Attending with love to the everyday – 12.10.2012

… there is no substitute for learning to be a Christian by being in the presence of significant lives made significant by being Christian. … Significance suggests importance… lives that make a difference and that demand acknowledgement.   But the lives of significance I began to notice were not significant in any of those ways.  Rather, they were lives of quiet serenity, capable of attending with love to the everyday without the need to be recognized as “making a difference”.  (Stanley Hauerwas:  Hannah’s Child)

Stanley Hauerwas is a prominent American theologian.  He grew up in a Methodist home in rural Texas, but never could manage to get converted, he says, so he became a theologian.  His previous career was bricklayer, and about that he wrote:  I write like I learned to lay brick. You do it because you have to get it done before it rains.  He is one of the most loving, insightful and irascible Christians I know of.

He thinks then that the point is to be capable of attending with love...  But he also says we don’t achieve this all the time.  Christians fall down and get up again, over and over, as the early monks discovered.  We are capable of attending with love.  A lot of people are not.  Perhaps as time goes by it becomes more and more our nature.  The word attending matters.  We know about attending, attention, paying attention, because this is at the heart of our contemplative prayer.  It is something we learn and practise, in silence and stillness.  We become less scattered and more focussed.  It becomes less threatening for us to pay attention through the rough times as well as the smooth. 

Attending with love, he writes.  The test of our prayer, the only test of whether it is “working”, whether we are “getting anything out of it”, is the question whether love is being released and facilitated in us.  If the prayer is for anything, if it has a payoff, to put it crudely, it is that we find ourselves to have become more capable of love, more lovingly insightful, lovingly patient. 

Then he says, Attending with love to the everyday...  Not necessarily the big things, although they happen too.  But pickling the beetroot, talking to some old bloke, and making a couple of sensible decisions, may well be the area and scope of attending with love today.  In the Rule of St Benedict, ordinary tasks matter just as singing the Psalms , and the garden tools of the monastery are to be cared for the same as vessels of the altar.  It is very much the opposite of the throw-away society – the everyday is where we practise our faith.  Stanley Hauerwas’s wife was bi-polar.  He knew over some 25 years of this what it meant to attend with love to the everyday. 

And then he writes, without the need  to be recognised as making a difference...  Some people seem to come with a kind of inner built-in meter, which monitors, measures and permanently records how much others were grateful – or how they were insufficiently grateful.  It is necessary in the world of careers to have an up-to-date CV –I think the trendy word is resumé, which details all our shining achievements thus far, more or less accurately.  But people of significance, Hauerwas discovered, are those of quiet serenity, capable of attending with love to the everyday without the need to be recognized as making a difference.