The Rest of God

by Mark Buchanan

  I just must not have been fully present at the time I learned them. I was probably in a hurry, already pressing hard and anxious toward elsewhere, lacking patience to seal up what I’d gathered. A large chunk of my life disappeared, without a trace.

  Someone asked me recently what was my biggest regret in life. I thought a moment, surveying the vast and cluttered landscape of my blunders and losses, the evil I have done and the evil that’s been done against me.

  “Being in a hurry,” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all that rushing.”

  Through all that haste, I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.

  Sanding away my wedding ring.

  The Chinese join two characters to form a single pictograph for busyness: heart and killing.1 That is stunningly incisive. The heart is the place the busy life exacts its steepest toll.

  This is true literally, physically, cardiologically. My own father died of coronary failure, as did his brother before him. Both, in their own way, were busy, driven men. I didn’t know my uncle well. He was the editor of a newspaper, a small-town daily. I imagine him living on coffee and cigarettes and greasy burgers, eaten from their waxy or foil wrappers, devoured standing up, between phone calls. I picture him chronically exhausted, habitually irritated, yelling and sighing too much, feeling the pressure of the next edition building before the current edition’s even off the press. I think of him standing at his office window on a late winter’s day, his reflection in the darkening window like a ghost looking back at him, pale and gray and thin, haunting him with what he’s missed and with what he’s become. I envision him afraid to slow down, lest he stop and the utter vanity of it all overwhelm him. He died young, in his early fifties. All that worry and cholesterol and caffeine and nicotine had become a muddy thickness in his blood.

  My father worked in the oil industry, in corporate sales. It was a cutthroat business, multimillion-dollar accounts that danced on the pinhead of half-cent-per-liter discounts. His work consumed him. He could describe the viscosity of oil, the way it turned treacly in cold or watery in heat, with a rhetorical power that was dazzling. But it was his hateful obsession, he loathed it most days but couldn’t let it go, couldn’t stop brooding about it, competing with his rivals, striving after some nose-ahead victory. He was like this even when he was only driving a golf ball or driving the car to the lake. It was all a race or a contest to him. He sanded away his wedding ring.

  The company he worked for retired him early, unfairly he thought, and so he spent many years afterward fighting an unwinnable court battle. When he finally slowed down, he seemed to collapse. He died at sixty-seven of a heart attack that felled him in a single blow. I was just getting to know him. Some nights I wake and wish, with an ache that’s hard on my own heart, for just one more conversation between us. Some nights I dream of him. He is usually young, younger than I am, and relaxed in a way I rarely saw him. He is standing in an open space, where wind sweeps earth and air clean. He is smiling, not a wide, toothy smile, just a crimp at the corner of his mouth, a suture in his cheek. It is a smile of hidden mirth, a secret he holds that makes his heart light.

  But his heart wasn’t light. His heart killed him.

  I miss him.

  But this insight—that the busy life murders our hearts—is also true in other ways. Wayne Muller writes:

  I have visited the large offices of wealthy donors, the crowded rooms of social service agencies, and the small houses of the poorest families. Remarkably, within this mosaic there is a universal refrain: I am so busy. It does not seem to matter if the people I speak with are doctors or day-care workers, shopkeepers or social workers, parents or teachers, nurses or lawyers, students or therapists, community activists or cooks.

  Whether they are Hispanic or Native American, Caucasian or Black, the more their lives speed up, the more they feel hurt, frightened, and isolated. Despite their good hearts and equally good intentions, their work in the world rarely feels light, pleasant, or healing. Instead, as it all piles endlessly upon itself, the whole experience of being alive begins to melt into one enormous obligation. It becomes the standard greeting everywhere: I am so busy.2

  And something dies in us. Too much work, the British used to say, makes Jack a dull boy. But it’s worse than that. It numbs Jack, parches Jack, hardens Jack. It kills his heart. When we get too busy, everything becomes either a trudge or a scramble, the doldrums or sheer mayhem. We get bored with the familiar, threatened by the unfamiliar. Our capacity for both steadfastness and adventure shrivels.

  We just want to be left alone.

  One measure for whether or not you’re rested enough—besides falling asleep in board meetings—is to ask yourself this: How much do I care about the things I care about? When we lose concern for people, both the lost and the found, for the bride of Christ, for friendship, for truth and beauty and goodness; when we cease to laugh when our children laugh (and instead yell at them to quiet down) or weep when our spouses weep (and instead wish they didn’t get so emotional); when we hear news of trouble among our neighbors and our first thought is that we hope it isn’t going to involve us—when we stop caring about the things we care about—that’s a signal we’re too busy. We have let ourselves be consumed by the things that feed the ego but starve the soul.

  Busyness kills the heart.

  And then the moment of reckoning comes—when we must meet the situation with genuine, heartfelt compassion, wisdom, courage— and nothing’s there, only grim resignation and a dull resentment that we got dragged into this.

