Dear colleagues,

Here’s a challenge I’ve been struggling with lately: focus. Perhaps it’s the constant news about the pandemic and the uncertainty about its future course. Perhaps it’s the fever pitch of the American presidential election. Perhaps it’s just that point of the semester. Whatever it is, it’s been hard for me to pay attention lately—to my work, my family, in church.

If you’ve heard me preach, chances are you’ll know of my love for etymology, the roots of our language. So I looked up the etymological roots of “attention.” (I told you I was having trouble focusing.) Here it is: attention comes from Latin roots that mean stretch (tendere) towards (ad). I found great comfort in this. No wonder I’m struggling with attention in a pandemic: reaching out to other people is exactly what I am not supposed to do in a time of physical distancing.

You could say that the Christian life is about being attentive to God. “Let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out its hands to God,” the psalmist writes (68:31), in a verse important to many African Christians. The woman with unstoppable bleeding reaches out to Jesus thinking, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” (Mark 5:28) (She was right.) In one of the collects for mission in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, we link Jesus’ stretching to our stretching: “you stretched out your arms of love on the cross… so clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you” (p. 101).

That collect reminds us that if we want to be attentive to God, we also need to be attentive to one another. Among the many things that distinguishes the Samaritan from the priest and the Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan is that the Samaritan is the only who reaches out to the wounded man on the side of the road. When Jesus concludes that parable by telling his listeners to “go and do likewise,” he is telling us to go show that same kind of attentiveness to others.

My recent struggles with attention aside, the larger truth is that we live in a society that is increasingly structured to distract our attention. Indeed, one way of describing the Internet and especially the social media ecosystem is as an “attention economy.” Companies seek our attention so as to sell us ads, and they do this with ever-more complex algorithms that feed us a steady diet of diverting, amusing, and incendiary content. Stretching out towards anything is awfully tough if you can just keep scrolling to the next thing.

It is a great sadness that in this pandemic we cannot stretch out towards one another in person. But as I seek to re-focus myself, I find that by stretching out towards God I am also stretching out towards all of God’s creation and paying attention as I do.

Faithfully yours,
Jesse

This message was written by Principal Jesse Zink for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community.