Newsletter #117
On Being Present
A perfectly good day nearly spoiled.
Be Careful What You Film
I’ve recently enjoyed Katherine Johnson Martinko’s newsletter, The Analog Family. The clever title invokes a common theme in recent cultural discussions of family life and technology: less is usually more.
In a recent post entitled, “Be Present,” Martinko reflects on her experience attending a musical festival at which her son was to play the piano. Electronic devices were permitted, but only in the designated “filming area.” (As an aside, I think it was a merciful thing that the event organizer thought to limit cameras to one area, as opposed to having them scattered throughout the audience’s viewing angles.)
Consider Martinko’s explanation of her choice not to film:
I declined the offer—not because I didn’t want a record of my son’s many months of practice (I did), but because I wanted to be fully present for his moment of execution. To witness it through my phone camera would make me slightly less present. I might think subconsciously about the angle and lighting and trying to hold it steady while also paying attention to him.
So, instead, I sat in the church pew, phoneless, and focused every bit of my attention on his performance. I never took my eyes off him. I listened to the phrases he’d practiced over and over again at home, and noticed how grand they sounded in this large space, on a fancy piano. I listened to the songs as if they were new. I noted his body language, sensed his tension, and watched as he pushed through and overcame it. I saw him relax as he settled into the comfortable knowledge that he could do this, that he would succeed—and I saw the happy pride beam from his face as he stood up for a bow and looked right at me, no phone obstructing our eye contact.
Martinko puts her finger on something I’ve increasingly thought for years: we’re missing what’s happening!
Whether it was the recent solar eclipse seen throughout my region and other parts of the country, or the people blessed enough to be on the stage last week at the NFL Draft, we’re frittering away beautiful, unique experiences by desperately trying to “capture” or “document” them. Instead of a quick snapshot, then full immersion in the remainder of a moment, we forfeit that for a shaky, ephemeral, 10- or 20-second clip.
The Glory of Attention
I do hesitate to lament the problem too much. My fear with these kinds of indictments of our modern culture of attention (inattention?) is that they start to feel as though they’re a dime a dozen. Truly, how many articles, blogs, podcasts, and books are all designed to help us rethink our “screen time” as families? The familiarity of the concerns and practical suggestions start to wash over us like the morning dew. It comes and goes as quickly as we feel it.
However, sometimes we need our own personal encounters with distraction and misguided attempts to mediate our experiences to remind us of the major problem we have on our hands.
After over a week of some kind of sickness in our household, we were able to take our kids to the St. Louis Zoo this past Thursday. The weather was nice, so we thought it was time to have our first family trip to our region’s excellent (and free!) zoo. Unfortunately, it got off to a frustrating start as we entered the River’s Edge. This is a great stop on the trip because you soon encounter perhaps my favorite exhibit: the hippopotamuses. I don’t what it is about them, but they’re magnificent.
Except, this trip was accompanied by thousands of school-age kids taking year-end field trips. As we entered the hippo exhibit, the glass surrounding these beasts was cluttered with elementary-age kids in their matching t-shirts (to make them easy for chaperones to spot no doubt). Rather than stepping back two feet from the tank and enabling everyone to have a clear line of sight, they crowded the tank, often pressing their snotty faces against it.
On one level, this behavior is totally predictable and understandable. But what a few kids were doing—and one in particular—made me nearly lose my cool. One kid raised an iPad to his face and aimed it toward one hippo’s face. (He must have had it two inches form his face, and barely that from the hippo’s face.) He just held it there, presumably recording. He wasn’t taking a picture. He wasn’t taking a turn, then moving on. He wasn’t being stopped by a chaperone. And he certainly wasn’t beholding the majesty of the hippo.
Meanwhile, I had to whisk my son out of the stroller and do my best to leverage our way closer to the tank so he could experience the awe I experienced the first time I laid eyes on one of these creatures years ago. Obviously, a two-year-old is going to experience such a sight differently than I did as a young adult. But being blocked by an older kid left me pretty sour.
Now one must consider a sobering question about this encounter. Who’s to say this kid didn’t learn such behavior from his own parents? There’s no need to blame kids for habits of attention (inattention) they learned from mom and dad. I’ve had a few of my own aha moments in the last two years when I was reading an article or email on my phone, only to glance at one of my children doing something cute that I was missing. Or worse, I miss the fact that one of them was watching me staring at a rectangle in my hand a lot more intently than I usually watched them.
Attention is a gift we give to our children and to all God’s creation. I’m haunted and inspired by John Ames’s casual but poignant remark in Gilead: “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” Of course, attention is also something we owe to others. Indeed, in our present attention economy, it’s a gift.
