if we can’t get attention, we can’t get people, we can’t build anything. Last week  I was asked by a visitor who loved the service why this place isn’t filled to the rafters. What’s happening here is  so wonderful; why isn’t it standing room only?  

Because in today’s culture, it’s very hard to get people’s attention.  

~Drop Something on the Floor ~ 

You were listening to me. I had what’s called voluntary attention. You were hearing my words. You had – and have again - chosen, at least if you’re in the room, to give me your nearly undivided attention. You might  have also be tweeting or posting or texting, but for much of the 20 minutes I preach on Sundays, I usually have  the attention of the people in the room.  

But then something fell to the ground and that thing got your attention. That’s involuntary attention. You  had chosen to listen to me. You did not choose to listen to the crash. You just did it. It happens with or without a  choice. 

The people in the attention business want your voluntary attention. Politicians want you to notice their  votes and comments and speeches. Newscasters want you to tune in to their channels and hear their messages and  opinions. Writers want you to sit undisturbed to read their words. Clergy want you to be attentive to their sermons.  Musicians and singers want you to lean in and hear their music. Teachers want you to absorb their lectures. We  are all in the attention business and none of us knows exactly how to get you to pick us over the millions of other  choices you have in a given moment. We don’t know how to get your voluntary attention. This is not a nut any of  us have cracked. 

But we have learned how to get your involuntary attention. We do know how to slam a pile of books on  the floor or how to send a tray of champagne glasses crashing to the ground. We know how to get you to turn  without thinking toward a screaming crisis of our own making.  

I mean, every child knows how to do this. You’re standing with some friends in the middle-school hallway  and one friend widens her eyes and says, “Here comes the principal!” and every kid turns their heads. The kid  then laughs and says, “Made you look.”  

We can all make you look. We can make you shift your attention from where it is to something else for a  moment. 

In the absence of knowing how to get anyone to sink into a juicy idea undisturbed, in other words, to offer  their voluntary attention, we’ve crafted a culture that thrives on the incessant slamming of books on the floor.  I’m guessing that in the time I’ve been talking, which is about 6 minutes, all of our phones have tried to  get our attention at least once. If we haven’t turned off notifications, there has likely been a ding with a text, 

possibly from a friend, but maybe from a politician asking for money or a company telling you that scarf you  were looking at three weeks ago is now on sale. I don’t watch television news, but if you do, you know the  newscaster is competing against their own scroll screaming from beneath their faces telling you there’s breaking  news that requires your attention right now. 

In January, we should all go to sleep. The human body, the human mind, needs time to rest. Planet Earth  provides just that. But we don’t allow it to happen.  

We don’t give each other a break. Society doesn’t give us a break. 

And when we get used to an onslaught of crises, it gets even harder to get our attention, requiring louder  and louder crashes, moving us further from the possibility of silence and stillness and healing. The other response to the constant screaming from every direction is that everything starts to feel the same.  The sale at H&M has the same urgency as the state sponsored shooting of an innocent mother in her car which  has the same urgency as the oncoming winter storm which has the same urgency as the death of an actor which  has the same urgency as a famine in the Sudan. Everything feels flat. Everything feels normal. And our response  time to each crash gets briefer and briefer requiring an increased volume and number of crashes.  We even, at this point, choose the crash over other things. The psychology of scrolling is based on this  phenomenon. You have one thing to pay attention to and in the time in takes for your thumb to scroll down, you  have another thing to pay attention to. One vertical video after another giving you hundreds of different crashes  creating, essentially, a white noise of emergencies.  

With an inability to lean in, to focus on one thing, to offer our full attention, our spirits begin to fragment.  We feel the internal frenzy, the disconnection, the many pieces of our minds rattling around, unable to click  together to form one long, deep thought. 

Silence is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. Silence is the healing balm  soothing the broken edges, bandaging the myriad pieces of ourselves and healing us, so we can live in right  relationship with the world around us, so we can live deeply, attentively, as our most authentic selves, the selves  we can’t usually even hear over all the noise. 

Silence is the place clarity is formed. It is where we are most honest, where we can be sure of what’s real.  It is in the silence we can listen to the wind and the trees and the winter birds call and it’s in the silence we can  listen to our deepest selves.  

Silence is also an act of resistance. In an economy that requires our constant willingness to commodify, to  pay attention, we have the freedom to shut it all down. Non-participation is a choice.  And it’s a choice I’m making with some frequency. I’m not making it so much because I want to but  because I need to. Maybe you need to also. 

Maybe you’re feeling the fraying of your mind the way I am. 

Maybe you’re living a shallow life that can’t penetrate the distractions, the noise, the crashing, the real  and virtual sirens screaming for attention as I do. 

Maybe you’re yearning for long thoughts that lead down unpaved roads with unexpected conclusions. Maybe you’re hoping for a life of depth, of meaning, of rich silences from which emerges beauty.  I know I am.  

I’m not on social media for the month of January, which is a semi-annual fasting for me. It means the  outside voices are silent. There are no crashes to force my attention. No one can make me look. That time is spent sitting with people – sometimes with you – over coffee to talk about everything or  nothing. Or it’s spent writing or reading or, cooking or engaging other activities that need both my body and my  mind.  

Because what I want of my one life is to live out of passion, out of profound commitment to Love. I want  to live boldly. I want to live deeply. I want to connect with people and with the creatures of this planet openly and  authentically. And that only happens when I shut out the noise and enter my life silence.  

Rejecting the all the crashing around me, sitting still and breathing, is the beginning of the Life Well Lived.  So I turn my attention, my voluntary attention, inward. I can’t sleep for a month, but I can get very quiet.  I can heal my mind and my spirit with open spaces and slow movements. We all can. As an act of resistance we  can all take naps and attend 5 hour operas and read epic novels that get lost in language and wind their way into  meaning. 

This sermon wasn’t meant to get you going. Wasn’t even designed to inspire you. This is a sermon of  invitation into a bigger, deeper, maybe even a fiercer life that is born of the quiet. It will only be memorable if  you accept the invitation. If not, it’s just more noise, quickly forgotten when something else comes crashing  down… 

We’ll close with this poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called Keeping Quiet 

Now we will count to twelve 

and we will all keep still. 

This one time upon the earth, 

let’s not speak any language, 

let’s stop for one second, 

and not move our arms so much. 

It would be a delicious moment, 

without hurry, without locomotives, 

all of us would be together 

in a sudden uneasiness. 

The fishermen in the cold sea 

would do no harm to the whales 

and the peasant gathering salt 

would look at his torn hands. 

Those who prepare green wars, 

wars of gas, wars of fire, 

victories without survivors, 

would put on clean clothing 

and would walk alongside their siblings 

in the shade, without doing a thing. 

What I want shouldn’t be confused 

with final inactivity: 

life alone is what matters, 

I want nothing to do with death. 

If we weren’t unanimous 

about keeping our lives so much in motion, 

if we could do nothing for once, 

perhaps a great silence would 

interrupt this sadness, 

this never understanding ourselves 

and threatening ourselves with death, 

perhaps the earth is teaching us 

when everything seems to be dead 

and then everything is alive. 

Now I will count to twelve 

and you keep quiet and I’ll go.