Jimmy Beh

There are only two homilies I remember from high school masses. Truthfully, I am surprised I remember any.

One was about family dynamics. The other was about a tip our Jesuit priest learned while walking on a pilgrimage.

It is the latter homily and its message that has continued to come to mind over the last two decades– slowly and persistently forming me. The message was simple; “Remember to keep your head up.” 

Sounds like something you would hear at a children’s soccer match, doesn’t it? I definitely heard it from my basketball coaches during our dribbling drills. 

This message is most often interpreted as “stay positive,” but Fr. Stephens SJ, the homilist, shared that for him it was a reminder from a fellow pilgrim to be present. To pay attention to the trail, the vistas, the people, the food, the setbacks, and everything else– the ordinary and extraordinary within each day. 

I’ve been thinking about this old homily recently since moving back to DC from my Novitiate year in Santa Barbara. Now being out of a contemplative religious life setting, I am bombarded by the grip technology seems to have on everyone around me. Don’t get me wrong, I know what it feels like to doomscroll after working on your laptop all day– I was only ‘removed’ from the normal flow of things for about two years. But somehow technology in my post-novitiate world seems… different? Or am I just paying attention differently?

I now watch as parents drop their kids off at school while looking at their phones. Dog owners walking their dogs like zombies reading emails on the move. I look over at the car next to me at red lights and see folks scrolling through social media (I presume). Even at a recent NHL game, I watched as most people opted to look at their phones rather than talk to their friends during the intermission between periods.

We all know this is happening and I think most of us know it is not a good thing. On varying  levels this type of behavior has negative effects on our communication skills, our sense of connection in our relationships, it atrophies our creativity, and it distracts from both meaningful work and active leisure. And yet, we still struggle to change our behavior. We know it is not good, but the alternative is…well… boring.

So what might a more boring daily life have to offer?

Well, lots of things, but I would argue one of the most important is the awareness of Beauty.

Beauty is on offer when we allow boredom to reshape how we pay attention. Simone Weil famously wrote that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Nowadays, our attention is treated as a commodity that is sold to brands instead of a spiritual practice that helps us cherish the simple things. When we doomscroll social media we are passively observing a virtual world. But each of us is called to be a participating co-creator in the physical and spiritual world. And so perhaps this is one way we can read the signs of the times… learning that the metanoia Jesus might be calling us to is a new way of paying attention in our daily lives.

But, when we take steps to limit our technology use we do not immediately turn into contemplatives. Rather, it is a slow process of making space for boredom, which ideally will lead to noticing things you had not noticed before. This might start small with delighting in how the sun is coming through your window so we can see those dust particles floating in the air, and it can (and should) lead to noticing larger and more intimate things. For example, the emotional state of a spouse or friend or the destitution of the homeless person we ignore everyday on your way to work. 

Noticing Beauty in not about simply locating ‘positive vibes’ that make us feel good. Beauty should move us– it can lead to gratitude and delight, and it can just as easily bring us to tears and heart back as we truly see someone’s struggle.

If we take seriously that all people are born with inherent dignity and that God is the Creator of all things (visible and invisible), then we ought to be moved by the mystery of Beauty everyday and in every place. Whether it is the love in your spouse’s eyes, the pain in the street person’s eyes, or the gentleness in an animal’s eyes. The Beauty of the Creator is present in all, inviting us to pay attention– and then to respond. Maybe it leads to starting a family or perhaps to a religious vocation, who knows? The point is that it all starts with how we pay attention to the mystery of this Beauty in our lives.

St. Clare of Assisi showed us how to pay attention through her contemplative prayer frame-work; Gaze, Consider, Contemplate, Imitate. Fr. Pedro Arrupe articulated how we can notice Beauty as contemplatives in action through his “Fall in Love” prayer. Even in nonspiritual terms, someone like Ross Gay seems to capture this same type of noticing in his popular book “A Book of Delights.”

In the end, I hope that all of us can continue to reclaim this immense gift we have been given– the gift of our ability to gaze, to pay attention, to fall in love. How beautiful it is to realize that a viable pathway to living a more meaningful and connected life– with God, creation and one another– is accessible to us in the ordinary practice of trying to keep our head up in our daily lives.

So what have you noticed today? Where did you see Beauty… did it move you? How might you respond to it?