On Paying Attention
I have felt many times the love of God, but the only time I think I can claim to have heard his voice was one night when I found myself surprised by a deep joy in the midst of a very busy day of seemingly endless tasks I had been performing for weeks on end. I heard the voice because I finally decided to pay attention to a young man, a stranger whom I had never met before and haven’t seen since, whom I was interviewing for a temple recommend. The young man was very talkative, and at first, I was irritated by this because it was already 10 pm, and I hadn’t been home all day. But as I listened to his story, something convinced me to stop feeling distracted and resentful and to really listen. As I did, his story became more and more moving to me. His courage amid suffering and his determination to build a life for himself lifted me out of my own life. At the conclusion of the interview, he stood and embraced me, thanking me for listening and in his words, “for bringing the spirit.” I was chagrined by my earlier irritation, and as we embraced, I felt overwhelmed with joy. We both felt held by powers beyond us.
I drove home in a state of stupefaction. How did that happen? I spoke out loud to God: “How did I almost miss that? Why can’t I feel that way more often? Why does my very full and rich life feel so burdensome? How can I learn not to feel crushed by duty?” Almost as soon as I spoke those words, I received an answer: “You only need to do what I ask you to do. That is enough. But you need to be less distracted. I need your focused attention.” Years later, reading these words of Simone Weil, I realized the depth of what the Lord was asking: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
It may seem like a sacrifice to accept the burdens of others, but it is really a release of the burden of our solitude. Paying attention is actually easier, less work, and more enjoyable than it is to be distracted by a desire for escape from responsibility. Christ promised rest, but he more specifically said that his yoke was easy and his burden was light. I suppose this means he promises a conversion of responsibility into opportunity, a subtle shift in our motivations that meets life with love. There’s that trick of the eyes whereby you confuse the very things that will lighten you for the things that will truly burden you and you resent the responsibilities you have chosen. You labor under the weight of duty, feeding on inattention and forgetting that love is what lightens the burden. You end up feeling pulled through life by currents that take you who knows where, as if your life is happening to someone else. I don’t suppose my burdens are exceptional in any way, but it never ceases to amaze me how quickly I can forget my intentions.
My intention in choosing a life of religious worship and a life of service was to give my life shape and structure, to give me community, and to keep my demons at bay. I go to church to learn the character and generosity that will fulfill me and make me truly happy. It has, for the most part, succeeded in providing these benefits, but as I have aged, organizational life has sometimes become the very obstacle to the happiness that I seek. At times it feels that my life is too administrative, too burdened by duty, almost to the point where I feel I am nothing but a machine through which bureaucracy stays alive.
When an opportunity presented itself to go into the wilderness this summer, to spend six days rafting on the main fork of the Salmon River with the writer, David James Duncan, I jumped. I knew this would be a needed disruption in my routine. On the morning after the first day of rafting, however, I awoke in my tent on the bank of the great river with a sense that my spiritual well was as dry as the river was wet. How can you be in such a place and feel nothing? I wondered. Faced with a day without tasks and responsibilities, I was spent, unable to feel a thing.
So I prayed and pled with God. Just walk with me, I asked. Just be my companion. I breathed deeply as I stared through the mesh of the tent into the sky above. I read a few words from Brian Doyle about the hummingbird’s rapid heartbeat and his conclusion that we only have so many heartbeats to spend in life, and then I read from the book of Jeremiah about the plea for a balm in Gilead, as the prophet mourned for a lost and broken people who for all their rules cannot stay focused enough to let God’s words accompany them. I packed up my things for the day, folded my tent, and ate my breakfast, but I was all the while pleading not to give but to receive, not to do but to be, not to make something happen but to let something happen… to me. For a brief moment, I stopped my movement and stared at the water move past us, listened to Lazuli Buntings among the willows, and caught a whiff of the ponderosa’s vanilla scent.
As the group gathered in a circle that morning, we were asked to remember our intentions for this trip. I thought about some of my professional intentions—the chance to get to know an author I admired and wanted to write about, the chance to rekindle my creative writing, but most importantly the chance to honor a dear friend, Wade Jacoby, who introduced me to Duncan’s novels and who had asked me years ago to find a way to bring Duncan to BYU. We had fantasized about searching him out, wherever he lived in the wilderness, and arriving with warm smiles and flyrods in hand. We were sure we could win him over, given the chance.
