Formation

Author: Canon Dr. Josh R. Ritter, Canon for Formation, Episcopal Diocese of Texas

Recently, the Rev. Canon Lorenzo Lebrija, Executive Director of TryTank Research Institute, wrote that “attention is a practice,” and it really resonated with me and reminded me of some things I’ve been thinking about for a while.

First, I think the practice of contemplative prayer is the practice of being available and paying attention, and I believe that is what engaged contemplation is primarily about…our ability to pay attention to our daily lives and be available to everyone around us, to God, and to Creation.

The reason we must pray is so that our availability and attention can be formed around the One who gives us life each moment of each day, so we can remember that we are every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Second, thinking about our A-ttention and our IN-tention as a practice can help us address a concern I hear over and over again when I talk with formation leaders around the country…

“I can’t get people to come to church for any type of formation outside of Sunday morning Worship. They’re just too busy. I remember when I was young and parents had more time. We came to church a lot more often.”

Are people too busy?

Yes, they are, but they are not necessarily busier than “back in the day.” Sure, we have different kinds of busy-ness today, but life has always been busy. Or, more precisely, the temptations of the idolatries of busy-ness have always been there, and we have always been happy to accommodate the busy-ness gods in our lives. The difference for us today is ACCESS to our ATTENTION.

Our culture has almost unlimited access to our attention. Even in worship services our phones are right there with us…beckoning to us…just to give them a quick peek…and that doesn’t make us busier. But it does make us feel busier because our attention is more occupied, and it’s exhausting to be “on” and accessible 24/7.

We feel scattered, fragmented, interrupted, and over-stimulated…by our constant beeps, notifications, texts, emails, social media alerts…how many times have I stopped mid-conversation, even mid-sentence, with someone to check (and maybe respond to!) a text? Like Pavlov’s dog, how quickly is my attention diverted by an alert or chime from my phone?

Interruption has become a way of life for us all, and instead of resisting it, we have embraced and accommodated it. It has formed us, as current studies are beginning to show, and the ways interruption forms us are not great. Usually it involves heightened anxiety and irritability!

Why do we give our attention away like this? Because we feel like we HAVE to…because the tyranny of the urgent dictates our lives to us…because the cultural formation machine has trained and conditioned us to believe we MUST be available to everyone…all the time…and we must respond to them…immediately…and it is the immediacy of cultural life that hooks us and pulls us into this busy-ness way of living.

As formation leaders, a practice we can consider is to notice these habitualized patterns of busy-ness and occupation in our lives, which is vital because it is these habits that shape us and form us into who we are and who we will become. These habits are the most formative practices in our lives, for good or for ill. We are certainly able to shift our habitualized behaviors through our practices of compassion, gentleness, and slowing down – our practices of Sabbath and prayer and contemplation.

But the first step is noticing…and surrendering our urgencies to God, gently and without self-condemnation. Remember, it is not God who wants us to feel guilty about our busy-ness. It is our culture that makes us feel guilty when we do not live up to its demands and expectations of busy-ness. It is God who offers us the grace and mercy to shift away from this busy-ness mindset.

Access and Exhaustion

Our culture has more access to our attention and availability than at any other time in our history, and it is constantly trying to colonize our attention, commodify it, and capitalize on it, and, so it seems, that Paul was correct in Romans 12 when he said that if we’re not careful, we will be con-formed to culture instead of trans-formed by Christ.

And the truth is…we have been conformed…formed into the shape of culture. We have given up our resistance against the tyranny of the urgent, and we have settled for the comfort, convenience, and empty promises of empty hope that culture offers us.

And we have given up because we are too exhausted and too burned out to struggle against the daily onslaught of tidal wave after tidal wave of massive amounts of information, events, programs, classes, teams, groups, clubs, recitals, performances, practices, games, productions, and meetings that are competing for our attention. Yes, we are not busier, but our attention is more occupied…so we FEEL busier.

We FEEL busy because our attention is captive to our culture…we are captive to our phones, our screens, a Netflix binge, a social media doom scroll. And we give away our availability thoughtlessly…

Our minds wander from stimulus to stimulus, thoughtlessly reacting, instead of thoughtfully wondering about the Wonder all around us.

A truth that we know: We will always give our time and attention to what is important to us.

And we believe what culture tells us. It dictates what is important to us, and it tells us that we must be busy. We must be productive. We must be entertained. We must keep our kids entertained and over-programed. We must do more and be more. We must study more. We must consume more. We must be comfortable. We must desire convenience at all costs. We must reply to more emails and consume more information.

But as we allow culture to tell us what is important, we become less available to our spiritual lives and church communities. Our busy-ness, distractions, and entertainments are captivating, and our attention is captive.

