Walking through a cemetery in the rain, radical attention and the peace in prayer
Hello,
I usually squeeze in a letter during a week day lunch hour but this week was too busy even for that. Work, life admin, trying to stay afloat as things start to feel endlessly the same, each day merging into another, unfair resentments flaring up when you least expect them, when you are least able to deal with them has left me with no time to write. We are almost halfway through lockdown 2. I’m trying not to think of what awaits us on the other side of it. My cautious optimism has given way to sullen denial. I don’t have much to say on this but would like to acknowledge my fear, frustration and anger.
Yesterday I left the house for the first time in days. And only because I was promised a couple of hours with a friend. The breeze and the cold air felt lovely on my skin and the rain brought out my favourite smell: wet soil. Lockdown rules mean we aren’t allowed in each other’s homes nor able to sit down in a cafe or a restaurant (which are only open for takeaway). The cemetery was a midway point between our homes. We met at the centre, near a domed structure and walked for 2 hours. We opened and closed our umbrellas in unison as the weather turned. We talked about life, and how we sometimes tend to focus on the negative. We shared our fears, assuaging them for each other and reflected on the extra dimension our faith adds to our lives.
She told me about Jewish cemeteries and how you can tell if a death is by suicide (a [broken] tree on the gravestone, usually buried on the edges of the graveyard - I remember hearing the word broken but now not sure if I was correct), how priests can’t go too close to the death and how there are always fountains at the entry and exit. How you have to wash before you go in and on your way out, wash death off of yourself. She asked me about Muslim cemeteries and I didn’t have any details for her. I told her about how some Muslim cultures believe that women shouldn’t enter graveyards. How we usually opt for unmarked gravestones and no coffins either, burying our dead in just a shroud. I wanted to tell her how Muslims believe in the power of prayer when it rains. That sometimes, when I remember, I send a quick prayer when I hear the familiar rumblings outside my window, a reflex I can’t shake off, don’t want to shake off. But the conversation had moved on.
I’m 15 days into my social media break and am enjoying the quietness in my mind. The other day, I read Radical Attention by Julia Bell in one sitting. After days of not being able to read anything, it was sweet relief to get sucked into this dazzling, clear-sighted prose. Bell’s publishers refer to it as ‘an essay on the battle for our attention in the age of distraction’. I made lots of notes after reading it and was particularly struck by Bell’s references of Simone Weil’s understanding of attention and stillness. Bell writes and quotes Weil:
For Weil, our attention has a powerful energy and agency. She argues that ‘the authentic and pure values - truth, beauty and goodness - in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.’ For her, attention has an importance which she equates with her own spiritual practice: ‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayers’.
Reading this essay made me think about what the highest form of attention means to me. I concluded that I experience this kind of focus only when I’m writing. And that the peace I feel when writing comes from the radical attention I pay to my words and my projects. It also helped me understand the solace I find in my prayers and why my life gets helter-skelter when I stop praying.
Just before I started reading this essay, my husband noted that in life, I seem incapable of not centring myself in our shared narratives. It’s a testament to the tender way in which my husband communicates with me, that he can say such things without upsetting me or making me feel defensive. We talked about how I’m driven by fairness and how sometimes I don’t have to bring all of me (and my experiences) to every interaction. And how this is a contradiction to my life as a writer, where I’m required to gain perspective and centre my experiences. And then immediately after, I came across the following paragraph
For Weil understanding can only be achieved by giving our attention wholeheartedly, especially when considering other people. Taking time to hold in our minds the whole person is the first step towards a moral, inquisitive life and the prerequisite of love. If we can learn to manage our attention, and ‘renounce’ our ‘imaginary position at the centre’, Weil suggests that: a transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility… It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, when we suddenly discern as a tree what we had first seen as a stooping man; or where we suddenly recognise at a rustling of leaves what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colours; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way.
I love that the same idea can be communicated through different words and analogies. If I’ve understood this correctly, I think practicing radical attention in life can bring some of the stillness and peace I chase in my writing and my praying. I’m looking forward to finding out.
If you are interested in life writing, I’m running a free course for Spread the Word. You can sign up here. This will be an email course, with the first email going out on 25th November. If you do, I hope you find the course useful and the tips and exercises instructive.
Zeba