Posts on attention as a form of love — the noticing and presence it takes to actually see what’s in front of you, rather than what you expect to find. These reflections explore attention as practice.

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Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways, Ninety People

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The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

There was a stretch of years when I would get to the Varment Guard yard before most of the crews, and what I remember is the sound more than the sight — twenty-odd trucks pulling in already running, warm from the drive, ready for the day and the hiss of a bay door going up. Most of the fleet never saw the yard in the morning. Ninety trucks and the men took them home, so at any hour of any night our trucks were scattered across Ohio in ninety driveways. Only the ones needing parts or a swap came in. But, standing there at six, what you saw was rows of black and gold, same logo, same ladder racks, same lettering on the door, men in the same uniform crossing between them with coffee.

I was proud of that lot. And, because of that pride it complicates everything I’m about to say.

We made them identical on purpose, and it cost money to keep them that way. Not for efficiency — for recognition( and maybe a little efficiency). Sending the trucks home every night was part of it. Ninety black and gold trucks sitting overnight in ninety neighborhoods is ninety people seeing us before they ever need us, so that a woman who noticed one in her neighbor’s driveway on Tuesday knew it on sight when it pulled into hers on Friday. She had already decided something about us before anyone knocked. That is how a stranger comes to trust you enough to let you into her crawlspace at ten at night. The sameness was a promise, of knowing that we had to be good enough, often enough, for the promise to be worth anything. Uniformity without a company behind it is just paint.

Which is why it took me a while to understand what bothers me about the internet now.

Because it looks like my back lot, and it shouldn’t. Scroll for ten minutes and you’ll see it — the same post, the same words, the same three-beat structure, the same gentle authority, the same closing invitation to reflect. Row after row of the same thing, parked, in the back lot. But our trucks were never supposed to be parked together. The whole design was to get them out and scattered, one to a street, each one sitting in front of a particular house belonging to particular people. What is filling the internet is the opposite: the livery piled up in one place where nobody lives, all the recognition with nothing behind it. No company. No crews. Nobody who answers the phone when it goes wrong at ten at night.

Nobody decided this, which is the strange part. At Varment Guard we chose the sameness and paid for it and could defend it in a room. What’s happening now is a lot that filled up by default, truck by truck, with no one ever choosing the colors.

I know how it happens, because I know how it almost happens to me. You sit down to write. Something comes back fluent and competent and nearly right. “Nearly right” has a gravitational pull that “wrong” never had. Wrong you fight. Nearly right you accept, because fixing it feels like fussiness, and because it already sounds like something that would do well. The median is seductive precisely because it is the shape of what has already worked for everyone else. Right?

The contemplative tradition has a name for this, and it is older than any of our tools. Thomas Merton spent his life circling what he called the false self — not a liar, not a villain, but the self we assemble out of what the room is known to approve of. It is competent. It is often admired. It is also, in his reading, not anyone. The desert monastics worried about the same thing in a different space. They were forever warning young monks against copying an elder’s practice instead of finding their own, because a borrowed discipline produces a borrowed man.

Here is the part that matters for anyone who isn’t writing anything. The parking lot is not primarily a content problem. It is an interior one, and it had a head start on the technology by several thousand years.

I sit with people for a living and what I hear, more often than anything else, is pre-owned language. Someone describes their marriage in the vocabulary of a podcast they heard. Someone names a career crisis in terms borrowed whole from an article they read. Someone tells me about their grief in the precise phrasing of the last condolence card they received. None of it is dishonest. All of it is context with nothing behind it yet. My work in that room is almost never to supply a better framework or give answers — it is to keep asking until something comes out that nobody handed them. You can hear it when it happens. The sentence gets worse. It gets halting and specific and a little embarrassing, and it is the first true thing said in forty minutes.

That is the whole discipline, as far as I can tell. The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

I wrote in the last blog about my father in his studio, and how he would set aside a piece that was nearly finished because a quarter inch in the slope of a cheek had gone wrong. He could not paint over wood. He had to go back to the log and start again. It took me fifty years to understand he was describing the same thing I am describing here from the other end — that the fluent, finished, nearly right version is the most dangerous thing on the table, because it is the hardest one to see a fault in.

