When you don't know what to do

I have a friend—a beloved woman, some years my senior, for whom I’m so grateful—who shares her wisdom with me from time to time. Back in November, after a difficult move of my father from his apartment into assisted living, which had been preceded by a couple difficult months, she sent me an email of encouragement. She included the words of a verse from the Old Testament, the book of II Chronicles. It’s a verse I’ve long loved, but it hadn’t come to my mind in a while.

“We don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

The story of the verse is that the people of Judah were surrounded by a vast enemy army and the King didn’t know what to do. So he prayed aloud a prayer that asked the Lord for help, ending with this admittance of helplessness yet a face turned toward God.

After he had prayed, someone announced he had a message from the Lord. “Do not be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army. For the battle is not yours, but God’s….[S]tand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will give you.” Then the King and his people fell to their knees and worshipped God.

The next morning, the men went out to face the opposing army. Instead of taking up weapons, the King told them to sing praises to the Lord. They began, and while they sang, the Lord set ambushes for the invading army. The people of Judah were saved.

That’s the story in which this wonderful line is anchored. My story doesn’t match that story, and I’m sure yours doesn’t either. There’s no enemy invasion on my block, no need for marching out to battle or the setting of ambushes. Yet, life is complex and often heavy. I’m so glad my friend reminded me of this line. In turn, I’m passing it on to you.

“We don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

~~~

[photo: polar bears at Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, Minnesota ]

2022: The Year of Repair

Alan Jacobs, author and professor, recently declared on his blog that 2022 is "The Year of Repair." For himself and for his readers, he urged stopping the focus on disruption and instead focus on fixing what needs to be fixed, which can mean small things like mending a shirt or tending to an overgrown garden. Or big things, like fixing a broken friendship or making even a dent in racial disparity. He included a line from Unapologetic by Francis Spufford: “Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know.”

Good food for thought here.

The Duty of Delight

I've been reading The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day. At 693 pages of small print, this compilation gathers her journal entries from 1934, at the age of 36 years, through 1980, the year of her death at age 83. Based on her work with the poor in New York City for most of her adult life, Dorothy Day is currently being considered for sainthood by the Vatican. In addition to her work with the poor through her community, the Catholic Worker, Day also wrote about 6 books, including The Long Loneliness.

I'm only halfway through this volume of her diaries, but what hits me every time I open the book is how human Day is. Many of her entries are filled with statements of honest complaint, such as how sore her legs and feet are, how tired she is, how frustrating is a person in her life, how upset she is with someone else, how discouraged she is, how little time she has for herself. Yet she kept getting up every day (well nearly every day) and being about her very difficult work. The title of the book comes from her mention, multiple times of a phrase from John Ruskin, "The duty of delight." A footnote in the book said, "this phrase came to serve for Dorothy as a call to mindfulness in the face of drudgery and sorrow."

Here's an entry of Day's from July 9, 1951:

"This diary could start with the chronicling of aches and pains—rheumatism, lumbago, etc., every day. It also could go on to list work done and that would give satisfaction. So many hours at the ms., letter-writing, talking to visitors, odds and ends of housework, wash, caring for the children, so much that does not show, that does not give one a sense of thinks accomplished....

The duty of delight—as Ruskin says.

Today we have a picnic in the woods. The air is sweet with milkweed in bloom. The honeysuckle is past, the sweet clover goes on all summer. ..."


The duty of delight. I like this reminder very much.

~

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Filling with light

The last couple months I've been reading through the Gospels using The Message paraphrase by Eugene Peterson. Reading through the eleventh chapter of Luke, here's what caught my attention: "Your eye is a lamp, lighting up your whole body. If you live wide-eyed in wonder and belief, your body fills with light."

Maybe as a child, like me, you learned and sang the song, "This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine," based on other translations of this verse. The light in me for others. Yes to this; a wonderful thing to be taught early in life. But I appreciate this additional twist that Peterson gives, this emphasis on opening outward, "living wide-eyed in wonder and belief," not in the sense of responsibility but in the joyful sense of becoming filled with light.

Sprinklers and Robins in Times of Drought

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Here in Minnesota, as in much of the United States, we’re in a drought. While watering of lawns is discouraged, strategic watering along the root zone of trees is encouraged, and so we’ve set up this old sprinkler to occasionally deliver a small targeted dose to our beloved teenaged river birch tree lest it fail to thrive. Yesterday, shortly after the sprinkler was turned on, a family of robins appeared and stood and shook their feathers under the falling streams. This smaller female stayed around longer and was particularly intent on getting what she needed. A drink. Can you see her sticking her beak in the spray, right at the source? She drank again and again. I’m so glad I got this shot; I’m so glad she got some water. This morning I read a poem in Christian Wiman’s collection, “Joy.” The poem is by Norman MacCaig and is called “One of the Many Days.” Here’s the line that jumped out at me: “I watched / a whole long day / release its miracles.”

Tiers of Attention

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Another book I've been reading is RAPT: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher (2009). Gallagher writes to turn our attention toward things that matter, because the things that matter most may not be what gets our attention first. She gives the example of going bird watching and becoming so enamored with the brilliant cardinals that quickly come into view that you tend to not see the more elusive or less colorful birds. This is exactly the scenario in my backyard. I look out the window, and, Oh look, there's a beautiful cardinal! And there's another! The cardinals tie a tether around my attention, and I never look for most of the other species of birds that are circling my yard just beyond the cardinals. Seeing the cardinals is an example of what Gallagher calls “bottom-up” attention, in which you go for the lowest hanging fruit and stop there. The problem with that approach is that there is so much more to see and learn and think about. Let’s aim instead for the “top-down” approach, urges Gallagher, and choose our focus with intention.

I’ve been watching my yard more carefully the last few days. What of the small birds that rustle the lilac bushes or that seem to shoot straight up through the blue spruce? What birds go with what song? I hear a multitude of melodies. Blue jays are another bird easy to see although they aren’t as common as cardinals. Yesterday, a blue joy slammed into my living room window, right in front of me, and bounced off as if to jealously warn me not to get too carried away aiming for sightings of birds of a more subtle variety.

Of course Gallagher’s goal is not to warn us about thinking too narrowly about birds but rather to consider carefully the thoughts that we too easily allow to capture and predominate our thinking. Given all that's gone on this past year, in the world, our nation, our cities, our personal lives, it's definitely been a year in which our attention has been grabbed and often by the bottom-up news, messages, and fears. The cardinal flits, the blue jay slams, the statistics flash, the sound byte lands and our attention is no longer our own. Pull it back, own it, I tell myself.

Gallagher writes, “Deciding what to pay attention to for this hour, day, week, or year, much less a lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your quality of life largely depend on how you handle it.”

