Naming Our Devotion

Barrington has, of late, been my spiritual director. Barrington, for the unfamiliar, is our 9-year-old Welsh Corgi “puppy” and sage, and all through the winter months, those various times during the day when I would hook on his leash and open the door, he would step into the bitter cold, take a quick romp in the snow, make a necessary pause, then answer my call to return; there being little else of nature’s call to notice. But lately I can’t bring these little excursions to an end. Easing himself into the grass, he holds his head high in the breeze, listening, seeing, like a king surveying his realm. And then he sniffs…every blade of grass…in our yard and the next…and the next. He notices every new emergence and takes its measure, seeing, inhaling, attending.

All the while I am tugging at the leash calling, “Come on Barrington, I have work to do. Let’s go home.” I am impatient and in a hurry, preoccupied with everything but the moment. But for Barrington there is yet another blade of grass to nuzzle, another sound to hear, another breeze to catch in his coat. Only reluctantly – begrudgingly, I suspect – does he finally acquiesce and follow me up the steps and inside. Every time it is the same: slow, fascinated, affectionate attention to the smallest detail of his world.

And I am starting to learn. The world outside my door is not just utility; it isn’t just the distance between where I am and the next place I need to be, nor the innocuous matrix on which everything gets built, the warehouse I visit only to retrieve or extract something I need, or the vast trashcan for all that I no longer want. It is a vast and marvelous wonder. It is the world in which I live and move and have my being. I am its offspring. And standing in the midst of it on a bright spring morning, smelling every blade of grass and listening to the rustle of the breeze, just like Barrington if I had a tail I would wag it.

But Barrington has his work cut out with me because I still have much to learn. Attending, after all, is not my long suit. Evelyn Underhill once wrote: “We spend too much of our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, to do. None of them has ultimate significance except the verb...to be.” I suppose it could be true that “Being” has always been a challenge; I only know that it is in our time. Everything about our culture is geared toward wanting and having and doing. And we are busy in the accomplishment of it all. There doesn’t seem to be much time left for – or value placed on – simply being, and paying attention.

Oh, we read the numbers, we scan the papers, we listen to the news. We form opinions, we take action, we listen to music – at least we have it turned on, playing in the background while we busy ourselves with something else. We calculate, we plan, we synthesize and rationalize, we browse the inundation of catalogs in the mail to see if anything is new that we would hate to live without – all of which is to say that we know how to pay attention to some things. Meanwhile blossoms bulge and gloriously open and then brown and finally drop – having asked for nothing from us along the journey except our enjoyment of them, but being too often disappointed.

But if such inattention disappoints the flowers, it ultimately dissipates us who ignore them. We could learn from the story of miserable experience of Antaeus. In one of the old Greek stories, Antaeus is one of the giant children of Mother Earth. He always slept on the bare ground in order to conserve and increase his already colossal strength. Whenever he touched the earth, his strength revived. Once upon a time, Antaeus found himself in a wrestling match with Hercules, the heroic son of Zeus. After awhile, Hercules noticed that every time he seemingly got the best of Antaeus and threw him to the ground, the giant’s muscles swelled and a healthy flush suffused his limbs as Mother Earth revived him. Wising up, Hercules threw Antaeus down no more but held him high in the air, cracking his ribs one by one until he died.

When our living is removed from the ground it loses, like Antaeus, the strength to grapple with the complexities that confront us, and we become weaker and weaker in all the ways that finally matter. And along the way, as sympathetic deterioration, perhaps, or more likely collateral damage, the earth itself begins to suffer.

There is something earthy, to me, in the speech that Paul gives to the Athenians – a sense of grounding that could be useful to us, even if it didn’t have all that much impact on the Greeks. Having spent the day walking around the city, Paul calls attention to the all the various shrines that dot the landscape and honor the name of one supposed god after another. Paul even notices that they have erected one shrine to “an unknown God,” just in case they have left any out. “That’s the one I want to tell you about,” Paul begins. And then he goes on to attribute to this particular God the authorship of the world and everything in it. “And he doesn’t live inside brick and mortar,” Paul asserts. He isn’t the stuff of carvings or moldings or smelting or fabrication. God is the stuff of soil and water and earthworm and root, of wind and eagle and ocean wave and…

…you. We are God’s offspring, and look at us: we are not silver or gold or stone or silicon chip. We are earth and water and wind.”

Well, Paul didn’t really mention silicon chips, but you get the idea. And implicit in his description, I think, is the recognition that when we lose track of the earth and the earthiness of ourselves, we are perilously close to losing track of God. And separated from the very ground of our being, it wouldn’t take much to crack our ribs one by one until we die.

Whatever Earth Day may teach us; whatever it may inspire in us about conservation and caretaking and our own ultimate survival, perhaps it might also recover among us a different view of holiness – of where the earth comes from; where we come from; and viewing it all from a different point of value. Perspective, after all, can be everything.

In his beautiful book My Story as Told by Water, a book that is part memoir, part philosophical pondering, and part environmental activism, David James Duncan calls attention to this aching need for a different way of viewing our surroundings. A naturalist and fly fisherman who found his soul along the trout streams of Oregon and Montana, Duncan describes the frustration he feels at voter apathy when it comes to ballot initiatives that would preserve various stretches of river, and the various polls that attempt to measure public interest. According to him, pollsters ask the wrong questions. You just can’t “ask some overworked cluck, point-blank, whether he wants to spend more of his inadequate paycheck on electricity in order to help a few salmon over a dam” and expect a balanced answer, he insists, referring to a particular ballot initiative facing voters in his part of the country.

“The Columbia/Snake River Salmon poll I’d like to see might begin by asking the populace whether they love animals and birds, including their pets, and other humans, including their children; it might then ask whether they’d be willing to pay a doctor or vet to keep those children and pets alive; next it would ask whether they realize that the Columbia/Snake system is the great doctor and vet to the life of our entire region; then it would ask if they realize that our generation is presiding over a biological holocaust – a third of the native plant and animal species on the planet annihilated in our brief lifetimes; it would ask if they knew that nothing like this has ever happened, that even the end of the dinosaurs did not compare; it would ask how long they think they can live with the food chain, the atmosphere, the Web of Life in tatters; it would ask how long people are living now in tattered places like industrialized China, Honduras and Haiti, lowland Brazil; the Pentagon-enhanced portions of Utah; and when it finally reached the money question, my Salmon Poll might phrase it thus: ‘Would you be willing to sacrifice a few annual dollars in order to protect your life, your children’s lives, your entire biotic community, the very Web of Life, beginning with the Columbia and Snake rivers and their vanishing wild salmon?’

“But that’s too wordy for a poll. That’s the trouble with the Web of Life. Even in tatters it has an un-poll-ably large number of beautiful living parts. You can’t invoke those parts with numbers, or even with words, really. Yet mere numbers, evoking nothing but dollars on a rigged gaming table, can make the choice of lifelessness over Life sound like sound economic strategy.” [1]

All of which is why I plan to stick close to Barrington. What I already know is that we don’t love that which we do not notice – be that a neighbor, a spouse, God, or the earth that God created. And Barrington knows how to pay attention – grass blade by grass blade; scent by intriguing scent; sound by sound and bird by bird; taking his time to notice; hungry to be captivated by it all now that the snow has melted and the rumblings on the surface of the flower beds and lawns foretell a coming eruption of color and fragrance and singing and shade…

…for those who have the presence of mind to notice.

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it…

Barrington somehow seems to know it, to treasure it; to relish it. And I’m grateful – if occasionally impatient – that he is determined to teach me to do the same.

[1] David James Duncan, My Story As Told By Water (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2001) pp. 102-103.