The Enneagram makes the same case from another direction. Each type is, among other things, a strategy for being acceptable — a reliable way of getting approval, safety, or distance that worked so well, so early, that it stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like a personality. Nine types, nine very sophisticated paint schemes. The work is not to trade your type for a better one. It is to notice the moment you reach for the familiar move and ask whether this situation is asking for it, or whether you are just driving the truck because it is the one in the lot.

Which brings me back to the yard, and to the thing I had wrong for years.

I thought the fleet was the achievement. It wasn’t. I knew those crews. I knew Steve and Brad and Harry — what each of them was carrying into the truck at six in the morning, what was waiting when they got home, which of them was in a season that was going to hold and which of them was in one that wasn’t. The trucks were identical. Steve and Brad and Harry were never identical, not for one morning, and every night those ninety identical trucks went home to ninety different lives. The black and gold only ever went as deep as the paint.

That is also what made the brand mean anything. The uniformity was never the product. It was a way of pointing at ninety particular people who showed up and did the work. Take them out and you still have the trucks, and the trucks are worth nothing.

So the question the internet raises isn’t really about sameness. The lot is going to fill up; it already has. The question is whether there is anyone in the cab?

Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways Reflection Sheet

What I have come to is unglamorous. Before I publish, before I say the thing in the meeting, before I offer the observation in a session that I can tell will land well, I try to ask one question. Is this mine, or did I pick it up in the lot? Not “is it true” — the median is usually true. True and borrowed are not opposites. The question is whether it came up out of a life or came in off a shelf, and I find I can tell, if I am willing to be slow about it for ten seconds.

Most mornings I don’t like the answer. The borrowed version is better written. It is always better written. That is the problem.

But I think about standing in that cold lot at six in the morning, looking at what I believed was uniformity, when what was in front of me was ninety people I would have had to ask, one at a time, to learn anything true about. The sameness was real. It was also, every single morning, the least interesting fact about what I was looking at.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

AI assisted, not written.

Sources

Thomas Merton on the false self — developed across his work, most directly in New Seeds of Contemplation (1961).

The sayings of the desert fathers and mothers on not imitating another’s practice: the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers).

Getting It Right and Back To The Log

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The work is not the writing. The work is going back to the log.

The smell I remember from my father’s studio in Detroit is sawdust and linseed oil, and under that the green, almost sweet smell of wood that hasn’t finished drying. He worked in walnut and cherry mostly, and he brought the material in himself — out to the forest, down a trunk, a log hauled back and set on end in the corner of the shop to wait its turn. Some of them waited years.

I was thirteen the year I started paying real attention, and what I kept sometimes was him starting over.

Not with failures. With work that was nearly done. A standing figure he had been at for weeks, and something in the slope of the cheek was wrong — a quarter inch, a plane that caught the light at an angle he hadn’t intended. There is no fixing that. You cannot paint over wood. He could cut deeper and let the whole head become something smaller than he had planned, or he could set it aside and go pick out another log. I watched him do both.

I questioned, the first time I understood what was happening. Not a child’s dismay — a thirteen-year-old’s wonderment which is curious, because I had reasons. Nobody would see it. It was weeks of work. He didn’t turn around. He said the figure had been telling him for some time that it wasn’t the figure, and he had finally gotten quiet enough to hear it. Hmmmm.

We had some version of that exchange a few times over the next few years. The foot placed a half inch off and the whole body going false above it. The shoulder that was technically correct and somehow dead. I always asked. He always said something close to the same thing, and I always heard it as a man talking about wood. Hmmmm. It took me five decades to understand he was describing a spiritual discipline, and I only understood it because I started writing — regularly, publicly, with my name on it — and found out that the work is not the writing. The work is going back to the log.

The process is not tidy. There is a list, sixty-some ideas now, growing, gathered from articles that snagged on something and sentences clients said in the middle of a session that opened a door I didn’t know was there. Some have been sitting a year and a half, like logs on end in the corner, not ready. Two have been drafted and set aside — not because they were bad but because they were not true yet. And every so often one comes up the moment I sit down, fully formed and insisting. Those are rarely the good ones. The urgency usually belongs to my ego rather than to the material.

