Altars of Attention

 

Last week I read this poem by James Crews in the Plough Quarterly magazine.

Altars of Attention

Someone has stacked rock cairns

on top of stumps and stone walls

all along the washed-out road

I walk this morning. Each slab

is balanced by the other like one

right action holding space for the next.

But what is the message of these

small towers shored against

the mossy ruins of a country road?

Are they evidence of an effort

solid enough to withstand wind,

lashing rain and the shrapnel

of beer cans tossed from trucks?

I want to kneel and touch each one,

feel how the tip of one stone

fits into the divot of another,

but I don’t. Let them be altars

of attention that testify: someone

paused here and cared enough

to build these things for no reason

other than the pleasure of making them.

 

It was accompanied by a painting of stone cairn that reminded me of making similar stone towers with our kids on various rocky beaches: in Nova Scotia several summers ago, on the Oregon coast, up on Beaver Island. The title of the poem caught my imagination too – altars of attention. I hear in it a call to be present, to savor, to be open with my senses and my heart.

 

And then on Sunday, Jay and Peter and I went to hike around Sessions Lake in Ionia. It was a bit of a drive and so we listened to a chapter of Dave Barry’s book, Lessons from Lucy. (Lucy is his dog.) And the chapter we happened to listen to was about mindfulness – about being present with and attentive to the people you love, rather than stewing over the past or fretting about the future, or being distracted by your phone . . . He observed that for dogs, there is only the present and his dog delights in simply being with him, much like our dog Luna with Jay.

 

As we were hiking, maybe 2/3rds of the way around the lake, at just the point where I was beginning to be ready to be done and to be slightly anxious about the darkening sky, we came over a hill, and the trail led through a clearing in the trees that was full of stones of all shapes and colors; all over the ground and many of them stacked carefully into cairns. Honestly, it seemed magical. Such a vivid reminder to stay present, to be mindful, to cherish the moment. So we stopped and spent time making a cairn of our own 5 stones high, with just the right stones, balanced at just the right angles.

 All this week, I keep picturing that place in the woods, and thinking about the idea of stones as altars to attention, and also about stones in the Bible. Jesus, in Luke 19 telling the Pharisees that if his disciples didn’t praise him, the very stones would cry out. The story in Joshua 4, when the people have crossed through the Jordan into the promised land and God tells them to take 12 stones and set them up as a memorial to God parting the waters and bringing them through. (I have a vague memory of Jay and I borrowing stones from a friend of a friend’s yard and putting them on the platform at church long ago for a sermon on that story. . .)

 

Jacob in Genesis 28 with a stone for a pillow, dreaming of angels and naming the place Bethel, ‘for surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it.’ And the story in 1 Samuel 7, of God defeating the Philistines and Samuel setting up a stone and naming it Ebenezer, saying ‘Thus far the LORD has helped us.’ The hymn Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing has a line based on that story: Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by thy help I’ve come, and I hope by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.

 

These stones in the Bible aren’t so much ‘altars to attention’ or calls to be present, but rather signs and reminders of God’s presence with us – in the past, in the present, and in whatever is to come.

 

It is so easy for me to be caught up in my head these days, fretting and afraid. But Jesus invites me to trust him in this moment, to be faithful in following him in this day, in this hour, in this minute. To leave the past and the future in his hands, and live confidently in the present knowing that ‘thus far, the LORD has helped us,’ and God will bring us safely home.