When Wade’s heart beat for the last time, he was on a mountain bike in Southern Utah with friends on a trip I was planning to join before my wife and I made last minute alternative plans for some cross-country skiing at Bryce Canyon. It was February 29, 2020, leap year and only days away from the pandemic lockdown that would strand us all at home for the next several months. As Amy and I drove home that evening, my cell rang. It was Darren, who had been on the trip with Wade. “Are you driving?” he asked. I remember a slight shudder of fear running through me at such a specific question. The words pierce me now, knowing what they portended. I wasn’t, I told him. He came right out with it: “Wade had a massive heart attack and he died.” The words cut me in two, one part seeing the words as surreal, as if I were in a dream, and the other understanding instinctively that yes, of course, this was already the new reality, a new world without our friend. I burst into a kind of wail that would certainly have created problems had I been at the wheel. Until that moment, I hadn’t lost anyone very close, other than my grandparents who lived to their 90s, since my oldest brother, Kenny, took his life in 1982. It just so happens that Wade and my brother were two of the most brilliant minds I have ever known, making me feel the tragedy yet again of a premature extinction of exceptional human brilliance.
Wade had wanted to meet Duncan because, more than anyone else, he spoke Wade’s native spiritual tongue. Wade had grown up poor, raised by a mother who bore him at age 17 and by a negligent and cold-hearted step-father on a farm in the outskirts of Seattle. He was a gifted baseball and football player, an avid hunter and fisherman, and a young man possessed of an instinctual and natural spirituality. If you know anything about the books of David James Duncan, you might appreciate why he found a home in them. At a young age, he was welcomed into an LDS boy scout troop and eventually converted to Mormonism, since it was there that he first learned how kind men behaved. He arrived at Brigham Young University without a clue about college, but his professors quickly discovered he was exceptionally gifted. After marrying a wonderful partner and getting his PhD in Political Science at MIT, while also playing professional football briefly in Germany, he began a successful academic career, raised three brilliant daughters, and ended up teaching at his alma mater in Provo where we met as colleagues. He never lost a sense of his roots in the rural Pacific Northwest, however, and, although devout in his service as a lay member of the LDS church, I would describe him as never church broke. He maintained his spirituality on his own terms, which included a steady diet of hunting and fishing.
Wade was a champion of the underprivileged. He was a brilliant political mind and the most gifted storyteller I have ever personally known. He was a quick wit who could make others laugh and cry at the same time and to feel righteous anger and deep humility simultaneously. Very little was ever lost on Wade. He lived a full and focused life. For a time, he was my Sunday School teacher at church, and he filled us with wonder as we listened to him expound on the ironies of life and the paradoxes of the holy word. It was only a matter of time before I was going to convince him to become a creative writer. The only time I remember him crying was when he read a passage from the final pages of Duncan’s inimitable novel, The River Why, to the class. Perhaps to the more traditional Mormons, he was hard to read and unconventional, but to many of us who knew and loved him, he was a man of endless spiritual reserves and profound wisdom.
We fished together religiously, and it was our opportunity to talk of our marriages and kids, to rant about the insane state of politics in the state of Utah and in America, and to marvel at the beauty of the Wasatch Mountains we had both come to love as our adopted spiritual home. After he died, I found myself buying and reading the rest of Duncan’s books, three different collections of essays. I never felt that I read them alone, and yet I could never quite conjure the dialogues I wished to have with Wade about them.
So, as I thought about my purpose that morning, I remembered that I was intent on sharing this experience somehow with Wade, and I decided that this meant I had to pay attention to the experience as Wade would.