Then comes the part nobody warns you about. You sit down intending to write one thing and the writing informs you, around the fourth paragraph, that you have been intending the wrong thing. Not a failure of planning. A kind of exposure. You cannot write honestly about patience while impatient and expect the sentences to hold; they go brittle, they start performing, and anyone reading carefully can hear it even if they couldn’t name what they’re hearing. The page is an unsentimental instrument. It registers what is in you with a precision I have found in only two other places: a good spiritual director, and silence.

Thomas Merton spent years convinced that the writing — and he wrote beautifully — was vanity dressed as vocation and discovered again and again that the page kept handing him back the very self he had come to the monastery to leave at the door. He could not get around himself by writing. Neither can I. Neither I suspect, can you, whatever your version of the page is — the report, the sermon, the hard email, the conversation you’ve rehearsed eleven times in the car.

So, writing has become a form of daily examen for me. Not something I perform at the end of a post, but what the post performs on me while I’m making it. Some sentences cost nothing. Others ask a question I would rather not answer, and I know which is which by a tightening at the base of the throat and a sudden interest in checking email.

The most expensive paragraph I ever wrote was in a post about what it means for a man to hear a woman say no. I was writing confidently, in the voice of the man who has it worked out, and the page stopped me. If I was going to write that, I had to admit I have not always heard it — not dramatically, but in the ordinary ways that are easier to excuse. Talking past a no. Softening it on someone’s behalf. Treating it as an opening position. I sat with it for a day and wanted to publish without it. Without the admission the post would have been competent and useless, one more man explaining a standard he exempts himself from. So I wrote it in, and then had to live with having written it, and the admission turned out to be the only part that earned the rest.

That is the half inch in the foot. The piece was fine. Fine was the problem. And there is no sanding your way out of it — you go back and start at the beginning or you publish something false and hope the light never catches it at the wrong angle.

Now I should tell you how this post got made, because leaving it out would make everything above a little bit of a lie.

There is an AI in my process, surprise! I bring the material — the studio, the list, the day I sat with that paragraph — and a draft comes back, cleaned up with sentence, spelling, etc and then I go to work on it. It is a real collaborator in that it asks me questions I hadn’t thought to ask myself, and not a collaborator at all in that it has no shop in its memory and nothing at stake in what I publish. Both are true at once. And it does not write the piece for me.

The danger is not the one people warn about. It is not going to replace me. Fluency is what it does best, and fluency is exactly what I described above as the signal that something is wrong. IT helps with an acceptable version. The surface you can no longer change. Every time it hands me that version I am standing where my father stood, except the piece arrived with questions before I had done any of the work that usually earns it, and a sanded surface is the hardest thing in the world to see a fault in.

That is the easy part — sentence structure, punctuation, the rhythm of a line.

But it cannot tell me which paragraph costs me something. It has no throat to tighten. When it drafted the section above it wrote well and wrote from the outside, because the admission underneath was mine and the having-to-live-with-it was mine. That does not transfer. An examen performed by someone else is not an examen; it is a performance review.

So: I let it start a draft. I let it argue with me. Then I go looking for the half inch myself, and I do not let it do that part. The day I hand over that part is the day this stops being a practice and becomes content, and I have enough content in my life. Don’t you?

Lynette reads most things after that, which is its own discipline, because she has known me for many years and can spot the sentence where I started hiding or it is not my words and it is the sentence a machine wrote. She doesn’t argue with it. She reads it back to me, and it falls apart on contact with her voice. No machine has done that to me yet, and I notice I don’t want one to. I do not want my writing to look like all the other AI generated material out there and face it, we can all tell when AI writes this stuff.

And then there is the reader I will never meet, who finds the post eight months late on a Tuesday night at an hour that tells you something about how the day went. I used to write to an imagined audience, which is to say nobody. Now I write to one person, usually someone who sat across from me and said a thing they had never told anyone. You lose reach that way. You gain the only thing that matters — the occasional note that says: this was me, how did you know. The honest answer is that I didn’t.

Back To The Log Reflection Sheet

I have one of his pieces. It is in my house, where I see it every day without seeing it, the way you stop seeing anything you live with. It is wearing a wizard hat at the moment — a gift someone gave me that I had no use for and no heart to throw out, so I set it on his figure, and it has stayed there because it looks right. It looks like something he would have found funny. Every so often the light moves across it and I notice my dad again, and what I notice is not the skill. It is the dozen other versions of it that never existed, the ones that got set aside at the point where almost anyone else would have finished and signed it. That is what I am looking at. The restraint is the piece. And I smile. Hi, Dad.

