Guide me through the wilderness
How paying attention can bring us home.
Poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is, but I know how to pay attention.”
When I look around, it’s apparent to me that we are living in a spiritual wilderness. People do not know how to pray. The collective “groaning too deep for words” is almost audible. There is a longing to experience truth and beauty, revelation, and redemption. In my work with young adults, I have observed that the desire to meet God is thwarted at every turn by chaos and confusion. The noise of the world invades our silent and solitary moments through the violence of various feeds. We long to pay attention but only scroll. Trauma specialist Dr. Gabor Maté observes that “pop culture grooms us for a particular sort of passive, spectator-like engagement with politics [and] disgraced icons…And what do we consume exactly? Art, sometimes: harmless fun, often enough. But we also ingest the pain of wounded people, packaged as entertainment, to dull or perhaps validate our own distress.”
Though we are “fed,” we become numb to tragedy and our compassion fades. We long to pray, but hardly know what to confess, what to lament or where to begin.
And yet.
I’m afflicted with hope. I’m surrounded by joyful colleagues, people who spend time on their knees, people who love the church and the city and who stubbornly practice hope. Five years ago, these pioneers said, let’s fill an old brick home with young people and embrace life-giving rhythms. Let’s see if we can pray and pay attention together.
The prayer warriors of our city lamented, saying “this generation is lost.” What might have been a warning galvanized our small community. Each September, as a new cohort of gap year students arrive at Act Five in Hamilton, Ontario after graduating from high school, we send them out to the wilderness, and invite them to consider Oliver’s iconic question – “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” This trek into the back country begins a year of discernment and imagination. If discipleship begins with hunger, our calling as spiritual mentors is to ignite that hunger as we walk alongside young people.
On chaos
If this generation is lost, the wandering didn’t begin with them. In an address at The Table conference at McMaster Divinity College in 2022, Professor Andrew Root (Luther Seminary) suggested chaos snuck in the door long before the dawn of social media. To the hundreds of pastors and ministry leaders gathered that spring, he painted a picture of society from Christendom to the secular age. He noted that while many people still believe in God, they no longer believe in the devil.
If there’s no devil, then there’s no liar, and anything might be true.
This is the water we’ve been swimming in for generations, and now our children are swimming with us. Whether we believe in the devil or not, the lies are ever present, and they’re coming at us in all directions at an ever-increasing speed.
The Germans have coined a word for this time-sickness plague, Root explained. Zeitkrankheit, or time disease, describes the acceleration of technology, our social lives, and the pace of life. The myth that growth will stabilize everything has been revealed as one big lie. Take, for example, the TikTok phenomenon of “bed-rotting,” spending an entire day or weekend in bed scrolling or binging on Netflix. This opt-out exhaustion is symptomatic of people who are trying to pay attention to a thousand things at once, and the realization that, as Root says, “there’s a speed limit to our mental health, and we’ve surpassed it. These sped up systems lead to disintegration and the erosion of commitment.”
What happens then? Depression and anxiety sink in. New York Times cultural commentator David Brooks notes that “the opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but purpose.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to find your purpose, especially as a young person, if your rhythms are disordered and dictated by the inhumane pace of the internet. If everything is possible, nothing is possible. Young people, he writes, are drowning in freedom.
Canadian psychologist David Benner wrote “it’s not that we tell lies, it’s that we live them.” For young people today, living in a culture that doesn’t believe in the devil, this plays out in a myriad of destructive habits (compulsive video gaming, hidden pornography use, mindless social media scrolling), which lead to dis-regulated rhythms. This kind of knowing about but not truly experiencing, has far reaching consequences, especially when what we think of as truth are sophisticated, curated lies powered by invisible algorithms.
In his latest book, The Myth of Normal, Dr. Gabor Maté writes of the various kinds of disintegrations that we have normalized, rhythms that are toxic to what he calls our bodymind, or what I would call the soul. For example, he describes how we have normalized isolated, stressed parenting, where keeping up with [so-called] expert advice, rather than parenting in community, leads to social malaise. In turn, we have normalized peer attachment over parental attachment, even though adolescents are not developmentally mature enough to stand in for adult guidance. Unsurprisingly, young and old are increasingly diagnosed with disorders when, in fact, everyone is simply lonely.
The normalization of toxic rhythms is as much a spiritual reality as a cultural phenomenon. Political pundits, theologians and trauma specialists may diagnose from different angles but the problem of lies leading to chaos is ancient. The good news is the possibility of redemption is ancient, too.
