To those communities of care that ship their grain across the sea, waiting many days for a reply
My go-to breakfast is a savory porridge of rice, pork and aromatics. They tolerate different heat. The pork, which I julienne into little matchsticks, requires a rolling boil that snaps its microscopic connective tissues taut. That makes its flesh firm and splinter in your mouth when chewed. No one enjoys gumming around a watery, elastic piece of meat early in the morning. The rice, however, must percolate in tepid waters, or else it burns.
I have scalded the porridge many a time, leaving my husband to scrape at the charred bits with his steel wool after some hours of soaking in the sink. My own audacity is to blame. I meander to the other side of the room and sit down at the computer to cram in a few minutes of property law when, all of a sudden, my nose is twitching at the odor of irreversibly burnt starch. So I stand at the stove. I stir. I resist the urge to set the task aside. If not for this stubborn porridge, I would allocate my attention to something else – like the rest of my time, subject to my whim or order. When cooking, I find myself in lockstep with the rhythms of God’s ecology.
Having to manage the organic matter in the fridge does this too. When the cauliflower starts to polka-dot, I scrub it with my nails and devise a second supper. Raised by Chinese immigrants, no bone in my body would allow me to throw spoiling vegetables away. So an evening I expected to be squeezing in another law school practice problem turns into a last ditch effort to salvage greens.
But I am otherwise accustomed to bending my environment to my will. Here in the post-Industrial United States, our floors vacuum themselves, our homes hum with warmth at the twitch of a knob, and our bodies are tuned with carefully administered doses of coffee, melatonin and weed. We face our greatest enemy, Darkness, with global wiring and electric LEDs. Forget about the frontier of the night— we own it. Sleep is a fiction we box into a timetable. That God summons the sun home like a warlord in a chariot no longer astounds us. Neither do we marvel at the stars that he marshals. In most places, we can’t even see the stars.
Yet, this also from the hand of God. His ecology thrums. It’s not been made extinct; we’ve just fallen out of joint with it. It’s not been made irrelevant; we’ve just lost our taste for what is relevant. Something cataclysmic is happening to his world, even now— mountains are falling into the sea, cities crumbling into gravel, seas being wicked away, seeds taking root and broadening into towering trees. God is rebirthing reality, now. We’ll all be useful; no person can escape this grand narrative. The question is whether we’ll be like pharaoh or like David— whether we’ll stonewall our hearts to the Orchestrator of History, or be in tune.
I’ve been trying to steward my attention to pick up on fibers of God’s reality, the Logos that underpins a world greater than I. I don’t wish to discover a clever apologetic or a theological system; I want to be in unity with the Divine. In my college Christian fellowship, we used to speak in terms of allowing “divine interruptions.” Because we are prone to wander, we are prone to be divinely interrupted. But instead of being “divinely interrupted,” might we instead be a “divinely responsive”? Might our willingness to pay attention become the locus of our joy?
To be in unity with God in law school requires cutting against the grain. While my peers ramp up journal writing competitions and club leadership and fancy formals, I pare down my commitments to the bare minimum: classes, the Christian Legal Society, and some clinic volunteering that will prepare me for my mission field of public interest law. I need the flexibility of margin, since I don’t know how God will plan my day. But I also need to honor my commitments, since that matters to him too. So less is more.
And he has his way, wending my heart like a river. One Tuesday morning, I found the shores caved in. I set aside the civil procedure review I was about to do before class at 9, and became preoccupied with the exercise Pastors call discernment. Why was I so upset? Was it this environment of ruthless, high-achievers? Was it fear that I would not surpass my peers? Pride that I was not intended to be a nobody? I jammed reflections into my phone with furious thumbs instead of quizzing civil procedure. I tore at the pages of my Bible for the verses I needed to hear instead of cramming property law during lunch. On my way back to the commuter lot after class, I paced in silence rather than re-listen to a lecture. I swore angrily at God, then begged Him to forgive me. Over the following weeks, waves of bitter pain hit me as He unearthed the sin and suffering in my heart; waves of sweet peace washed over me as I called that evil out into the light and He reconciled my soul.
Like the rice granules that pass from still-raw to scorched in an instant, this process eluded my planning. To steward my attention meant savoring the moment– directing a desire to pay further attention– and taking advantage of my margin– the classwork could wait– in order to align myself to its timing.
And there is also the matter of the other hearts that thrum in this ecosystem of God. In order to hear their thrum, I pay attention. As I stave off the to-dos worming into my conscience and greet the woman who is cleaning up bagels, I discover that she will be alone on Easter. I tag my co-heir with Christ. She hikes her baby, husband and mentee up and we flood the widow’s house with muddy shoes and cake crumbs.
Monday morning, an old Bible study acquaintance texts the half-dormant group chat: my mother’s passed away. I’m in shock. I’ve only met him once or twice. I know he’s been in and out of hourly wage jobs. I know he’s a YouTuber in his free time. What will it do to my heart if I do not pause to weep?
Tuesday, I get a text from my law school mentor to please pray for her parents; when I ask why, she unfurls the fact that they are separating. We had just met for coffee a few days ago. She wasn’t ready to tell me then. But I want to be primed to hear, now that she is ready to share.
Wednesday, I deliver beef and pepper stir-fry to a mom whose baby is in the NICU forty-five minutes away. As she follows her two boys bouncing out of the truck, she drops her phone screen-down. It comes up stalactited with mud. (Later, she assures me over text that she was able to clean it off.)
Every day, there is the 30-year-old college dropout who has not made his unemployment check-ins or his rent for the last four months– for him, we pray.
And the porridge isn’t always burning. With the friend who completed his climbing competition, we dip salty fingers into celebration poutine for the table. When my best friend of six years aces her first medical board exam after a year and a half of hair-splitting work, we scream into the phone at each other. That, too, is life worth sharing.
In having my awareness arrested, I discover Life itself.