Paying Attention Prompt

 

This week, we are paying attention to the incarnational (fancy theological word for the practice of wearing skin or being human) part of our faith.  Yesterday, I asked you to connect your five senses to someone else.  Like how a butterscotch candy makes me think of my grandma (as does peanut brittle that she made every Christmas).  Like how canoeing makes me think of my call to ministry.  Like how hearing Patsy Cline singing transports me back to our living room growing up and my parents playing her music on a stereo that was bigger than our couch!  Our five senses are portals to our past. 

Today, I want to invite you to pay attention to what you are hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, and smelling.  Three times today, pause and survey your surroundings, naming and noticing what you are picking up in all your five senses.  At breakfast ~ notice the taste of your cereal and its crunching sound and smell.  Or the bird that is chirping outside alerting other birds that breakfast is served.  Or the smell of the earth after the rain.  Or the touch of laundry right from the dryer. 

We move so fast in this world that we miss God showing up in the ordinary sacredness of the everyday.  Andy Warhol once said, “Nobody really looks at anything – it’s too hard.”  We glimpse and quickly convince ourselves that we have it all figured out…and then act like we are certain and confident.  But if we slow down, dare to dive deeper, there is a mystery that can never really be known.  Or as Emily Webb says at the end of the play, Our Town, “I can’t look at everything hard enough.”  That play was written in 1938, when Europe was in turmoil.  Wilder knew nothing of phones that constantly ding with notifications and texts that demand our immediate response and emails that have piled up while you are reading this morning meditation.  Too often, we don’t recognize that we live with joyless urgency.  And Wilder’s message is to slow down and savor. Perhaps we need to hear now more than ever. 

Be present to your beautifully imperfect life today.

Be present to all that is around you and what awakens within you.

And may God show up, because God already is there, disguised as your life.

 

Amen.