I think about those afternoons every time a draft goes smooth and I can feel myself writing the acceptable version. Changing it is what brings the truth up — something underneath is asking for the room. Whatever I was proud of may have to go back to the woodpile. Sigh.

Then I sit in the quiet, where the sawdust was, and wait to hear what the figure has been telling me.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ, where they work at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and spiritual formation. Jim is a Master Certified Coach, a certified spiritual director, and a former CEO. Lynette’s doctoral research grounds their Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) framework. Together they write The Mystical Seeker. spiritofeq.com · mysticalseeker.substack.com

Sources

Thomas Merton wrestled with writing as vocation and as vanity throughout his journals, most directly in The Sign of Jonas (1953).

When Matter Becomes Prayer

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When Matter Becomes Prayer

A companion to Thin Places — because the holy ground may be in your hands.

Last time I said the thinnest ground you will ever stand on is probably within a mile of your bed. Here is the next turn of that same screw: it may be closer than that. It may be in your hands.

Most of us were handed a quiet assumption somewhere along the way — that the spiritual life is the part of life that is not physical. Prayer happens with eyes closed. Holiness happens in sanctuaries, or at least in silence. Everything else — the dishes, the commute, the sanding of a board, the chopping of an onion — is the ordinary stuff you get through in order to arrive at the real thing. It is the life we have, right? It is also, according to nearly every contemplative who ever lived, exactly backwards.

The monk in the kitchen

In the 1600s a Carmelite lay brother named Lawrence, whom I love, was assigned to the monastery kitchen, work he did not particularly want. He spent decades there among the pots and pans, and what he discovered became one of the most beloved little books in Christian spirituality. He said he felt as close to God with his hands in the dishwater as he did kneeling at the altar. He put it with a kind of homely joy that still disarms people four hundred years later: “I turn my little omelet in the pan for the love of God” (The Practice of the Presence of God).

Notice what he is not saying. He is not saying he thought holy thoughts while cooking, using the omelet as background noise for a more important interior event. He is saying the turning of the omelet was the prayer. The egg, the pan, the wrist, the attention — all of it, offered. Matter became prayer in his hands, and he did not have to leave the kitchen to find God, because God had not left the kitchen either.

The most material faith there is

There is real theology under all of this, not just a nice sentiment. Christianity makes an almost scandalous claim about matter, that God took a body. “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14) — not became an idea, or a feeling, or a philosophy. Flesh. And ever since, the central rites of the faith have been stubbornly physical: bread, wine, water, oil, hands laid on a head. A sacrament, as the old definition has it, is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. Which is to say the material world is not a distraction from the spiritual one. It is the way the spiritual one reaches us.

Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit who spent his life with his hands in actual dirt as a paleontologist, said it as plainly as anyone has: “By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see” (The Divine Milieu). Nothing here below. Not the sink, not the garage, not the body, not the work.

Running in the grey mist

I used to run marathons. Really — I did. I was never a world-class runner, not close, but I did all right.

I would lace up in the dark and get out on the road while the grey mist still hung over the street in the early twilight. And there were mornings when I stood there stretching and thought, I am not in a place mentally to run today. Some days I went anyway, for no better reason than that one foot could go in front of the other.

And then something would happen. A mile or two in, a rhythm would find me — breath and stride and pavement all arriving at the same time — and I would smooth out. The effort did not disappear. It changed, simple.

And then, in that rhythm, came the moment. I touched something. You know what I mean, don’t you? All was right with the world, and I was not running anymore. I was communing. I had no language for it then. I would call it prayer now.

How we learned to split them

If this is true, why does it feel so unfamiliar? Two reasons, and they come from opposite directions.

The first is old. There has always been an impulse in religion to treat spirit as high and matter as low — to assume the body is a problem to be managed and the material world a waiting room for something better. It is an ancient instinct and the church has flirted with it for centuries, but the Incarnation keeps embarrassing it. You cannot build a faith around God taking on flesh and then quietly teach that flesh does not matter.

