A Better Way to Pay Attention
“If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”
I hear this refrain constantly in these strained days. The phrase kind of reminds me of a game of whack-a-mole, first popping up from the Right, then the Left, then anti-maskers, then vaccine crusaders, then those with concern for what’s happening outside our borders, or at our borders, or inside our borders, then over school board candidates, then ballot initiatives. I can hardly keep up.
No matter where these people land on the spectrum of perspectives on any number of important issues, the message seems to be the same: anger is the only appropriate response to the chaos, injustice, oppression, and evils of our day. Anger is the antidote to apathy, lighting a fire under us to speak out against injustice and then actually do something about it.
In the past year, I have been watching closely the fruit of the constant thrum of anger (punctuated by occasional bursts of rage) in our communal life. To be sure, there are plenty of wrongs to be angry about in this world. And I do think anger can be part of a healthy response to those things.
I read somewhere that anger is “what we feel when something we love is threatened.” Anger will point us to what we value, if we’ll let it. Anger is an invitation to ask ourselves in the presence of Jesus: “What is it that I love, here?”, and “What do I perceive the threat to be, and what is the potential danger?”, and—for the particularly courageous—“What am I afraid of, here?” Allowing anger to make me curious, rather than rejecting it as unhealthy or unholy, has opened the door for the Spirit to form me more into the image of Christ, and I am grateful for that.
Even so, I am convinced that making anger the primary indicator of whether we’re paying attention has in fact diminished our ability to pay attention to what is going on in the world. It is not the antidote we had hoped it would be, but has blinded us instead. Anger simply cannot sustain the kind engagement that is needed to see healing in our world. Anger may light a fire under us, but that same fire will consume us.
Jesus offers us a deeper way to pay attention: the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9-13). This better, fuller way of paying attention isn’t measured by anger, but leads to a hope in his coming Kingdom. And this hope is not apathetic or navel-gazing, but active, stirring us to imitate our Savior as we open our hearts and extend our hands and move our feet and lift our voices under grace, not compulsion.
The prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray in his Sermon on the Mount invites the Spirit to transform us so that we can see, hear, smell, touch, and taste as Jesus does. It gives us identities rooted in the Father’s love and redeemed imaginations that see the world as awash with possibility for restoration, even as we are confronted with all that is broken in us and around us. Jesus’s words empower us to envision and then embody life “on earth as it is in heaven,” receiving him as our Daily Bread, reaching for him in repentance as we recognize that the evil we hate in the world runs through our own hearts, and welcoming one another in peace as forgiven forgivers. This prayer acknowledges that though we are painfully acquainted with the presence and pull of evil, yet we are being formed into a people who have been invited to participate in the sure victory of our King over all of it when he makes heaven and earth one once again and forever.
We can pay attention with hope in the way Jesus taught us, through his words and his life:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our sins,
as we forgive those who sin against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours,
now and forever.
Amen.