COMMUNITY SENSE

PAYING ATTENTION

Mark R. Wenger

Ispend much of Saturday showing some dear Virginia friends around our new neighborhood in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We stroll through Central Market, drive through Amish country across a covered bridge. We visit a quilt museum and tour the Hans Herr house. It’s a good day, literally touching some things that span the years. Late afternoon after our guests are on their way, I pick up the paper and read a column by Ellen Goodman. Oh, this is good stuff!

Goodman is walking to the post office to mail a letter, the kind with a handwritten address and note. It’s a card of sympathy to a widow. She could have sent it much more efficiently by e-mail. There are hundreds of e-condolences to choose from. But that wouldn’t do. Too easy, too cheap, too mindless, like "serving Thanksgiving dinner at a fast-food restaurant."

She strolls home after slipping the letter in the slot, wondering if slowing down isn’t the "only way we pay attention now in a world of hyperactive technology." I mentally add my own twist to bring the logic around fullcircle. Paying attention to things that matter may be the only way to slow down in a world of multitasking media mayhem.

Goodman quotes Linda Stone, a former Microsoft whiz, to describe this so-connected-yet-so-scattered age. Stone calls it an era of "continuous partial attention." We live, Stone says, with the illusion that we can expand our personal bandwidth, connecting to more and more. Instead we end up overstimulated, overwhelmed, and unfulfilled.

TMI is a helpful new acronym I learned sometime in the last year. That doesn’t stand for "Three Mile Island" of nuclear infamy. TMI is "too much information" to absorb, to digest, to respond to. Many of us are perpetually "on"—scanning, researching, doing, and always within reach of anyone with our cell number.

We are trying to pay attention, perhaps more desperately than ever before: too many things, going too fast.

Maybe the secret to ending continuous partial attention is to find ways to disengage and give selective full attention to things that matter. The key, I suggest, is found not in more exciting consumption or even production but in the place of creation or re-creation. This is the kind of paying attention that matters, the kind that slows things down enough to let the rest of the world go by at its breakneck speed. Let me offer several anecdotal suggestions.

Gardening

It is full summer as I write. My father, all of 87 years old, is in his glory gardening. There are the flowers he harvests for market. Add to that the zucchini he sells for a few cents a piece, the pumpkins, tomatoes, grapes, apples, peaches. He rarely seems stressed about the work. Yes, he’s retired and doesn’t have to worry about raising a family or a nine-to-five job. But he has always found solace and space by working the soil.

There is no way to hurry a sunflower into bloom. No amount of Internet surfing will turn a bare grape vine into purple laden bounty. But patient care and paying attention to the mysteries of plant growth have helped my dad stay healthy and focused. He is minimally wired with e-mail and cell phone; his attention is elsewhere, turning green things into beauty or flavor.

Singing

I stumbled almost by accident into a choir of about 3,000 voices singing in a huge hallway of the Convention Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Mennonite Church USA and Canada had gathered for their national conventions. One afternoon, anyone interested was invited to join a "hymn sing." I arrived late but within seconds was enraptured by the sound of voices, unadorned with instrumentation, filling the space to overflowing.

I joined in and looked around. All the ages were there, from gray heads to glass beads. Soprano, tenor, alto, and bass mixed in rich harmony. The resonance off steel, glass, and concrete echoed like a medieval cathedral.

A few folks took out their cell phones to share the moment with distant friends. But the contrast to our techno digital driven, iPod personal world of music consumption could hardly have been sharper. Simple human voices creating beauty together. At the finish, an acquaintance said to me, "Maybe there’s hope for the church after all."

Learning to sing doesn’t come by listening to the din of recorded music. We learn to sing by paying attention to live voices around us, then tentatively adding ours—imitating, learning to read the dots and lines on the page, listening carefully, seeking to help create beauty.

I wonder what will happen to the sense of community Mennonites or any other traditions committed to singing share if we no longer take the trouble to teach children, newcomers, and guests how to use the voice in vigorous song. The sound in the convention hallway gives me hope that many are still learning music the old-fashioned way—singing with others.

Sharing Meals

We are not a large family, just two daughters and two parents. Still our schedules can be terribly difficult to align. Softball practice, play rehearsal, evening meetings, grocery shopping. The list is as expansive as it is relentless in its pressure to take us in four different directions—four people sleeping under the same roof but all marching to their own preoccupations and habits. Continuous partial attention. We do it with people too, even the ones we love dearly.

Something out of the ordinary happens, however, when we sit down and eat a meal together. For a few moments, we stop moving, working, and surfing. We sit, eat, and talk. We talk about the encounters and activities of the day. We become present with each other, face to face. The dinner table is much more than an intersection where we park our bodies to refuel. It becomes a canopy for relational communion and repair.

Sabbath-Keeping

The biblical concept of Sabbath draws a direct connection between rest and paying attention to God. A worship teacher I once heard, however, made a strong point about the link between work and worship. Worship and service and work all used to be part of the same whole. There was no canyon between Sabbath worship and the rest of the week. He had a point. Worship and Sabbath rest are not sacred moments cut off from the marketplace.

But I suspect that most of us today have the opposite problem. In a wired world, there is often little or no boundary between Sabbath and the other six days of the week. Thus I am more fascinated by the connection not between worship and work, but between worship and rest as Sabbath-keeping. There is an old proverb to the effect that Sabbath slows our bodies down enough for our souls to catch up.

Ellen Goodman touched a sore spot with her column about mailing a letter the old-fashioned way. That fed into my emotions fresh from touring a few time-tested treasures of Lancaster County with dear friends.

Add to that the hurry and scurry of a recent move and starting a new job, and you begin to catch a glimpse of the personal backdrop of this piece. I’m betting, though, that others probably know the terrain pretty well too.

—Mark R. Wenger, Lancaster, Pa, recently moved from a 10-year pastorate in Waynesboro, Virginia, to assume responsibilities as Director of Pastoral Studies for Eastern Mennonite Seminary at Lancaster.