Sacred Attention: A Spiritual Practice for Finding God in the Moment
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About this ebook
Just One Moment of Close Attention Can Be a Prayer to God
"Does God communicate through the natural world? Through the slug on the compost pile, the leaf on the lawn, the stone tumbled on the beach, the air that feeds my lungs, the dreams that fill my nights? How will I know unless I pay attention?"
—from the Introduction
Paying attention is rarely easy to do. It requires focus, patience and a willingness to slow down—traits that are hard to come by in this hurry-up world. But close attention to even one small piece of creation, one object, person, routine, image, word or scripture, can become a prayer to God, opening a channel of communication between you and the Divine to allow for deep spiritual growth.
In this inspiring guide, you will discover ways to develop a practice of attention as a means of talking—and listening—to God. Framed on the Christian liturgical year and paired with images of the seasons of the earth, each chapter includes an insightful and poignant narrative which illustrates the surprising richness to be found in every attention-getting moment. Following each narrative is a prayer, suggested scripture readings and a specific exercise you can use to develop your own practice of attention as a means to better connect with God.
Accessible, humorous and meaningful, these words and practices will lead you further along your path toward discovering a deeper awareness of yourself and your relationship to all that is around you—and within you.
Margaret D. McGee
Margaret D. McGee, a writer, teacher, and leader of spiritual workshops and retreats, is author of Sacred Attention: A Spiritual Practice for Finding God in the Moment (SkyLight Paths), and Stumbling Toward God: A Prodigal's Return. Her haiku have been published in journals such as The Heron's Nest, bear creek haiku, and Wisteria. Her website, www.IntheCourtyard.com, hosts a forum to write and share haiku in response to the sacred writings of world religions.
Read more from Margaret D. Mc Gee
Haiku—The Sacred Art: A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stumbling Toward God: A Prodigal's Return Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Sacred Attention
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I loved the idea behind this book and the individual stories were charming and wise. And yet the book just did not grab me at some fundamental level; I have no urge to try any of the exercises or put any of McGee's suggestions into practice. I would recommend this book for liberal Christians looking for a flexible structure to help them explore the spiritual aspects of their faith.
Book preview
Sacred Attention - Margaret D. McGee
Introduction
SLOW DOWN—PAY ATTENTION
19 FEBRUARY.
First salmonberry blossom. Most bushes still bare and brown, except for fat, velvety, silver-green buds at the elbows of the branches.
Shortly after my husband, David, and I moved to our house in the woods, I started to keep a nature diary. Most entries were brief, and one or two a week were plenty. My only rule was that each entry be specific to a particular plant, animal, or state of weather on a particular day.
4 MAY.
Salmonberry bloom almost finished; a single magenta blossom left in the middle of a row of hard, green berries fuzzed with pink hairs.
Before I could describe the salmonberry bush, I had to look at it with care. I needed to be close enough to touch, smell, and, if possible, taste.
7 JULY.
Ate thimbleberry, Pacific blackberry, and salmonberry on my walk today, each its own blend of tart, sweet, and bitter.
I started the diary to learn about the environment of my new home, and also, as a writer, to lay up professional material. My visual memory is not good. The diary would be a treasure chest that could be plundered for season-specific details any time of the year. What I did not expect was how keeping the diary would affect my prayer life. In helping me pay attention to God’s work, my nature diary helped me pay attention to God. It changed the very meaning of the word prayer for me.
When I was about seven, my mother taught me the classic bedtime prayer, Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
followed by requests to God for blessings on family, friends, and anyone else who occurred to me at the moment. I knew then what it meant to pray—it meant talking to God. The prayers I learned by rote or made up myself, the prayers recited or heard at church, they were all messages to God. When printed on the page, a prayer looked just like a letter, starting with Dear God
and ending with Amen,
the ecclesiastical equivalent of Very truly yours.
When said out loud, a prayer was like half of a conversation—the half in which I got to do all the talking.
Growing up, I learned about the other side of prayer—the listening side.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
1 JOHN 4:16
I began to understand that, if God is with us—within, among, and between every atom and being—then a conversation with God is not with a remote and distant Being, but with a fellow pilgrim. One who may be as interested in the conversation as I am.
