by Barbara Mahany

Barbara Mahany is an award-winning author, essayist, and longtime journalist, who worked as a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune for nearly 30 years. She is the author of five books, the most recent of which, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God's First Sacred Text (Broadleaf Books, 2023), has been called a “spiritual classic of the 21st century.” Her first book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door (Abingdon Books, 2014), was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of its Top Ten religion books for Fall, 2014. Barbara is a former pediatric oncology nurse who worked at Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital before becoming a newspaper writer. She is married to Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago Tribune architecture critic, and together they have two sons.

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
—Simone Weil, twentieth-century French philosopher, mystic, and political activist

***

The road to epiphany is attention.

As it ever has been. Across the millennia, the ones seeking the sacred—poets and prophets, mystics and everyday saints, holy vagabonds and run-of-the-mill antisomnambulists—stalk the earth attuned to susurrations and silence and the palpable sense of something deeply astir: the animating author of all the cosmos. It’s a watchkeeping ever on watch. Peel back the wisdoms of East or West, plumb the canons of any civilization, listen to the thrum of Indigenous truth telling, and there you will find the spiritual practice of paying closest attention. On alert to the visible invisibility.

Mark Strand, the Pulitzer-winning poet laureate, boiled it down in plainspoken logical terms: “We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”

Indeed, if, in this too-swift sprint that is our lives—“a faint tracing on the surface of mystery,” in one poet’s inscription—we are here to inch our way toward absorbing and being absorbed into the divine, thinning the veil between heaven and earth, then the surest way there is to crank up the senses, and not fall asleep on the clock. I’ve sometimes wondered if maybe our sensory components—those inner workings of the human species, the neurotransmitters by which we take notice—might have been God’s afterthoughts (something of an editorial tweak, a rococo embellishment at the hour of creation) upon delighting in the whimsy of rainbows confettied across the sky and giggling aloud at, say, the great heron’s curious footprint, an appendicular trace once described as “an ideogram at the end of the calligrapher’s brush.”

God, it so happens, is not of miserly constitution.

All through the ages, there’s been an unbroken tradition of spiritualists pointing the way, all but tracing a finger across the pages of the Book of Nature. We needn’t look to the fringe. The Belgic Confession of 1561, a cornerstone of Reformed doctrine, one of the earliest such statements of faith, spelled it out in article 2, titled “The Means by Which We Know God”: “That universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God.” This long tradition of spiritualists might be called the Footprintists, those who understood that our holiest work is “studying in minute detail the footprints of God in the world,” as ecotheologian Belden Lane put it in Ravished by Beauty, his 2011 study of the historical development—from John Calvin to Jonathan Edwards—of a sensual theology of beauty and desire.

Think not that it’s straightforward business. Nor an obvious read.

“The book of nature is like a page written over or printed upon with different-sized characters and in many different languages, interlined and cross-lined, and with a great variety of marginal notes and references,” observed John Burroughs, the inimitable Hudson Valley essayist who subscribed to a quiet, close-to-home approach to nature watching. “There is coarse print and fine print; there are obscure signs and hieroglyphics…It is a book which he reads best who goes most slowly or even tarries long by the way.”

Nature, always protagonist but often antagonist of the eponymous Book, is not one to billboard its secrets.

In an essay titled “The Art of Seeing Things,” Burroughs continues: “So far as seeing things is an art, it is the art of keeping your eyes and ears open. The art of nature is all in the direction of concealment. The birds, the animals, all the wild creatures, for the most part try to elude your observation. The art of the bird is to hide her nest; the art of the game you are in quest of is to make itself invisible.”

For our purposes, the game of which Burroughs writes is a hide-and-seek of the holy variety. Not only are the sightings elusive, demanding of urgent attention—a quick eye, a steady gaze, the patience of an Assisian Francis—the scrollwork of creation tends to be fine-grained, subtle. Which is why its disciples—those seers and saints who’ve authored the literature of illumination on creation’s manuscript, a trove populated by the likes of Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, J. Drew Lanham, Annie Dillard, and Thomas Merton, to name just a few illuminati from not-distant decades—have proven themselves indispensable. They point the way toward deeper reading. 

“I became a student of subtle differences: the way a breeze may flutter a single leaf on a whole tree, leaving the other leaves silent and unmoved (had not that leaf, then, been brushed by a magic?); or the way the intensity of the sun’s heat expresses itself in the precise rhythm of the crickets,” writes David Abram, in his lyrical The Spell of the Sensuous, drawing from Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own past as a sleight-of-hand prestidigitator, to reawaken us to the language of this holy earth.

It might be fleeting and furtive, but it’s not in short supply, the Book of Creation’s wild-grace wisdoms. In the words of Dillard, who penned that paean to paying attention, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.”

