Babies stare. It can be worrying when they weigh you up, especially given that babies hover in unstable equilibrium, a nudge away from either rewarding you with a gummy smile or bawling in huge gulps.
It’s worrying for us, though, when, unlike babies, we stop paying attention to people – a point made by the blogger Trevin Wax1 recently and worth repeating in part:
G. K. Chesterton said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” Our age offers countless wonders. What’s missing is our wonder, especially our sense of awe at the glory of ordinary human beings—those we live with, eat with, work with, and worship with.
Simone Weil once described attention as “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Amid endless digital distractions vying for our focus, perhaps our greatest temptation is stinginess—the failure to be generous with our time in truly attending to others. We become unable or unwilling to look beyond the dull and irritating aspects of human interactions until we erode our capacity to offer, and receive, grace and love.
As well as being in trouble with babies, I may get in trouble with my wife, from whom I am often accused of not paying attention. Also, it’s slightly creepy when a grown-up does fix their eyes on yours for too long. And staring at the wrong person, in the wrong way, is of course offensive. Leaving aside husbandly neglect and social improprieties, however, the point stands. Recently someone told me that she wanted visitors to leave her home with two things: (1) something of Jesus, and (2) a sense of having been heard.
- You can find him here, and I appreciate his regular presence in my inbox. I notice with a little concern that his bio stumbles at the same point as Ravi Zecharias’ did. From what I’ve read of his blogs, his claim to have ‘lectured in culture and Christianity at Oxford University’ means teaching at Wycliffe Hall, an Anglican training college (a Permanent Private Hall) at Oxford. So the statement, while technically true is stretched a little thin, and Zecharias, before his fall, was picked up by a critic on the exact same point. I am happy to be put right if I’m wrong.