Disciples of the struggle

This morning, in Jesus the Teacher Within, I read this curious statement: "We are disciples of what we pay attention to." I just had to go back and reread that in order to type it in, because for some reason I keep thinking the quotation is "We ARE what we pay attention to" or maybe "We BELIEVE what we pay attention to." But to say that we are DISCIPLES of what we pay attention makes much more sense -- and is, at the same time, a scarier thought.

A dear friend called a day or two ago to say she was thinking of getting married -- for purely practical reasons -- to her long-term live-in boyfriend. "The problem is," she said, somewhat apologetically, "that I read all these romance novels, and I get how unrealistic they are, but still... I want more. I want this to be romantic, not just practical; I don't want to just go down to city hall and get it over with." And then, because I read those novels, too (though I usually give them up for Lent) we talked about why we read them, and how they skew our thinking.

And, of course, that's exactly why I give them up for Lent: it's because they create lots of charming illusions in my susceptible heart, about what a marriage can be like, and how a husband should act, about the sort of world we live in... and cultivate, though they are supposed to serve as an escape, a sense of longing for more, a sense of not enough. As with any other item or activity that we over-indulge as a way of coping with the various kinds of emptiness we struggle with -- over-eating, smoking, our children, drinking, shopping, television reality shows, working out, computer addiction, drugs, sex, gambling -- they create more problems than they solve and end up exacerbating the very emptiness we were trying to erase.

And part of the reason is that, in paying attention to these things, we become their disciples; we learn their false lessons, and they become our false gods. Some are obviously more harmful than others, but the fact remains that we do become disciples of whatever we pay attention to. But what if we are paying attention to things that are obviously connected to our faith? What if all our time is consumed by "good stuff" -- working on behalf of the environment, or volunteering in a homeless shelter, or working for the church, or, in my case, photographing and writing? Well then, we become disciples there, too. And sometimes the lessons we learn can be good ones.

But the trick about discipleship lies in the fact that it is more than just learning: it is spreading what we learn -- what the dictionary calls "spreading the doctrine of another." We get caught up in whatever it is that takes our attention, and it becomes the subject of our lives and conversations. We believe in it, we talk about it, we share it, and we get so caught up in it that we forget to listen to anything or anyone else. It begins to define us, and as it becomes inextricably linked with our ego we become increasingly inflexible, less and less open to whatever might call to us that doesn't fit into this definition we create for ourselves.

And that's the heart of it: it's a definition WE create, it's ego. It does not evolve naturally out of an ongoing, attentive, relationship with the divine, it is something WE have chosen. God may have put us there in the first place, but as soon as we begin to feel a sense of ownership and try to make it our own, it becomes... well... an idol. And whenever we find ourselves stuck worshiping something that is not God things can begin to go a little haywire. We stop listening, we start arguing with anything that pulls us away from the idol, whatever it may be, and we lose our sense of balance.

Which is why this whole tradition has grown up around giving things up for Lent. We are not giving them up because we are bad people. We are giving them up as a way of moving our attention back to the Source, as a way of removing the obstacles that distract us from a constant, ongoing relationship the divine, as a way of revealing the extent to which we have been pulled out into the ego and away from the true Self.

We are none of us perfect, and we are rarely as balanced and attuned as we would like to be. But if we understand the need to return to the Source, then we will make a continual effort to draw our attention back to Center. And in the friction of that constant struggle to resist those other pulls and respond to the Divine, there can be much growth and learning -- because, if that is where we put our attention, we will become, if not disciples of the Divine, at least disciples of the struggle to return to the Divine. And that has a great deal to teach us.