Indeed, it’s worth pausing here to consider one of the great origin stories magnifying the penny-strewn nature of all creation, one drawn from ancient Judaic mysticism, underscoring how all the cosmos came to be consecrated or filled with sparks of the divine. It’s known as the Mystery of the Shattering or Splintering of the Vessels; in Hebrew, Shevirah. And it goes like this:

At the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. When God decided to make heaven and earth, God drew in a breath, which made the darkness. When God said, “Let there be light,” a light thus filled the darkness, and ten holy vessels appeared, each filled with this first breath or primordial light. God then sent forth those vessels, like a fleet of sanctified ships, each ferrying its cargo of light. But the vessels were too fragile for such a luminous heavenly light, and so the vessels shattered or splintered and holy sparks rained down “like sand, like seeds, like stars,” as one especially beautiful telling puts it. The sparks fell everywhere, onto and into everything. And that’s why, according to the myth, we humans were created: to gather up the sparks, no matter where hidden. It is our holy task to be spark seekers. When enough shards of holiness have been gathered, when the vessels are restored, then tikkun olam, the repair of the world, long awaited, will be complete.

Our paying attention, then, our seeking the sparks of holiness within and under and over and through all of creation, it’s not some dalliance or diversion. We’re not strapping on our hiking shoes, fetching our butterfly nets for the pure frolic of it. We’re getting about the business of infusing ourselves—and the broken world all around—with all the holiness we can muster. We are called to attention and witness. Who knows what you’ll find lurking there on the edge of some murky old pond?

It’s the cloud of unknowing we’re aiming to lift with our curiosities piqued and our inquisitions endless. Dillard elucidates: “We remove the veils one by one, painstakingly, adding knowledge to knowledge and whisking away veil after veil, until at last we reveal the nub of things, the sparkling equation from whom all blessings flow.”

It’s the nub—that holy, holy nub—that I seek.

In truth, it won’t take long to amass a veritable catalog of astonishments, should we pay attention to what mythologist Martin Shaw calls “the trembling mysteries,” to follow the call of that late great rabbi and thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel, who implored that we “live life in radical amazement, get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted…To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

The point of all this watchkeeping is that it can’t help but train our sights on the crosshairs of wonder in our everyday. To drench us in the undeniable beauties of God, the ones reminding us how infinitesimal we are against the immensities of heaven, and how unendingly God delights in sharing the holiest romp with us all. And isn’t the point of this very close reading to come to the closest knowledge of God through the very intricacies poured onto each page of the vast Book of Nature?

A necessary exercise in probing that genius, I find, is to peel away the apparent, to reach for the marvels of science undergirding it all. It’s the utter brilliance, spelled out in the laws of botany or physics, in astronomical algorithms and mathematical formulas, in the uncanny repetitions of ubiquitous patterns and shapes—the golden ratio, the spiral, the circle, the hexagon, the whorls and ellipses and fractals, even plain old spots and stripes—that to me seals the deal on the Great Intelligence.

I’m hardly alone in my inclination to lean into science, specifically as a factor in multiplying the holy. Here’s Robert Macfarlane on the late great wilderness writer Lopez, who seriously considered becoming a Trappist monk or a priest before devoting his writing life to the wilds and authoring his 1986 masterpiece Arctic Dreams, among a catalog of great works:

“Lopez’s scientific training [as a field biologist] also helped him. Through it, he came to realize the importance of fact as a carrier of wonder,” wrote Macfarlane. “Arctic Dreams is packed with data: about the crystallography of frazil ice, or the thermodynamics of polar-bear hair…Science, for Lopez, finesses the real into a greater marvelousness. Arctic mirages were once thought to be the work of angels; they are now known to be the work of angles. For Lopez, the two are never far apart.”

How then do we come to see in such fine-grained texture and intricacy, fix our lens on what the lyrical Williams refers to as “wild nature’s seasonal fugue of infinite composition and succession”?

Frederick Buechner, a seer if ever there was, sets no low bar here: “Look with Rembrandt’s eye, listen with Bach’s ear, look with X-ray eyes that see beneath the surface to whatever lies beneath the surface.” There’s a difference, he’s reminding us, and what we’re after is the deep-down noticing, a sacramental attention. Shaw, the mythologist, makes clear: “There’s a difference between seeing something and beholding it.”

Begin by stalking. “You have to stalk everything,” Dillard insists. Otherwise it’s only a glimpse, and you’re likely to miss it altogether.