Hear Martinko again on this point:
In a phone-saturated culture, attention feels like a rich and luxurious gift. To feel the full glow of someone’s being attuned to your own, committed to hearing what you’re saying, listening, and then responding without distraction, leaves me feeling intensely satisfied. We humans are hardwired to crave this kind of connection. And while I took it for granted for decades, assuming that full attention was a basic prerequisite for one-on-one conversation, the presence of phones has made it feel like an ever-rarer experience.
We need to hear this, meditate on it, and act on it. We desperately need an overhaul of our habits of attention. And it seems only sensible that Christians—those to whom God has entrusted His Word—would take the lead in modeling what it really means to hear.
We’re called to hear and heed God’s Word, and that Word calls us to hear and heed people. Certainly, we don’t heed or mind people in the exact way that we mind God. Then again, Paul says in Colossians 3 that whatever we do unto others we should do as if we have done it unto the Lord. Why would that not apply to listening?
Parents, teachers, preachers, leaders, and children (and zoo-goers!): we need to strive to embrace daily opportunities to behold God’s world, including His creatures—human and otherwise.
Follow-Up:
In Newsletter #93, I wrote about the way we speak about others—especially trying to do so with care.
In Matthew Lee Anderson’s newsletter, the Path Before Us, he has recently shared some insights on the nature of and need for fraternal correction. More recently, he has written about healing from slander—a rather practical but overlooked subject! Below is a brief excerpt on the former, followed by an excerpt on the latter:
There is no doubt that extending fraternal correction to another person is hard. Few of us live in communities that regularly extend real accountability to each other—much less extend that accountability with a graciousness that might allow it to be heard as ‘good news.’ While we have much to learn about how to season our correction so that those who hear it are primed to respond well, the first step in such a process is investigating our own hearts to ensure we are not guilty of that which we object to. (This is, I take it, the plank/eye principle that Jesus lays down in Matthew 7:3-5).
The wounds caused by slander or defamation are peculiar. Insofar as they involve our reputation, they harm us in an arena that we have (at best) only indirect control over. While we might attempt to transform people’s perceptions of us by changing the appearances (“reputation management”), directly defending our reputation directly rarely works. As Socrates notes in the Apology, he is tasked with trying to clear his name in the course of an afternoon against stories that have built up across decades. Yet while reputations are exterior to us, they are also deeply intimate: to lose our good name means to lose standing with the community. And few things matter more to us than the respect and love we receive from others.
You can subscribe to Anderson’s newsletter for an affordable annual fee.
What I’m Reading:
James K. Dew, Jr, Ronnie P. Campbell, Jr., eds. Natural Theology: Five Views.
Quote of the Week:
“Creation” names the ongoing reality of human beings, animals, plants, land, and weather, all connected to each other and bound to God as their source, inspiration, and end. As such, the teaching of creation provides a moral and spiritual map that enables us to see the significance of things and then move faithfully through the world. When we confine creation to an originating event, we lose the sense of it as a dynamic place so cherished that God enters into covenant relationship with it (Gen. 9:8-17), so beautiful that God promises to renew it (Isa. 65:17-25), and so valuable that God takes up residence within it (John 1:14 and Rev. 21:1-4). Creation is not a vast lump of valueless matter. It is God’s love made visible, fragrant, tactile, audible, and delectable.
Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation.
Common Grace Wisdom (CGW): Wildlife and “Public Science.”
“Science” is one of those words regularly wielded like a hammer against ordinary folk. It’s sometimes deployed to enforce social conformity, sometimes to push specific public policy preferences, and other times keep simpletons in their place.
Admittedly, this isn’t the entire picture. Sometimes people who haven’t done the hard work of study, research, investigation, and experimentation feel their opinions count as much as those who have, and this is folly also. It’s some of the rotten fruit of anti-intellectualism and populism that has a long and frustrating pedigree in American life.
However, I want to propose that the public—scientifically credentialed or not—has a crucial role in the enterprise we call “science” (which, at its core, just means knowledge). How we come about this knowledge, and especially what to do with it, remain ongoing areas for debate. But simple articles like this one remind us that the scientific endeavor, especially as it concerns how we observe and document happenings in the animal kingdom, require the participation of everyone.
How do we know if and when animals are truly extinct? How do we track the movements and well-being of various species? Certainly, colleges and universities, departments of natural resources, and the like are necessary. But we also need hunters, game wardens, fishermen, and informed citizens.
We all have a role in this kind of science, and many others. We’ll never know what we know (or don’t know) without lots of different knowers doing “science.”
Parting Shot
I have been an avid listener to podcasts over the last six or seven years. However, this post (challenge?) by Brad East has prompted me to consider his own experiment in taking a break from them.
