Bishop Caussé’s Invitation to Attention and the Question of Grace #LDSConf

Bishop Caussé opens his talk with a stunning acknowledgement about failing to pay attention: his family lived in Paris for 22 years without ever making time to visit the Eiffel Tower! Similarly, he suggests, we can all too easily miss occasions for spiritual wonder all around us. In a monitory tone, he says:

Our ability to marvel is fragile. Over the long term, such things as casual commandment-keeping, apathy, or even weariness may set in and make us insensitive to the most remarkable signs and miracles of the gospel.

Later, he quotes Marcel Proust by way of inviting us to undertake a wondrous spiritual journey made possible by the simple mechanism of paying attention: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” This quote marvelously captures both the “renewing of [the] mind” that Paul makes a consequence of grace and the spiritual riches that await those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

I loved this talk for the same reason that I loved Michael Austin’s recent post on “The Sacrament of Attention”: I find that the attentive practices of “study, meditation, and prayer” to which Caussé invites us have greatly blessed my spiritual life. I’m interested, though, in how his talk intersects with two other forceful offerings from Sunday Morning: President Wixom’s and President Uchtdorf’s. Put into conversation, these three talks form a potent reflection on what the life of faith entails.

First, President Wixom. Among its many virtues, her talk acknowledges that good people can experience periods of spiritual darkness, even long ones. She quotes a letter from Mother Teresa: “[T]here is such a terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.'” Read alongside Bishop Caussé’s talk, one might be tempted to ask: was Mother Teresa simply not paying attention to the spiritual bounties all around her?

I think the answer to this question is “No.” I love the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (see my post about him here). He was a deeply spiritual man, and poems like “God’s Grandeur” could hardly be surpassed as exemplars of profound spiritual power revealed through the careful paying of attention. Yet, later in his life Hopkins entered the depths of spiritual darkness. Consider this poem:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

   With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

   I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

   Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

The first is, because of our being tepid, lazy or negligent in our spiritual exercises; and so through our faults, spiritual consolation withdraws from us.

The second, to try us and see how much we are and how much we let ourselves out in His service and praise without such great pay of consolation and great graces.

The third, to give us true acquaintance and knowledge, that we may interiorly feel that it is not ours to get or keep great devotion, intense love, tears, or any other spiritual consolation, but that all is the gift and grace of God our Lord, and that we may not build a nest in a thing not ours, raising our intellect into some pride or vainglory, attributing to us devotion or the other things of the spiritual consolation. (source)