This paying attention in such up-close scale, and hot on the trail of catching the divine in the act, insists on patience. “No one knows when God will choose to reveal himself,” reminded Welsh poet and Anglican priest R. S. Thomas, who said he was sometimes more apt to notice God’s exit than entrance or presence, too often feeling “the draught that was God leaving.” Merton, the monk of Gethsemani, who read deeply and ecumenically the wisdoms of multiple spiritual disciplines—Christian Desert Fathers, Taoist philosophers, Buddhist Zen masters, and more—reminds us “not to run from one thought to next.” Rather, give each thought “time to settle in the heart.”

The Japanese embrace the ancient knowing of hakanasa, or evanescence, best expressed in veneration toward the cherry blossom. Its beauty, the Zen masters teach, is all the more piercing because it won’t last; any minute a breeze might blow and the petals will flutter to earth, a pink-tinged perfumed rain. God has made everything beautiful for its time; the abbreviations only serve to intensify.

While wisdom seekers across time have turned their gaze, their beholding, to the whole of the cosmos, it is a watchkeeping infused deep into the DNA of two particular tribes, ones now braided into my own ecology of awe: the Jews and the Celts, both rooted in the humus and the turning of this holy earth, and whose prayers and praise resound with the vernacular of star and moon, sea and sod, rain and drought, seed and season.

In Hebrew, Sim lev!—the command form of “pay attention”—literally means “put forth your heart.” It’s the call to divine attention especially. And it’s one that’s long echoed among the people of Israel, a summons across time and timelessness for all who are keen to the holy call. It’s a sacred thread sewn through all of Jewish history. In the Warsaw ghetto, the Hasidic rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira taught a form of meditation called hashkatah, or quieting, of which a central element was honing a “sensitization to holiness,” a process of discovering the holiness within oneself and the natural world. Martin Buber, the Austrian-Israeli philosopher, distilled the sacred purpose into three simple words, one blessed truth: “hallow the everyday.”

The Celts, another ancient rural people, this time from the unforgiving rugged lands anchored in the Irish Sea and the North Atlantic, lived by the same simple code. They too listened for God—“the Lord of the Elements”—in all things, and recognized the world as a place of revelation, the whole of life as sacramental. It’s been said that the first cathedral of worship to the Celts was all that unspooled under God’s holy dome. They were a people who asked, as in an eighteenth-century Welsh poem, “How many bright wonders does this world contain…how many mirrors of His finest work offer themselves a hundred times to our gaze?” And the soulful response of these sea-faring, field-toiling, flock-herding folk, who lived by the tides and the seasons’ turning, highly attuned to the laws and the language of nature: to attend and to bless each stitch of the day with beannacht (Gaelic for “benediction” or “blessing”). Theirs was a life of ceaseless prayer rooted in the quotidian, from kindling the morning fire to milking the cow and planting the seed, to spying the moon and smoldering the day’s last embers.

“These are the prayers of a people who have so much to do from dawn to dusk from dark to dark, that they had little time for long, formal prayers,” explains Celtic scholar Esther de Waal, of the elemental prayers gathered in Gaelic in an extraordinarily beautiful compendium, Carmina Gadelica. It’s a collection of incantations, hymns, blessings, and charms recorded mostly in the Gaelic-speaking Outer Hebrides of Scotland between 1860 and 1909 by a folklorist, Alexander Carmichael, who surely saved a treasure from the ash bin of history.

It was believed by these imaginal people from a place of wind-swept moors and craggy mounds that a “thread of glory” wove through the warp and weft of all creation’s tapestry.

Much like the tight focus of Japanese haiku, or the sure brush of the Impressionist painter, the Celtic way of prayer was especially attentive to so subtle a thing as shadow and nuance of color. Not an iota of grace was taken for granted. Echoing the ancient Hebrews’ tie to their Holy Land, the Celts held an astonishing confidence that God had showered them with blessings, and through their simple anointing of each and all, theirs was a praise song always rising.

This call to attention, as prescribed and practiced by Celts or Jews, Zen Buddhists or Shinto priests, modern-day popes or medieval mystics, is quite simply our surest hope of hewing to Meister Eckhart’s admonition to “learn to penetrate things and find God there.”

In the opening passage of his classic work The Human Phenomenon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spelled out the imperative: “Seeing. One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing—if not ultimately, at least essentially…That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes at the heart of a cosmos where it is always possible to discern more…To try to see more and to see better is not, therefore, just a fantasy, curiosity, or a luxury. See or perish.”

It’s either or, to be blunt. If the Book of Nature is the text we’re longing to read, to bump up against the One who breathed it and penned it, then the one holy practice, the necessary practice, is that of paying attention. Only then might we see: the seen and the unseen, all of it, all along the road to epiphany, where attention points the way.

***

Nothing is more essential to prayer than attentiveness.
—Evagrius the Solitary, fourth-century monk and ascetic

Barbara Mahany

Author of The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Broadleaf Books, 2013), from which this chapter is excerpted.
barbara.ann.mahany@gmail.com