And in our churches, time and again, our response (as formation leadership) is to try and accommodate our calendars to culture’s busy-ness and our people’s busy lives, but perhaps that is not what our response should be. Perhaps our response should not be to adapt to and compete with culture.

As I said, people give their time and attention to what is important to them, and we cannot compete with culture on its own terms.

Culture has our people’s attention, and it has significant influence over them. Culture gives them priorities, and the church is not at the top of the list.

So, what is our role as formation leaders? Our role is to diagnose spiritual illness…and busy-ness is certainly a spiritual illness. We do not accommodate busy-ness in our people’s lives. We reveal this spiritual issue in all of our lives, and we offer liberation practices so that we might all find freedom from the bondage of busy-ness in our lives. We offer liberation for healing.

Our role, as formation leaders, is to offer a healing alternative. A counter to the culture. In all that we do – in our thinking, speaking, and actions – we do as Christ (Col. 3:17), offering healing to the world, and our healing good news is Sabbath. Our practice is Sabbath. Our Way of life is Sabbath. Jesus’s teachings to us were about Sabbath…the Kingdom of God…Shabat Shalom. Our resistance to the tyranny of the urgent…is Sabbath. And Sabbath is subversive.

Resisting Sabbath and Sabbath Resistance

Sabbath peace…is resistance, says Walter Brueggemann.

It is, he says, a resistance and a subversion to Pharaoh’s demand economy and an oppressive, domination “culture of NOW” that teaches us anxiety, productivity, consumerism, demand, and commercialism. We live in a production-consumption society, and the church is supposed to offer a counter to that culture…a counter to Pharaoh’s oppression systems in our lives. In our culture of ME – “ME-Victorious above all others!” – the church is called and commanded by God to offer a counter to the commodification of ME within a hustle culture of anxiety, depression, and infinite consumption.

Fast forward from Pharaoh’s Empire to the Roman Empire, and Sabbath was certainly a form of resistance and subversion for Jesus. At every chance he got, he pushed the boundaries of what Sabbath peace meant under the violence and oppressive domination of the Roman Empire. His vision of Sabbath was what he called the Kingdom of God, which was always a protest of subversion against the alleged “Peace of Rome” – a peace through violence, aggression, domination, oppression, and war. Counter to that reality, Jesus brings a re-imagining of Sabbath.

Cole Arthur Riley writes in This Here Flesh:

It is, indeed, Sabbath that will save us for ourselves. It is the movement of God’s Spirit, a cool river of Mercy, flowing right through the middle of our lives that will save us and bring us back to ourselves. It is the wisdom of Mercy that can cut through all the clutter and scattered frenzy in our lives…to bring us clarity, peace, compassion, and an undivided heart.

A Culture of ME, A Culture of NOW

Today, we are faced with the same domination culture of the Empire, and are we offering a counter to that culture? Or are we simply accommodating and indoctrinating ourselves into that culture? Have our practices and ways of “doing church” simply conformed to culture and been formed by and within culture?

The expectation and assumption of many churches is that if we are just more entertaining, then more people will come to our church. And that is sometimes a correct assumption. But a question to consider is this, Is church supposed to be entertaining and are we supposed to just give people more of what they already get from culture?

Perhaps that is why “rock band churches” are so appealing to folks. Because it is all so familiar…more of the same cultural messages and practices. Not because there is an alternate message of “good news” that is offering alternative ways to live life together subversively within our culture, but because we are just used to being entertained…and distracted.

We, as the church, should really consider how strongly we might offer some good news that is radically counter, and subversive, to the culture.

Our people are exploited by social media – manipulated, fed mis-information and confusion, targeted for divisiveness, and data-mined on every social media platform that exists – and our response in our churches is often to invite our people into this toxic environment so we can try and post more things about our church…so the official churches social media account can get more “Likes.” Is this type of competing for attention what conforming looks like?

Sadly, we seem believe that using the tools of culture will help us live counter the culture…but that never works. It just means we are embracing our own exploitation.

Thankfully, the church is a beautiful dream of God…a sanctuary of belonging within a world of division…because our culture puts our people into shadow, and we are the light. The Light of the World – the Christ we proclaim – dispels the shadow, but what happens when the church stops offering light and just offers more shadow?

It is our responsibility to plant seeds of Light, and we will know what seeds we are planting by our harvest…and the crops don’t lie. We cannot produce oranges if we are a pear tree. So, we must mean what we say. We must believe our own words of salvation that we proclaim. Because the world will know we are Jesus’s disciples by our harvest.

The world will know we are Jesus’s disciples by the seeds of compassion and mercy that we plant to guide us and allow Sabbath peace to cut through the busy-ness, frenzy, and tyranny of urgency that dominates our lives and our day.

