Day Eighteen

Day Eighteen // March 17 // Inattention

“Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.” – George Santayana –

It’s all a blur. We rise every morning and gird ourselves up for yet another day of business and busyness. Surrounded by the electronic buzz of our modern-day lives, we hustle to make the most of every moment. We consume the day before us and in the process, are consumed by it, too.

Transparent to us was the crimson sunrise; invisible, the golden moon. And all the quiet moments of grace in between fell passionless on deadened ears. Did our inattention make the sun less bright? Did it cause the moon to blush? Of course not. The lacking was not in them… but in us.

It is the insidious curse of our age: the split-attention, the inattention, the hardening curse of multi-tasking in a world that’s come to value productivity over the value

of what’s actually produced. Like the well-worn hands of a plowman, our souls carry the callouses of struggles and storms; but maybe even more frequently, we carry the callouses of the mundane.

We’ve let ourselves become immune to the glory of God’s creation; we’ve let ourselves take His handiwork for granted – His goodness, wonder and grace. And it’s in that hollowed-of-the-holy existence that we crave to taste transcendence. We want, we need to experience God’s presence; we yearn to know His love. But in its ever-presence, we fall victim to the passing whims of not noticing.

What starts with our commerce with God is transferred to our commerce with others. We fail to notice. We fail to notice the hurt and the pain. We fail to notice the despair and need. Brokenness’ ever-presence has become the mere background scenery upon which our productive lives of convenience are enacted, and the hurting are only the bit-players. And little by little, layer by layer, the rot of intention grows. For just as sinful as the harsh words we speak, are the healing words that go unspoken. Just as sinful as the things we might long to see are the needs we fail to see. And that, too, is Lent’s call: to slow down, to look around and to pay attention. Is there a cost to attentiveness? Absolutely. It’s not called “paying” attention for nothing. It will cost us to see our neighbor’s pain, but it is a price well worth paying to follow after the One who paid the price for us.