The second reason is new, and it is the machine I have written about before. A culture organized around output does not want your attention on the onion. It wants the onion chopped fast so you can get to the next thing, ideally while listening to something that makes you more productive. Hurry makes matter mute. Not because the dishes stopped being holy, but because nobody is home while they are being washed.

Who sweeps a room

The practical tradition here is wonderfully unglamorous. George Herbert, who wrote in 1633, put it in two lines that have outlived nearly everything else he said: “Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and th’ action fine.” The Hebridean households I wrote about in the last piece blessed the kindling of the fire and the milking of the cow. Jewish practice has a blessing for bread, for wine, for the body working as it should. None of these are poetic decoration laid over ordinary life. They are claims about what ordinary life already is.

The book on my father’s kitchen island

My father died. And when my brother and I went to clean out the house, we found the book he had been reading at the end: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

My father was not a religious man. He had no use for church and did not talk about his soul. So why was he reading that? I never found out. There was no one left to ask, and I have made a kind of peace with never having the answer.

But I read the book, it changed my life. Its whole argument is that the spiritual path is not somewhere else — it is in the chopping and the carrying, in the office and the kitchen and the ordinary hours. Living here, now, is what matters most. The end of my life will take care of itself, won’t it?

I still do not know what my father found in those pages. I know what I found. And I know he handed it to me without ever meaning to.

There is one more thing I only learned later. That book, published in 1984, is sometimes credited with almost single-handedly creating the modern literature on finding the sacred in ordinary work. My father — who had no use for organized religion — died with the founding text of the thing I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand sitting on the kitchen island. I have never known what to do with that, except be grateful.

When Matter Becomes Prayer Reflection Sheet

Matter does not become prayer. We do.

I titled this blog “When Matter Becomes Prayer,” and now I want to take part of it back. Matter does not actually become prayer at some point, as though a bowl of soup were inert until the right thoughts were applied to it. In the last piece I wondered whether the veil is thin everywhere and we are the thick ones. The same correction belongs here. The onion was always the handiwork of God. The water was always water of baptism, in its way. What changes is not the matter. What changes is whether anyone is present to it.

Attention, then, is the thing we actually bring. Not belief, not feeling, not the right words — attention. Simone Weil said that absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, and anyone who has ever lost themselves in making something with their hands knows the truth of it from the inside, whether or not they would have called it prayer at the time.

Practices for hands

Do one thing at a time, with your whole self, and let that be enough. Make something with your hands this week — bread, a repair, a meal, a line of paint — and do not listen to anything while you do it. Eat one meal slowly enough to taste it. Bless the thing in front of you, out loud if you can stand it. And when words will not come, which happens to all of us eventually, let the body pray instead: walk, dig, cook, hold a hand. The body has been praying since long before you had language, and it has not forgotten how.

Brother Lawrence stayed in that kitchen the rest of his life. He is not remembered for a system or a doctrine. He is remembered because he discovered that the distance between the sink and the sanctuary was a distance he had invented, and once he stopped defending it, God was simply there — in the pan, in the water, in the hands.

Your hands are already in the water. That was never the obstacle. It was the invitation.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Brother Lawrence — The Practice of the Presence of God: overview

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — The Divine Milieu, “nothing here below is profane”: Center for Action and Contemplation

Rick Fields et al. — Chop Wood, Carry Water (1984).

George Herbert, “The Elixir” (1633); John 1:14; Simone Weil on attention.

Thin Places That You Don’t Notice

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Thin Places

The thinnest ground you will ever stand on is probably within a mile of your bed.

It is a Tuesday. You are standing at the kitchen sink with your hands in the warm water, or sitting on the back steps while the light goes long and gold, or in the chair where you always sit, and the house is quiet in a way it usually is not. Nothing happens. Nothing you could put in a report. And yet for a moment the ordinary goes quietly transparent, and you have the distinct sense that you are not alone in the room — that the world has worn thin right here, over the sink, on a Tuesday.

The Celtic Christians had a name for that: a thin place. The idea is that the usual distance between heaven and earth — between the material and the spiritual, the seen and the unseen — sometimes narrows almost to nothing. There is an old Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but that in the thin places the distance is smaller still.

Yes, there are famous ones. That is not the point.