The world will know we are Jesus’s disciples by the ways that we come alive amidst a culture of slumber and fear. By the seeds of liberation that we proclaim, practice, and live. By the living proof of the salvation and liberation that we preach!

We are full of the wonder of God’s Spirit, born of fire…we are the embodied Temples of God’s own Aliveness…we are given power over evil and shadow…we are the bearers of the Light of the World…we have the message of salvation and liberation…we know the practices and teachings of Jesus the Christ…we follow the path of the true and Living God.

So, let us never give up planting our counter-cultural seeds of Christ. Let us never give up compassionately diagnosing our culture with the spiritual illness of busy-ness. Let us never give up offering everyone the healing from our production-consumption culture of anxiety and frenzy that we all so desperately need. Let us never give up our saltiness in favor of the bland “more of the same” that culture promises.

• Our people are busy with too many events and programs? They do not need more of the same from the church.
• Our people are overwhelmed with too much information to consume? They do not need more information, more lectures, and more curriculum to consume from the church. The church is not a classroom.
• Our people’s attention has been colonized. Their lives have been dominated. Their time has been occupied, and they are hungry for something different. They need the compassionate diagnosis and healing of the church.

Every recent study of churches in the past decade all come to the same conclusion that people do NOT want more curriculum, more lectures, more programs, and more events. Children, youth, young adults, emerging adults, adults, senior adults all want more ways to cultivate relationships. People want connection, human connection.

In a world where our technological advances and algorithms are increasingly forming us and shaping us and keeping us fragmented and disconnected, our people are desperate for more connection and deeper HUMAN relationships. Our people are hungry for something different…something counter to the culture…

Dialogue. Discussion. Deliberation. Conversation.

These are the things we crave as human beings, and these are the models of discipleship that Jesus taught us through his actions and through his life. These are the models of discipleship that Paul spent so much time writing about during his travels. Communication, connection, and relationships. This is what John the Baptizer is teaching us when he tells us to demonstrate our transformation in Matthew 3. We must mean what we say. Our words of salvation and repentance must mean something for the transformation of our world.

Programs, events, and more teaching do not hold the ATTENTION of our people, and young people are the most observant about this. Young people are paying attention to what is occupying adults’ attention, and they are seeing us as giving up on what is important…

Listening.

Meaningless talking, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, sounds like a banging gong or clanging cymbal. It’s just more noise in the world. To truly communicate with one another our communication must be infused with love, compassion, and generosity…and this means listening to each other…deeply listening.

In the Future of Faith’s “Sacred Listening Study,” 77% of teenagers said that being listened to without judgment made them feel more connected to the person listening, and two-thirds said that being listened to deepened their own faith.

In a recent study in Faithful Futures, by Josh Packard, 75% of youth and young adults said that being listened to helped them stay open about faith and spirituality. And I’d say that goes for us all!

It’s clearly not more entertainment that we are seeking but an attentive presence that appeals to us. It’s not a new curriculum or a new program. It’s not a big event or a new lecture series during formation time or Sunday School.

What matters is our matter. Our physical presence being fully present to where we are.

It is our ATTENTION that matters most in our ministries, and it is our attention that has become colonized and occupied. It is our attention that needs liberation, and that is what the church is for…liberation.

Awake, and Come Alive!

As we are reminded in Ephesians, we are all asleep, and it is time to come alive….awake o sleeper and rise from the dead and the light of Christ will shine on you…

Our people are tired of being tired and tired of being asleep. Our good news is to wake up and come alive. Our good news is the light of Christ to shine out into the shadows of our culture.

If our people are too busy to come to church, then that means busy-ness is a spiritual issue, and that is the diagnosis they need to hear. We have traded transformation for accommodation as we seek higher attendance from those thoroughly entrenched within the busy-ness of culture.

But our people are hurting, exhausted, lost, and in bondage…they need liberation. They do not need our accommodation. They need Christ’s transformation and healing. They need to hear the good news that busy-ness is a bondage and a spiritual dis-ease, and the church offers the antidote. It is the great liberator.

So, let us not continue prioritizing all the gods of our culture and worshipping at the altar of busy-ness. Let us surrender and give our attention more readily to the grace and mercies of God.

We are confused, and Jesus has come to clarify our lives for us and to us. Jesus has come to bring liberation. That is his good news. What is our good news?

We all need to pay more attention to what we are paying attention to. It is time to notice. It is time to pause. It is time to reflect. It is time to connect and discern together how best to move forward within this domination culture of busy-ness and burnout.

Let us focus on our deep liberation practices that Jesus teaches us, and paying attention is one of these liberating practices. Prayer is a liberation practice.

This Advent season, let’s try this practice: 12 Days of Sacred Listening. Let’s try it for 12 days. It just might change our lives…and our world.