~~~

[Photo: Tulips seen on a morning walk. A house further down the block had much flashier tulips set in a large garden. I almost took a picture of those tulips. But then I saw these, tulips of a more humble variety, hugging the street.]

How Not to be Afraid: On Fear and Loving Our Neighbors and the World

When I opened How Not to be Afraid: Seven Ways to Live When Everything Seems Terrifying, by Gareth Higgins, founder and editor of The Porch (“a slow conversation about beautiful and difficult things”) I expected to discover ways to not be afraid of tornadoes or flagged biopsy findings or pink slips or out-of-control worldwide pandemics. I thought the book would deliver ways to circumvent the pounding heart or racing mind on sleepless nights. But that wasn’t exactly the book Higgins wrote.

Higgins didn’t write to describe ways to combat fear but rather to describe living in a way that is bigger than fear, a way so full of love and care for this often oh-so-scary but rich and beautiful world, that fear is dwarfed. Here’s how to take your eyes off the fear that holds you and instead open them outward, Higgins is saying on these pages.

Early in the book I was attracted to what Higgins wrote about the stories we tell ourselves:

“Stories of connection, courage, creativity, and the common good are more true but less frequently told. Given that the brain more easily recalls shocks than wisdom and notices spectacular more easily than gradual change, these better stories need to be spoken more often with more imagination. That doesn’t always mean they need to be longer. Love your neighbor as yourself is a very short story indeed, but it may contain the secret of how all life can experience its own abundance.”

As I kept turning the pages, I realized more and more that Higgins is calling his readers to attend not only to the stories we tell ourselves but to the stories each of us are helping to write for our neighbors and the world.

~~~

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