Digital Culture, Attention, School Studies, Mary Oliver, & Washing of Feet
by Erin Doom
Feast of the Holy Martyr Eupsychius of Caesarea; Holy Thursday in WestAnno Domini 2020, April 9
1. Essays & Reflections: Πρὀσεχε σεαθτῶ (Attend to Thyself): Attentiveness and Digital Culture by Fr. Maximos Constas
I believe Fr. Maximos Constas is one of today’s most important theologians. He is an Athonite monk who graduated from Harvard and is now back in the world serving as interim dean of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. He is beyond doubt the greatest living scholar on St. Maximos the Confessor. One of the first Daily Synaxis
posts included this piece on the iconography of the Annunciation
by Theophanes the Cretan.
Today, I offer you one of the best short reflections I’ve read on attention (or lack thereof, due to digital distractions), based on the Deuteronomic imperative to "Attend (or Give heed) to thyself" (Deut. 4:9 and 15:9). As we approach the end of Lent (East) or Holy Week (West) in the midst of coronavirus chaos, there couldn’t be a better time to heed that biblical mandate. Please read this reflection here.
2. Essays & Reflections: "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God" by Simone Weil
French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil begins this wonderful essay with the following:
The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.
It is the highest part of the attention only which makes contact with God, when prayer is intense and pure enough for such a contact to be established; but the whole attention is turned towards God.
Of course school exercises only develop a lower kind of attention. Nevertheless they are extremely effective in increasing the power of attention which will be available at the time of prayer, on condition that they are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone.
Surely that’s enough to convince you to attend to the entirety of this essay! It’s so good (and important) that I read it at least once or twice a year. Read it all here.
3. Essays & Reflections: "Why We Struggle to Pay Attention: The Trouble of Focusing in a Fractured World" by Alice Robb
Here’s a short piece on a new book by Casey Schwartz, Attention, A Love Story. It tells the story of using Adderall to strengthen her attention (in Schwartz’s words, "attention weaponised"). After a decade of chemically enhanced attention, however, she realized it was destroying her ability to pay attention, to engage in deep, sustained work. She turns to thinkers like David Foster Wallace and Simone Weil to offer a book that, according to Robb, "is an antidote to the countless manuals devoted to attention-hacking and technology detox, the tired denouncements of our iPhone dependence. She concerns herself instead with more profound questions: what does it mean to pay attention? What deserves our attention, and how do we decide?"
You can also get a taste of Schwartz's new book in her recent article, "How to Pay Attention in a Time of Crisis: A Reading List – For All of Us Who Are (Understandably) Distracted These Days."
Be sure to order a copy from Eighth Day Books.
4. (More) Books: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
by Nicholas Carr
While we’re on the theme of attention, here’s one more book recommendation. An excerpt from the Eighth Day Books review:
Carr claims that electronic reading, with all its hyperlinks and brightly-colored distractions, lights up the frontal cortex of our brains where short-term memory processes immediate experience, while reading conventional books exercises a different, deeper part of the brain associated with long-term memory.
Read the whole review here, get a copy from Eighth Day Books, and be sure to let the Daily Synaxis lead you to physical books (and poetry memorization) for the strengthening of your long-term memory!
5. Poetry: "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper? T
his grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
6. Bible:
Is. 65:8-16, Gen. 46:1-7, Prov. 23:15-24:5. Online here.
7. Liturgy for Holy Thursday in the West: Excerpt from a Homily on Holy Thursday at the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Thursday, April 17, 2014 by His Beatitude Patriarch Fouad Twal of Jerusalem
While he was washing the feet of the disciples, Jesus, reading wonder, surprise and astonishment on their faces, explains clearly and directly to them what he is doing: "Do you realize what I have done for you?" (Jn. 13:12) he asks. And without waiting for a reply, He himself explains the significance of the action He just made: "If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do" (Jn. 13, 14-15).
Dear brothers and sisters, conscious of being sinners, but confident in divine mercy, let us be washed by Christ, let us be reconciled in Him, to experience more deeply the joy of forgiveness. For a fruitful celebration of Easter, the Church asks the faithful during this time, to approach the sacrament of Penance, which resembles death and resurrection for every one of us.
Saint Peter who denies the Lord out of cowardice, Judas who betrays, and the disciples who squabble over who should be first, in a sense, all still live in each of us.
Following the counsel and example of our Pope Francis, let us not be afraid to approach the sacrament of Penance. Christ’s forgiveness is a source of internal and external serenity, and turns us into peacemakers in a world, where unfortunately, divisions, suffering and the dramas of injustice, hatred and violence continue to exist. However, we know that evil does not have the last word, because the crucified and resurrected Christ is the victor.
Dear friends, let us allow ourselves to be washed, so that we in turn may wash the feet of our brothers.
8. Word from the Fathers: On the Washing of Feet in the Gospel of John by St. Augustine of Hippo
For my western brethren on this Holy Thursday, I offer you St. Augustine’s reflection on the washing of the disciples feet in John 13:6-10. Here’s an excerpt from the full piece:
Jesus says to him, He that is washed needs not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit. Some one perhaps may be aroused at this, and say: "Nay, but if he is every whit clean, what need has He even to wash his feet?" […]
But what is this? What does it mean? And what is there in it we need to examine? The Lord says, "The Truth declares that even he who has been washed has need still to wash his feet." What, my brethren, what think you of it, save that in holy baptism a man has all of him washed, not all save his feet, but every whit; and yet, while thereafter living in this human state, he cannot fail to tread on the ground with his feet. And thus our human feelings themselves, which are inseparable from our mortal life on earth, are like feet wherewith we are brought into sensible contact with human affairs; and are so in such a way, that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (1 Jn. 1:8). And every day, therefore, is He who intercedes for us (Rom. 8:34), washing our feet. And that we too have daily need to be washing our feet, that is ordering aright the path of our spiritual footsteps, we acknowledge even in the Lord's prayer, when we say, "Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors (Mt. 6:12). "For if," as it is written, "we confess our sins, then verily is He," who washed His disciples' feet, "faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 Jn. 1:9), that is, even to our feet wherewith we walk on the earth.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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