You may have heard the phrase attached to islands. George MacLeod, who refounded the Iona Community on that windswept Scottish island, is remembered for calling Iona “a thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual” (The Living Church). Pilgrims say similar things about Lindisfarne, about Skellig Michael out in the Atlantic, about certain holy wells and standing stones. All of it is true, and if you ever get to stand on that kind of ground, go.

But if thin places are mostly islands off the coast of Scotland, then thin places are for people with money and vacation time, and that cannot be what the Celts meant. It is not, in fact, what they meant at all.

The Celts blessed the kitchen

Look at what they actually prayed. In the Carmina Gadelica — the great collection of Gaelic prayers and blessings that Alexander Carmichael gathered from Highland and Hebridean households in the 1800s — you find blessings for kindling the fire in the morning and for smooring it, banking the coals, at night. Blessings for milking the cow. For walking out. For making the bed and lying down in it (Carmina Gadelica). These were not pilgrims on a holy island. They were farmers and fishermen and tired women with cold hands, blessing the hearth in their own kitchens before dawn.

Which means the tradition we are borrowing from was never mainly about famous places. It was about the hearth. The doorway. The byre. The work of your own hands on an ordinary morning. They assumed the veil was thin right where they were standing, and they talked to God accordingly — not on retreat, but while lifting the peat.

The night on the back steps with Lincoln

One winter night I was sitting on the back porch steps with Lincoln. It was snowing. It was dark and cold and completely quiet.

Lincoln was a big golden retriever who almost never sat still — he loved everything and everybody, all the time, at full volume. But that night he sat. The two of us stared off into the dark together, our breath slowing until it seemed to wrap something gentle around us both.

And then everything stopped. The stars stopped moving across the sky. The sound around us stopped. Even the snow seemed to freeze mid-dance. We were still on the back steps, and we were somewhere else — a thin place. I did not decide that. It simply was.

And here is the part I still cannot explain: both of us knew. The dog knew. Something different was happening, right here and right now, and we were not observing it. We were being met. We felt seen.

Jacob was not on pilgrimage

Scripture backs this up in a way that should be a relief to all of us. Jacob was not on a spiritual retreat. He was running from his brother, sleeping rough in an unremarkable patch of wilderness with a stone for a pillow, and he dreamed of a ladder with angels going up and down between heaven and earth. He woke and said one of the most arresting lines in the whole Bible: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16).

Read the second half slowly. The place did not change overnight. No one installed the holiness while Jacob slept. What changed was Jacob. The ground had been thin the entire time; he had simply been walking on it with his mind elsewhere, the way we all do — until a dream cracked him open enough to notice. He had been sleeping on the gate of heaven and calling it a rough night.

The ones near you

So look closer to home than you have been looking. A hospital corridor at three in the morning. A church basement with bad coffee and folding chairs, where somebody finally tells the truth. The cemetery you drive past on the way to work. The river in fog. The garage. The kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed. The drive home from something hard, when you sit in the car in the driveway a minute longer before going in.

And the nearest one of all is about five and a half feet tall and goes everywhere you go. Your own body is a thin place — the breath that keeps arriving without your permission, the hands that know the work before you think it through, the gut that registers a room before your mind has words. If God is anywhere, God is at least as close as that.

Then there is this, which we have come to believe is the thinnest ground of all: sometimes the thin place is a person. The space between two people who are actually present to one another — in a direction session, in a marriage, at a bedside, in the silence after something true has finally been said — can be more transparent than any island. Ask anyone who has sat with the dying. They will tell you, often haltingly, that the room felt different. That they were standing somewhere they had not been before.

Sitting with Ernie

Ernie’s family asked me to sit with him. We do not know what to say, they told me. So I sat.

Ernie was coming to the end of his journey, and it had been a very good journey. There was nothing to fix and nothing to arrange. I did not have any words. Neither did Ernie. So we did not use any.

But I knew — the way the body knows things before the mind has language for them — that this was different. Important. Real in a way that most hours are not.

And when it was time, he left. I was holding his hand. In that moment I was standing against the other world. Not near it. Against it — close enough that I could almost have put my hand through and into it. I have never been able to describe it better than that, and I have stopped trying. Some things you do not explain. You carry them.

