Stop, Look, and Listen
“Is it too much to say that Stop, Look, and Listen is also the most basic lesson that the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us? Listen to history is the cry of the ancient prophets of Israel. Listen to social injustice, says Amos; to head-in-the-sand religiosity, says Jeremiah; to international treacheries and power-plays, says Isaiah; because it is precisely through them that God speaks his word of judgment and command.
“And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
“In a letter to a friend Emily Dickinson wrote that ‘Consider the lilies of the field’ was the only commandment she never broke. She could have done a lot worse. Consider the lilies. It is the sine qua non of art and religion both.”
- Frederick Buechner
then hear, see, and go.
Others can be, should be …. God’s speed bumps.
Others can be, should be …. God’s speed bumps.
The lillies of the field wouldn’t cut it with many religious people today…
They wouldn’t be tall enough, colorful enough or plentiful enough to satisfy their critics; they would also probably lean in the wrong direction or be too susceptible to going wherever the wind took them…
What beautiful words from Buechner. Makes me think of “be still and know. . .”
Thanks Mike… for you, a poem in progress:
The Morning, and Still We Sleep
Continuing, the stillness
of dreams reshaped
is day formed.
The moment of waking,
touched, is never
to be held.
You hand me birds,
their beaks and wings
without song or cadence;
I say wooden
soldiers will stand still,
their fingers sprouting triggers.
Shots fall quietly
in their shade,
and Jay did sing, patriotic,
easing us awake with
whistles— a gentle patrolman,
pressed and perched, shaping citizens.
It should be impossible
to stay asleep in the wood
alive with this urgent,
bright call,
and the quaking form
of sentinels, saluting us
one by one
together, quiet,
and so attentive.
Some ideas, as Emily would I’m sure agree, don’t fit into prose containers.
Scott