Duncan began our first session of the workshop that morning by reading some wisdom from Martin Shaw who said that “the correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking.” The precariousness of the present requires not panic but deeper creativity, a return to the impulse to make new worlds of meaning out of the materials of lived experience. He read further from Shaw:
“As humans we’ve long been forged on the anvil of the mysteries: Why are we here? Why do we die? What is love? We are tuned like a cello to vibrate with such questions. What is entirely new is the amount of information we are receiving from all over the planet. So we don’t just receive stress on a localized, human level, we mainline it from a huge, abstract, conceptual perspective. Perpetual availability to both creates a nervous wreck…. We have to set out into those mysteries, even with the uncertainty. Especially with the uncertainty. Make it magnificent. We take the adventure. Not naively but knowing this is what a grown-up does. We embark. Let your children see you do it. Set sail, take the wing, commit to the stomp. Evoke a playful boldness that makes even angels swoon. There’s likely something tremendous waiting…. So what could that look like in our lives? It means rescuing little ideas that gleam for a second in our soul then disappear. Coaxing them back. It means attention to not this or that but possibly both or some other way entirely. This isn’t necessarily easy, being so conditioned as we are to yes or no, black or white. And sometimes that third position is not what many would call a logical response.
He asked us to think about our writing as a response to a gleam, a response to a ray of light we might have felt or experienced that deserved some coaxing, some work to bring it out of oblivion. He insisted that this work of dusting off and sharing the radiant gleams of inspiration was the very purpose of writing itself. He then asked us to take some time to write about a “gleam.”
As he was speaking, my gleam at that point amounted to a very telluric realization that my morning bowels were full and I needed “to go to the bathroom,” as we say. I put it in quotes because, let’s face it, it is an inappropriate phrase in the wilderness, since of course there is no such place. There was what the guides called “the groover,” a bucket that served as a toilet of sorts that was placed at a remove from the camp where we could do our business and that would not flush but collect our waste so that it could be hauled out of the wilderness without a trace. I was relieved to know that I had time to go before they took down the groover and packed it up. The thought of being stuck on the river in desperate straits had worried me. I stood to go.
My anxiety was not without cause. Many years ago on a study abroad in London, my family and I were on our way to church, several hours by public transit from our flat. Suddenly, I found myself in desperate need of a bathroom while waiting for a connecting bus with the family. I left them at the stop, told my wife to take the next bus if I didn’t get back in time, and went in search of relief. It was so early on a Sunday morning and in a city with few public restrooms as it is, I found no refuge. I tucked under an overpass and crapped in my pants. As I walked out from the underpass, I saw my wife and kids in the window pulling away on the bus. “I am not coming!” I mouthed to my wife. I couldn’t imagine getting in a taxi or using any transportation at all, so I began what became a three hour walk home with no map or smart phone. The first hour wasn’t bad because hardly anyone was on the streets but then the urge to go came again, and again I just stood in an alley in my misery. As I got closer to the heart of the city and the city was waking up, I wrapped my coat around my waist and hoped no one would get near enough to notice my humiliating condition. After I took a miserable bath, my wife found me hours later curled up in the fetal position in bed, unable to speak about what had happened.
For a long time, as a religiously inclined person, I was in search of answers as to its meaning, but I couldn’t make any sense of the experience. It was simply humiliating, like finding out that the dream you have when you are walking around without any clothes in public was true. I buried it deep in my memories, never to be spoken of.
A few years later I read the book, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. In it, he argues that Freud fundamentally misunderstood human psychology and that it wasn’t sexual desire that human beings spent all of their conscious effort repressing but the fear of one fundamental fact: that we are animals who defecate and die. Anything that reminds us of our mortal condition terrifies us, including our sexuality and other bodily functions. The dark shame we run from is the fundamental fact of our earthly nature, our body and its vulnerabilities and frailties. Knowing firsthand the power of such shame, I finally understood the meaning of my humiliation.
Searching for answers in the aftermath of Wade’s sudden death, I found myself listening to my friend Scott describe in some detail what it was like to watch Wade fall over suddenly on his mountain bike in an unnatural way, without any effort to stop himself, and to approach him, to see spittle on his mouth, blood and cactus thorns on his arm and face, and to put his lips on his and give him CPR. He and Ben kept him artificially breathing for 45 minutes, while Darren called 911 and described their location to a helicopter coming for rescue, even though, despite their desperate hopes, Wade was already dead. They did enough CPR at least to keep his organs oxygenated for transplants. What I think impelled Scott to share these details was the indignity of the moment, the bodily fragility of Wade’s life, despite the dignity and impressive strength with which he lived—he set sail, took the wing, committed to the stomp like few people ever do and just like that his heart and all his motion stopped. Anima, of course, means life, breath, air, and even soul in Latin, even if it is also the root of the word animal, the very mortal thing that we think separates us from heaven and its angels.