Why we walk past

So why do we miss so many of them, when they are this close? Consider Moses at the burning bush. The text says something easy to skip: he turned aside to see. Only then does the voice come, and the instruction — take off your sandals, the place where you are standing is holy ground (Exodus 3). The bush was burning before Moses noticed. What the moment asked of him was not belief but attention: the willingness to stop the errand he was on and go look at something that was not on his list.

We have built a world almost perfectly engineered against turning aside. Hurry is its native speed and distraction its default setting; there is always one more thing, one more scroll, one more errand. You cannot rush into a thin place. It does not open on demand and it will not compete for your attention. It simply waits, patient as a burning bush, for someone willing to be late for something else.

Or perhaps it is we who are thick

Here is where the mystics push us further, and we think they are right. If God is genuinely everywhere — if, as Isaiah heard the seraphim sing, the whole earth is full of the divine glory — then perhaps the veil is not thin only in a handful of blessed locations. Perhaps it is thin everywhere, and the variable is not the place at all. Perhaps it is us. Perhaps we are the thick ones.

That reframes the whole spiritual life. The goal is not to collect thin places, pilgrimage by pilgrimage, as though holiness were a destination with a gift shop. The goal is to become thin ourselves — porous, unhurried, awake — so that the ordinary Tuesday and the kitchen table and the person across from you begin to give off the light they have been giving off all along. The saints were not people who found more holy ground than the rest of us. They were people who had grown transparent enough to keep noticing it.

Thin Place Reflection Guide

How to grow thinner

None of this requires a plane ticket, though by all means go to Iona if you can. It requires smaller and harder things. Return to one ordinary place often enough that it stops being scenery. Keep silence long enough to get past the first wave of boredom. Go to the edges — dawn, water, doorways, the hours before the world has organized itself. Let grief and beauty do their slow work instead of managing them. Put your phone in another room and do one piece of work with your whole attention. And when something in you says stop, turn aside — do it, even if you are already late.

You might even do what those Hebridean women did, and simply bless the thing in front of you: the kindling of the fire, the making of the bed, the washing of the dishes, the hand you are holding. Not because the blessing makes the ground holy. Because it was holy, and the blessing is how you finally notice.

“Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” That is not only Jacob’s line. It is the sentence waiting at the end of a great many of our days. The whole invitation of the mystical life is simply to shorten the distance between the presence and the noticing — until one day, God willing, there is no distance left at all.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Carmina Gadelica — Alexander Carmichael’s collection of Gaelic household prayers and blessings: sacred-texts.com

The Living Church — “The Thin Place of Iona” (George MacLeod on Iona): livingchurch.org

Scripture: Genesis 28:16–17 (Jacob at Bethel); Exodus 3:1–5 (Moses turns aside); Isaiah 6:3.

Beholding: Learning to See What’s Always There

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The Art of Beholding: Learning to See What Has Always Been There

There is a particular quality of light that appears in the late afternoon of an Ohio April. It arrives low and amber, slanting through leaves that have already begun their eager growth to bright greens. If you are moving fast enough — hurrying to a car, glancing at a phone, managing the thousand small demands of a day — you will miss it entirely. Not because it isn’t there. Because you haven’t learned to behold it.

Beholding is an old word. It carries weight in it, a kind of gravity. We use “seeing” now, or “looking,” but beholding suggests something more — a sustained, willing act of attention that changes both the one who gazes and the thing being gazed upon. It is, in its truest form, a practice. And like all practices, it has a history.

An Ancient Hunger

Long before cell phones, before television, before the printing press turned information into a torrent, human beings struggled to pay attention. The desert fathers and mothers of fourth-century Egypt walked out into the Saharan silence precisely because the noise of Alexandria made attention impossible. They were not fleeing the world so much as trying to see it. To behold it, without the distortion of constant stimulation.

The medieval contemplatives — Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich — built entire theologies around the act of sustained looking. Julian, sealed in a small room attached to a church in Norwich, spent decades beholding a series of visions she called her “showings.” She looked at them not once but repeatedly across a lifetime, returning, noticing new things, going deeper. Her great work, Revelations of Divine Love, is less a transcript of mystical experience than a record of what happens when someone refuses to look away.

What they all understood — and what we are slowly, painfully rediscovering — is that attention is not passive. It is not what happens when you have nothing else to do. It is, as spiritual writer Amy Frykholm describes it, a form of discipline every bit as demanding as any physical practice. “The practice of beholding,” she writes, “takes desire and discipline.” The desire is the easier part. We often want to see more deeply, feel more fully, live with more presence. The discipline is where most of us quietly give up.

