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Receptivity and offering: Our attention

Lynne Baab • Tuesday May 24 2022

If you look around online, you’ll find a growing body of articles and books on the question of attention. All of them highlight the challenge of the internet and cell phones. The experts writing those articles are right that attention is a topic of particular concern today. Here’s a quotation from one such article:

“‘My experience is what I agree to attend to,’ the pioneering psychologist William James wrote in the late 19th century. His observations about the mind, both detailed and sweeping, laid the groundwork for the ways Americans talk about attention today: attention as an outgrowth of interest and, crucially,...

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Receptivity and offering: Moments

Lynne Baab • Monday May 16 2022

“An illusion haunts us that a long duration – as a year, a decade, a century – is valuable. But an old French sentence says, ‘God works in moments.’ We ask for long life, but ’tis deep life or grand moments that signify. Let the measure of Time be spiritual, not mechanical. . . . Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance – what ample borrowers of eternity they are!” —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet

“The new life into which we are baptized is lived out in days, hours, and minutes. God is...

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Receptivity and offering: And-ness

Lynne Baab • Wednesday May 11 2022

“The world we inhabit is full of splendor and misery, our fellow humans are brilliant and inspiring and selfish and vicious, and we ourselves are hopelessly motley, full of mixed motives and mixed feelings.” —Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the memoir “Lost & Found.”

Schulz describes the big and small losses she experienced in the pandemic and concludes:

“All these are examples of what I think of as the fundamental and-ness of life, the way it requires us to experience so many contradictory or unrelated things all at once. There’s no getting away from this and-ness, because it is...

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Receptivity and offering: Tears

Lynne Baab • Wednesday May 4 2022

My husband Dave and I have been talking about the growing number of times we get tears in our eyes. We are both experiencing this as we get older.

Dave often tears up when singing hymns or praise songs at church, and when that happens, he feels okay about it because no one can see him in the pew. However, in our church we come forward to receive communion, and Dave often has tears on his face as he comes forward. He finds this embarrassing (and he gave me permission to write about this).

He says that his tears sometimes reflect sadness for...

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