As I stood and began walking to the groover, walking in my all too animal movement across the sand and through the ponderosas in a world where life and death hold no differentiated value, I suddenly had the distinct impression that Wade was walking with me. Almost as soon as I felt his presence, however, I almost laughed. “Not now,” I thought. “Not on my way to the groover, Wade!” But there it was, that presence, all the same. The fact is, I had experienced the presence of my deceased brother a handful of times in my life, and each time, I was at my lowest and here was that same undeniable sense of real presence helping me to accept and take with me my own darkness, to redeem my unholiness, my inattention, my very animality. I generally avoid the habit of cussing, but I couldn’t resist muttering under my breath with playful reverence, “holy shit, indeed!” I could almost hear Wade laughing with me.
Here's a principle of the wilderness I would be governed by: we keep the wilderness, we respect it and preserve it by not defiling it with our waste; more precisely, we do not deny our animality but accept accountability for it. I don’t know how else to put it: it simply means that we own our shit, literally and figuratively. The sanctity of our lives does not depend on being untainted or untouched by dirt but more simply by accepting that, as the Good Book says, we are men and women of the dirt, that life comes from and returns to soil, that death is as much a gift as life, and that heaven is no more glorious than earth. We possess gifts of animal strength and of animal frailty. We walk in the clear light of dawn, in the gray light of dusk, and in the bewildering black of night.
I remembered a dear elderly neighbor of Wade’s and mine who expressed to us the indignity of aging, how so many of his bodily functions were failing him, and how difficult it was for him to understand this, the last of his trials on earth. I didn’t know how to answer him at the time, but it occurred to me on the way to the groover that maybe there is some comfort in at least believing that Jesus’s incarnation filled him with compassion for our human condition, to the point, we are told in Latter-day Saint scripture, that Christ's compassion for our human condition fills his “bowels of mercy.” I was sure I could hear Wade’s holy giggles now.
I never wanted so badly to walk daily with God as when I was a missionary walking the streets of Venezuela. Like many missionaries, I took comfort in these words: “I will go before your face. I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up” (D&C 84:88). Was going to the groover somehow to be on His errand? Angels were round about me, for sure, even if it wasn’t clear what was so dignified about my errand. I recall now a time on my mission when, obsessed with Mormonism’s theology of the body, I suffered through an intense bout of amoebic dysentery by telling myself “This too was something I craved the chance to experience when I was nothing but a premortal spirit in God’s presence, so appreciate even this!” Not long after I returned to civilian life, I thought of that moment with some embarrassment and chalked it up to my religious zeal, but maybe the truth is that I almost learned a deeper wisdom.
If we were anxious to experience life in the body in all of its joys and humiliations before our birth, perhaps too our eternal souls, awaiting the final restoration, will literally haunt the hell out of this planet after we are gone, returning again and again to those places and people that healed us and that need our healing, strengthening the weak knees of our loved ones, trying desperately to communicate to them that prayer is not merely a means of getting answers to questions or directions in times of uncertainty but the very quest of life to walk with God, to practice heaven here and now in the midst of uncertainty and contradiction, a way of giving our attention to the substance of this very ordinary world and converting it into the literal ground of hope, of love, of deep joy.
As we are wont to do when good people in our lives pass away, for a while many of us asked “What Would Wade Do?” like some kind of mantra. As I paid attention for his sake to the world and people around me on the river, I started to notice a transformation within me. I was setting sail. For the next five days, nothing seemed insignificant or unworthy of angelic attention and admiration and nothing felt too profane to pull me away from the sense that I walked on holy ground and floated on living waters. I would do well to ask what Wade would do, what Kenny would do, what my grandparents would do if they could return for just one more day. They would certainly pay enough attention to taste this life in all of its moods and varieties and savor the holiness of the bodily senses. This attention gives places and people the power to gleam and when those gleams are received as gifts and coaxed back from the brink of oblivion—which is to say back from the brink of hell—they unveil a paradise we were already mercifully given.