  Wayne Muller writes on the fallout of the busy life:

  I have sat on dozens of boards and commissions with many fine, compassionate, and generous people who are so tired, overwhelmed, and overworked that they have neither the time nor the capacity to listen to the deeper voices that speak to the essence of the problems before them. Presented with the intricate and delicate problems of poverty, public health, community well-being, and crime, our impulse, born of weariness, is to rush headlong toward doing anything that will make the problem go away. Maybe then we can finally go home and get some rest.3

  Busyness makes us stop caring about the things we care about.

  And not only that. Busyness also robs us of knowing God the way we might.

  It’s true that some facets of God we glimpse only through motion. Only those who stretch out their hands and offer water to the thirsty discover, disguised among them, Jesus. Only those who trudge up the mountain, willing to grow blistered and weary on the narrow trail, witness his transfiguration. Only those who invite the stranger in to share bread realize they’ve entertained an angel unawares, sometimes even Christ himself. Often, God meets us along the way, as we go: he waits to see who will step out before he sidles up, woos us over, intercepts, redirects.

  But other facets of God we discover only through stillness. “Be still,” the psalm instructs, “and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). Only Mary, Martha’s sister, sitting wide-eyed and open-eared, truly hosts Christ in her home. Only those who wait on the Lord renew their strength. Only those who are quiet and watchful find God’s mercy that is new every morning. Only those who join him in his love for the contrite and broken in spirit recognize him hidden among “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40).

  “He makes me lie down in green pastures,” Psalm 23 says (v. 2, emphasis mine). If we don’t choose to lie down, God sometimes makes us. That’s happened to me more than once: I refused the sleep or rest he granted, and my health broke.

  He made me lie down.

  But only then was I still enough to hear God, to “taste and see” that he was good (Ps. 34:8).

  A man in my church became sick and couldn’t shake it. It went on for mont
hs. He was usually a man who went full tilt at everything, night and day. In Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, there’s a page where that frolicsome, troublesome cat is pirouetting on a rubber ball while balancing a teetering mountain of stacked objects: a fishbowl on a rake, a tray with a milk jug on his free foot, a cake and a teacup on his hat, a toy boat on one hand and a tower of books on the other. He holds a Japanese fan in the curled tip of his tail. The cat claims he’s capable of even greater feats than this. But:

  That is what the cat said . . .

  Then he fell on his head!

  He came down with a bump

  From up there on the ball.

  And Sally and I,

  We saw ALL the things fall.4

  That’s a suitable metaphor for this man’s life.

  The sickness stripped him down. The sickness collapsed him and scattered his circus act. He had to spend whole days and weeks housebound, idle, waiting, banking energy just to go up and down stairs. He spent more time with his wife and children in those few months than he had in all the years he’d known them. He read more than he ever had and pondered more and prayed more.

  One day he said to me, “I know God is trying to get my attention. I just haven’t figured out yet what he wants my attention for. He must want me to do something.”

  I thought a moment. “Maybe,” I said, “that’s the problem: you think he wants your attention in order for you to do something. Maybe he just wants your attention.”

  Maybe that’s what God requires most from us: our attention.

  Indeed, this is the essence of a Sabbath heart: paying attention. It is being fully present, wholly awake, in each moment. It is the trained ability to inhabit our own existence without remainder, so that even the simplest things—the in and out of our own breathing, the coolness of tiles on our bare feet, the way wind sculpts clouds into crocodiles and polar bears—gain the force of discovery and revelation. True attentiveness burns away the layers of indifference and ennui and distraction— all those attitudes that blend our days into a monochrome sameness—and reveals what’s hidden beneath: the staggering surprise and infinite variety of every last little thing. Louis Aggasiz, Harvard’s renowned biologist, returned one September to his classroom and announced to his students that he had spent the summer traveling, he had managed, he said, to get halfway across his backyard.5 To those with eyes to see, that’s enough. Everywhere we turn, wonders never cease.

  One day is as good as another for practicing this kind of attentiveness. No day claims unique or superior status for the possibility of waking up. We all know people so self-absorbed and obtuse that they would miss the apocalypse if it happened in their living rooms. Their myopia is not limited to any day of the week. And we know others so alert they seem to operate in a sixth sense, deciphering the hand of God in mere whispers and flickers and shadows. Their perceptiveness is not bounded by time or circumstance.

  This theme, indeed, often forms a subplot of comedy in the Bible: God or Jesus or an angelic messenger shows up, and those who should know better, who should be paying attention—priests, lawyers, teachers, apostles—typically miss it, while those least “deserving”— shepherds, children, beggars, whores—typically grasp it, and immediately. It turns out, numskulls are numb every day, and seekers of grace awake nearly always.

  And yet, of all days we might set apart to practice the art of attentiveness, Sabbath is an outstanding candidate. Sabbath invites us to stop. In that ceasing, fresh possibilities abound. We can shut our eyes, if we choose—this is one of Sabbath’s gifts, to relax without guilt. But there is also time enough to open our eyes, to learn again Jesus’s command to watch and pray.