On order
I fell into discipling young people through story when Act Five invited me to read some of my fiction at one of their storytelling nights in 2021.
In the Q&A afterwards, I shared with the students about my writing group, committed companions who encourage my creative writing weekly. These writers stop me when something is crooked – not grammatical errors but words and scenes that aren’t true. The task, I told those students, is to find the truth, even if it is a painful, endless revision. If you write a lie, if you live a lie, everyone will know it. I may occasionally know that a scene is artificial and try to soldier on anyways, but my writing community never lets me get away with it. To know you’re telling lies or living lies, you need community. Discipleship was never meant to be an individual effort. That night I had my first hint that I was preaching to the choir. The students in the audience were already living that reality.
For the participants in Act Five, discipleship in community begins in the morning, like all resurrection stories. Students rise early and go together on morning walks through the Blakely neighbourhood east of downtown Hamilton. They learn to wake up and pay attention to their street, to their neighbours, to the magnolia tree budding much too early, to the children who walk to school with happy or haggard parents, and to the kids who wander the sidewalks on their own.
After morning walk is prayer, led by a student or staff member. The daily liturgies are simple, old and new, improvised and ancient. They spend time in silence: reading, journaling, sketching or perhaps playing guitar in the leafy backyard. Afterwards, they are off to class, or to an internship in the city. In the afternoons, they complete chores, explore the city, and exercise. They grocery shop in pairs and prepare meals for a crowd that often includes refugee neighbours or alumni, in one of the two slightly sticky kitchens. There are more dishes piled up on the counters than you can imagine, and it’s beautiful.
In a world characterized by untenable speed or quicksand despondency, I’ve found my hope renewed witnessing this community living out ordinary rhythms guided by the sixth century Benedictine “Rule of Life.” Six months after that initial story-telling introduction, I joined the staff team. Though the Act Five year is interspersed with trips and adventures, when I meet alumni of the program, they tell me that what they miss aren’t the forays abroad, but the silly dancing in the kitchen, the spontaneous trips to get ice cream after evening prayer, and the extended worship sessions after Sunday Evensong. They even miss the Wednesday tech fast we practice, twenty-four phoneless hours, week after week.
When I arrived in the budding Act Five community, “liturgy” and “Rule of Life” were unfamiliar words to me, but not unfamiliar practices. I practised the spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude because it was the only way I knew to survive life as an extrovert and on-stage leader. I grew up on a farm where long hours of silence and meditation were baked into the day. Today, when I introduce students to St. Benedict’s Rule of Life, Ora et Labora, it is a small attempt to re-introduce order into chaos. In a world that has divided into tribalism, characterized by mutual hatred, the discipline of hospitality is how we fight for love. While rage clicking is common, the vinyl, sticker-covered suitcase where our devices rest on Wednesdays allows us to consider whether we want to click at all.
On coming to the table
On the night Jesus was betrayed he asked his disciples to pay attention, and he prayed. In fact, he begged them to “watch and pray so they wouldn’t fall into temptation.” (Matt. 26:40).
Attentiveness and prayer have never come naturally to mere mortals. Fear, confusion, lies, and chaos have long impeded our capacity to follow Jesus. Our hunger ebbs and flows. The trappings of our consumer culture and privilege in the West have become like narcotics, numbing our deep desires. And yet, we serve a risen saviour, who tenderly slips in the room or shows up on the shore and says, “let’s have breakfast.” Jesus invites us to “learn the unforced rhythms of grace” (Matt. 11 MSG) and reminds us how lies lose their power around a table, in community.
May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you, wherever he may lead you.
– The Book of Common Prayer.
May he guide you through the wilderness, protect you through the storm.
May he bring you home rejoicing at the wonders he has shown you.
May he bring you home rejoicing once again into our doors.
Thank you for these reflections. I am completely in agreement with Gabor Maté and thank you for citing his perspective.
“Pay attention” is also something that Calvin De Wit (ecologist, “beholding”) and Aldo Leopold stressed in their fields and David Kline (Amish farmer) in FARMING MAGAZINE and his books.
One more comment about wilderness in Hamilton where our son and his wife and children live. John Terpstra’s book about DAYLIGHTING CHEDOKE says something about paying attention, too. I’ve stood on the Canadian Tire asphalt parking lot underneath which, he speculates, is a possible origin for the creek.