A Story About a Garden

I remember when my grandmother kept a garden in the backyard of a house in a small Michigan town up in the thumb area. It was not a grand garden — a few beds, a few tomato stakes listing to one side, herbs growing in a few terra cotta pots along the fence. But she tended it with a quality of attention I didn’t understand as a child and have spent most of my adult life trying to remember these times of quiet and what they meant.

She would go out in the mornings, before it was fully light, and simply stand in it. Not weeding, not harvesting, not doing anything that could be explained by utility. Just standing. Sometimes she held a cup of coffee. Sometimes she didn’t. I asked her once what she was doing. She thought about it for a moment and said: I’m watching it wake up. WOW!

I thought she was being poetic. Now I think she was being precise.

She had learned, through years of practice, to behold. To give her full attention to something outside herself without immediately needing to act on it, explain it, or use it for something else. She was, in the language of the contemplatives, practicing presence. And the garden — the wet soil smell, the hum of early insects, the way light moved through bean leaves like green stained glass — the garden held her in return.

The Difficulty Is the Point

Frykholm names the struggle honestly: “Don’t underestimate the paradigm shift required for the act of beholding, just how different it is from our everyday lives and just how shiny and compelling our everyday life will seem when we propose pausing.”

This is not a problem technology created. Technology has sharpened it, given it new urgency, made distraction faster and more elegant. But the problem itself is ancient. The mind that wanders from prayer in a stone monastery cell and the mind that reaches for its phone in the middle of a sunset are doing the same thing: fleeing the discomfort of full presence.

Because presence is uncomfortable. To truly behold something — a person, a landscape, an idea, a grief — is to become vulnerable to it. You cannot behold something and remain entirely in control of what it means to you or what it does to you. This is why beholding is an act of courage as much as attention.

And then there is the second difficulty Frykholm names, the one that arrives even after we’ve managed to sit still. Our own thoughts. The internal narrator who cannot stop generating commentary, to-do lists, memories, anxieties. “Any act of attention is not a sustained experiencing,” she writes. “It’s a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again.”

This reframe is quietly revolutionary for us. We tend to judge ourselves harshly for the mind that wanders — as though a wandering mind is evidence of failure. But Frykholm describes the return itself as the practice. Every time you bring your attention back, you are training something. You are doing the work. The wandering is not the obstacle. The returning is the path.

What Beholding Makes of Us

My grandmother died on a cold day in November. The garden had long gone to frost by then. But on the morning of her funeral, I went outside and stood in my own backyard — not her backyard, mine, a inner city lot quite different then hers — and tried to do what I had watched her do. I tried to behold. Her passing touched a part of me that needed to wake up.

The sky was the gray of Midwestern November, cold, stark, the kind that seems to press down gently on everything beneath it. A cardinal landed on the fence, bright as a wound, and regarded me with one black eye. I noticed my thoughts moving immediately toward meaning — a sign, she’s here, she’s saying goodbye — and I watched myself doing it, watched the mind rushing to make the moment useful, to metabolize it into narrative.

So, I came back. To the cardinal. To the gray sky. To the cold that was starting to find the gaps in my coat.

And for a few seconds — Frykholm says sometimes it is only a few seconds — something opened. The fence and the bird and the sky and my grief and the cold and the smell of dead leaves all existed together without needing to be explained or arranged. I was held by it.

“Whatever you behold,” Frykholm writes, “you eventually become beholden to. You enter into a love relation.”

This is the fruit of the practice: not escape from the world, not transcendence of the ordinary, but a deepening into it. A recognition of what has always been present, waiting for us to slow down long enough to receive it. The interconnected, openhearted world, as she puts it, welcomes us — not as strangers who finally arrived, but as the ones it has been waiting for all along.

My grandmother knew this. The desert fathers knew it. Julian knew it, sealed in her small stone room, looking and looking and looking.

The light is still there, amber and low, arriving every October afternoon.

We are still learning to see it.

Peace and every good

 

As cited by the Center for Action and Contemplation.

Chicago/Turabian: Frykholm, Amy. Journey to the Wild Heart. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2025, pages 28–30.