  I recently experienced what for me was the pinnacle of the attentive life. It happened on a Tuesday, not a Sunday. But it was pure Sabbath. It was late afternoon on the Masai Mara—a wind-scoured plain cradled between the arms of two high escarpments in southern Kenya, just above Tanzania’s Serengeti. The Mara is near the equator, and the crouching sun of late day spreads out in a fantail of light, creating a chiaroscuro of dazzling yellows and inky shadows. In the hour before sunset, creation pulls out all its stops: hammers light like gold flake on leaf and blade and flank, embroiders shadows dark and thick in forest and swale.

  Everything stands out, as though for just this hour a fourth dimension of space has overlain the world.

  Light and shadow on this day were especially strong because a storm had been gathering all afternoon. Heavy blue-black clouds rode the high ridge of Tanzania and dragged a veil of rain toward us. The immense sky was split in two above us, shimmering bright on one half, brooding dark on the other. Lightning shivered through the clouds. Thunder catapulted from them.

  Our guide left the main road and slithered along a muddy, trackless field. He was driving toward a tree that stood stark and alone on the wide plain. He must have seen something out there. He was a Masai, a man who lived close to his own instincts, who sensed things long before he saw them and saw them long before anyone else did. As we neared the tree, the rest of us saw what he did: a shaggy, tawny mound that transfigured into a pride of lions. There were two leonine brothers, huge and disdainful, with a small harem of females and a den of cubs. Our guide drew close and turned off the Land Rover’s motor.

  The lions at first were drowsy. They lay catnapping, lolling in the warmth of the failing light. The only movement was the ruffle of wind on their manes. But then something caught the attention of one of the females. Up she sat, looked intently at whatever scent or sight had roused her, and, cool and sly, sauntered over in that direction. About a hundred feet out, she stopped, sat on her haunches, and waited. Then, one after the other, all the females and the larger cubs walked off and did the same. Each took a position about the same distance from where we’d parked, spaced twenty or thirty feet apart from one another. Then the two males stood up, stretched, and moved to opposite sides of the tree, each about fifteen feet in front of our truck.

  We were, essentially, surrounded.

  And then the storm hit. Against our frail encampment, rain fell, wind raged, lightning whirled, thunder broke. We zipped shut the plastic-and-canvas windows of the Land Rover, but the rain pried its way under all the unsealed places and drenched us anyway.

  For the next fifteen minutes, we sat there, under siege, unable to move. We could see nothing. All we knew, and not even this for sure, was that we sat in a company of man-eaters. On a whim of hunger or anger, any one of them might rend our flimsy defenses and leave our pale bodies shredded and bloodied and strewn across the grasslands.

  We had nothing to do but wait. Only wait is the wrong word. Waiting implies anticipation of something else: that this moment is not the moment. It implies that the expected thing, the hoped-for thing, is yet to arrive, that the present is only preliminary to the future. No, we weren’t waiting, we were fully immersed in the here and now. We could not have been more present in our own lives, could not have more completely indwelt our own skins. Every sense was alive. All energy was absorbed in paying attention.

  The storm passed. The lions still sat, unmoved. They had been, it turned out, no more interested in us than if we were a boulder left in the field from the last ice age.

  We took one last look and carried on.

  But I hope not entirely. I don’t want to just carry on. I want to learn more and more to practice, here, now, always, the quality of awareness that I knew in those few minutes.

  I want to learn to pass through a day without passing it by.

  Yesterday it rained hard all day, a gray, sullen downpour that at times flooded windshields faster than the wipers could sweep it away, so that you had to pull over and wait for the sky to ease its anger or sorrow. But this morning dawned clean and bright. Everything glowed. I rose early. Before I lit a fire in the woodstove, I clambered onto the roof and cleaned the chimney flue, pulling a wire brisk down its length and sending plumes of soot into the crisp morning air. Then I snaked my arm into the chimney’s lower
cavity and scraped barnacles of creosote from it.

  Then I showered. I kissed my children good-bye as they left for school. Then Cheryl and I drove to a coffee shop and got warm cinnamon buns and mugs of rich, dark coffee, and we stirred cream in until the coffee was nutty brown. We saw three friends and spoke to each. We sat in the corner, at a table strewn with sun patches, and talked at leisure about our children, about what we had read in the Bible that morning, about what the day might unfold.

  Then we walked out into the bright morning. I kissed Cheryl, told her she was lovely, and set out to walk home while she took the van to do some errands. I greeted people as I went, some I knew, some I didn’t. A woman in front of the train station was sweeping the maple leaves, dry as parchment, that lay in thick drifts across the pavement. I stopped and chatted with her. We both agreed the day was a gift, not to be wasted. I strode through the small town center, putting my face close to the dark windows of shops not yet open to peer inside. Near the city park I stopped to study the design of a gated arbor, thinking I might build one like it some day.

  I was in no hurry. I prayed. I sang. I listened. I watched.

  In all that time, I never earned a cent. I didn’t write a word. I didn’t build a thing. The world is no richer for my passing through it.

  But I’m far richer for not missing it.

  SABBATH LITURGY:

  Paying Attention