In the best conversations, both parties listen and respond, opening up a channel of energy that flows both ways. This energy has the power to heal wounds. Spark ideas. It carries transformation in its very nature. It makes love.
Paying attention matters.
Unfortunately, paying attention does not come easy for me. I am not very good at it. Keeping a nature diary made me aware of how rarely I slowed down and looked closely at anything. When I took the time to stop, look, and listen, what I saw and heard always turned out to be unexpectedly rich. It was as if I had encountered a language both new and old, strange and familiar, prehistoric and alive. God’s language. I began to wonder about all the ways that God might speak in and through creation.
Does God communicate through the natural world? Through the slug on the compost pile, the leaf on the lawn, the stone tumbled on the beach, the air that feeds my lungs, the dreams that fill my nights? How will I know unless I pay attention?
Does God communicate through my work? Through the ups and downs, the triumphs and failures, of my everyday tasks? How will I know unless I pay attention?
Does God communicate through other people? If I am made in God’s image, then so is my husband, David. And so is the kind neighbor who helped us build our arbor. Oh … and that annoying co-worker who never stops talking about herself.
And so are any number of people who may strap bombs to their bodies, then try to use death to change the world. Every one of them is made in God’s image. That’s how they are made. Just like me.
God speaks through every single human relationship, direct or indirect. I know that. Still, it can be so difficult to pay attention.
To get better at paying attention, I needed to practice.
One summer near the end of my little brother Brian’s grade school years, our father installed a basketball hoop above the garage door and spent time with each of his kids teaching us how to shoot hoops. I quickly tired of the sport, but the hoop attracted neighborhood boys, who spent long hours shooting hoops with Brian after school. They spent so much time at it, I finally asked my dad, If practice makes perfect, why aren’t any of them perfect shooters by now?
Dad, the former high school basketball coach, answered, They’re just horsing around. You don’t get better unless you practice right. Get in position, aim, follow through, watch the ball. Their shooting doesn’t improve because they don’t pay attention to what happens when they shoot.
To get better at paying attention, I needed to practice. And I needed to pay attention to what happened during practice.
That is what this book is all about. It tells of moments when God came knocking on the door, looking for conversation, asking for attention. Saying, Slow down, look closely. Watch me work and see what happens.
Sometimes the process of discovery is fun. Other times it is more like peeling bandages from a wound I would rather keep hidden. The result, however, is always healing. Transforming. Writing these stories down was one way of paying attention to them. Reading the stories alone or with friends is another, sparking memories of other attention-getting moments and ideas for fresh ways to practice.
Paying attention reveals the newness of all things, so the stories in this book come from all seasons of the year. Most of them are from my own experience. A few come from people who have generously shared their stories with me. I have also drawn on scripture passages that resonate with the themes in these stories, sounding echoes of the common human experience from generations past. The writers and translators of these passages did their best to express a living relationship to God in their own words. In my writing, I generally try to avoid referring to God with gendered or hierarchical language, but things were different back then. When I read the Bible, it helps me to remember that, to the generations who come after us, we are going to sound odd in ways we can’t now conceive. We can only ask that they read our words with generous hearts, looking always for the truth that lives and breathes and reaches out to new seekers through the ages.
Since I am grounded in the Episcopal tradition, I write from the Christian perspective and relate the stories to the seasons in the church’s liturgical calendar. My hope is that people of all faiths will look through this lens and recognize God’s universal presence.
About the Liturgical Calendar and Sacred Attention
Above my desk hangs a calendar that starts on January 1 and ends on December 31—one year containing twelve months. Each year of a person’s life also contains twelve months, but the years are counted from birthday to birthday. And a gardener’s year might start and end with the first crocus that pokes up through the last melting snow—an elastic twelve-month period that starts around the same time each year, give or take a few days.
The liturgical year of the church, like the gardener’s year, is an elastic twelve months that starts around the same time each year, give or take a few days. Like the span of a person’s life, the liturgical year begins in