What are you leaving out?

The spiritual life is often driven by the question: What’s missing? The quest to answer that question often leads people back to church or to pick up reading spiritual authors to fill what is perceived as a void. It doesn’t seem to matter if life and the daily calendar are full or if life is less filled with activity. Something just seems to be missing - there is a longing to be a part of the thing that is bigger that we are; that indescribable thing that we can no more grasp then mist or water. There is something that is calling our attention and we both desire to follow to see where it leads and distracted by many things. 

Jesus addresses this quest when he addresses the crowd remembering to them their time with John in the wilderness. He asks them What did you think you would find there? In three different ways he asks them this question: What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? What then did you go out to see? and again, What then did you go out to see? When we are seeking something that we think is missing or to put something back that has been lost we are paying close attention. That is the task of the spiritual life - to pay close attention. 

There was once a Buddhist student who had been living in a monastery praying and studying to become enlightened for many years. The time came that he was done with his work there and was preparing to leave. When he came to meet with the master on the day of his departure it was raining. He left his umbrella outside the door and went in. In the course of their talk the master asks the man, What side of the door did you put your umbrella the right or the left? The man did not know.  He returned to his studies and to the life of prayer for another ten years. 

The necessity of giving each moment in life our full attention cannot be understated. It is because we do not yet know the value of this attentiveness and that the kingdom of God is with us, yet hidden from us that we go on spiritual journeys and seek to find what is with us and has never not been available to us. Our searching gives us away. Jesus speaks from that in-between place, whispering to us: What have you come to see?

John Shea speaks of our lack of attention to the things that call to us in the spiritual realm through the metaphor of the parable of the seed that is scattered on the ground: 

The seed that falls by the side of the road and is devoured by the birds means we do not have the time or inclination to entertain the teachings of Jesus. The side of the road is not the middle of the road, the place where we normally walk. If we would consider the seeds, we would have to alter our routine, step outside the way we work But this does not happen because the devouring birds do not allow it. The devouring birds are symbols of our inattention to the seed, our failure to heed and consider what we have heard. The seed of the word is given no chance. As soon as it lands, it is taken away. The Gospel interpretation is that these birds are like the devil. The devil, diabolos, does what his name signifies. He breaks things apart. When we are this first soil, there is a brief contact with the Word, but no real coming together at all. The seed and the soil are quickly separated. The seed may be a wake-up call, but we turn away and go back to sleep. (Shea, On earth as it is in heaven, 16.)

But sometimes we are roused from our sleep unexpectedly. We are called to attention from some supernatural event in places where the veil is very thin - if we are open to being in that place. 

In Tales of a Magic Monastery, Theophany the Monk tells a story. He is in the House of God and late at night he hears a voice. 

“What are you leaving out?

I looked around. I heard it again.

“WHAT ARE YOU LEAVING OUT?”

Was it my imagination? Soon it was all around me, whispering, roaring, “What are you leaving out? What are you leaving out?” 

Was I cracking up? I managed to get to my feet and head for the door. I wanted the comfort of a human face or a human voice. Nearby was the corridor where some of the monks live I knocked on once cell. 

“What do you want/“ came a sleepy voice.

“What am I leaving out?”

“Me,” he answered. 

I went to the next door. 

“What do you want?”

“What am I leaving out?”

“Me.”

A third cell, a fourth, all the same.

I thought, “They’re all stuck on themselves.” I left the building in disgust. Just then the sun was coming up. I had never spoken to the sun before but I heard myself pleading, “What am I leaving out?” The sun too answered, “Me.” That finished me.

I threw myself on the ground. And the earth said, “Me.”

When we are attentive we see the world as God sees it. Not the world we have created, with all its glitter and bling and the poverty and despair it creates. That is the world of our making. God sees the world that was created in which God finds expression. And it is not the anthropocentric world in which we seat ourselves at the head of the table. The work of the spiritual life is to see the world, the created world through the eyes of God. We cannot see what we are leaving out because, like the monk, we don’t have eyes to see it. We are like children who have built an imaginary world out of Legos. The little blocks and all their various shapes and sizes and the amazement of how they were made and all the possibilities for creating new things drawn us in an away from the ground we are sitting on. God did not create Legos but rather dirt. Dirt does not seem that interesting. But a thoughtful and curious person who turns their attention away from plastic toys might find the microcosm of dirt and all the life held within in and the knowledge that it necessary for all life and that its state of health bears a direct correlation to our own state of health might find it is infinitely more interesting after all. There is more to contemplate in a single dried leaf that has fallen and a single snowflake or a feather found on the ground or an odd shaped rock with shiny flecks or a flock of birds restlessly changing configuration over a dew covered field then all the books that have ever been written. 

Chaim Potak, in The Gift of Asher Lev, wrote: 

My father of blessed memory once said to me, on the verse in Genesis, “And He saw all the He had made and behold it was good.” - my father once said that the seeing of God is not like the seeing of man. Man sees only between the blinks of his eyes. He does not know what the world is like during the blinks. He sees the world in pieces, in fragments. But the master of the universe sees the world whole, unbroken. That world is good. Our seeing is broken, Asher Lev. Can we make it like the seeing of God? Is it possible? 

The quest to see as God sees begins with attentiveness. Of seeing what is there. What did you go out there to see? Jesus asks them. What have you come here to see? I ask you. What is it you hope to find? or to feel? or to realize? or to grab a hold of? or experience? or to take home with you? What is it you are leaving out?