What does it mean to ask God to "establish the works of our hands"?
We are overwhelmed with distraction, and it doesn't feel good. Plus: Two poems for your Eastertide, and Winnie the Pooh on the spiritual power of hums.
It’s a cold and rainy May morning in my part of the world. Let’s see what the early bird is up to.
Posted notes
Establish the work of our hands: Psalm 90, Mary Oliver and how to pay attention
At the end of Psalm 90, Moses asks the Lord to “establish the work of our hands!” But what are the works of our hands? Did Moses have something specific in mind? What about in my own life, or is that even a legitimate question, given the emphasis on “our work” in the passage? If it is, what is the work of my hands? Is it writing? Is it fostering and adoption? Is it humming? Is it all of these things and more?
These are questions Lindsey and I have been returning to over the last several months. And the answer I keep coming back to is attention.
This thought occurred to me one morning while reading Psalm 90, which I often do in the mornings. And it was because of theses line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes”:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
So I started to wonder, “Is the ‘work of my hands’ first to pay attention?”
Oliver would say yes. It’s perhaps the major theme in her body of work. In her poem “Yes! No!” she says, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” In her essay “Upstream,” she writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” which is a wonderful way to think of work. Vocation as devotion.
I do not want to put words in Moses’s mouth. Maybe there are multiple right answers about what our work is. Yet paying attention sure seems to make a lot of sense—as the work beneath the work.
But attention is hard. It is fleeting. It is slippery. It is expensive. When you are fighting with all your being to give attention to someone you love or something worth doing, it feels anything but sexy. Attention exists in the hard, brittle deserts of reality, elusive as water and cold as night.
Rise, heart: Two poems for Easter
Fun fact: Easter is an entire season—50 days of steeping ourselves in the truth and reality of Jesus’s resurrection. A resurrection which makes possible our adoption as sons and daughters of the King. In the resurrection, fact and mystery combine.
And this is why poetry matters, because it helps us to seek both at the same time. Here are two poems to help you swim this glorious Eastertide.
One of them is Mary Oliver’s “Black Swallowtail.” This poem has been a companion of our family’s this school year. The kids memorized it in the fall, and we returned to it last week. As part of Lily’s kindergarten curriculum, we bought one of those at-home butterfly kits. Five painted lady caterpillars arrived in a cup. They ate for several days, then hung upside down on the lid for several days. When they moved to the lid, hanging from their J-shaped cocoons, we moved them into a cylinder-shaped net enclosure. Then they emerged. Lindsey and the kids released them in our backyard a few days before Easter Sunday.
You are what you hum: Winnie the Pooh, Piglet and the power of words
My favorite part of the whole Pooh canon is where Owl’s house falls over in the windstorm with Pooh and Piglet inside it. Piglet climbs out through LETTERS ONLY to find help. And in the “Where will Owl live now?” aftermath, Eeyore suggests that it’d be grand if Piglet gave up his home for Owl. (Whenever I read Eeyore’s dialogue, I say it in my best Mike Ehrmantraut voice. They are kindred spirits, even if Eeyore is decidedly less violent. Rest in peace, Mike.) The sequence that follows is one of the more beautiful sections of literature—children’s or otherwise. And every time I read it, I find myself a bit rattled by Piglet’s response to Eeyore’s presumptive boorishness. He doesn’t get indignant with Eeyore; he doesn’t try to reprove or shame him out of his radical insecurities. He ponders the situation in a simple, uncynical way:
And then Piglet did a Noble Thing, and he did it in a sort of dream, while he was thinking of all the wonderful words Pooh had hummed about him.” Yes, it’s just the house for Owl,” [Piglet] said grandly. “And I hope he’ll be very happy in it.” And then he gulped twice, because he had been very happy in it himself.
The chapter ends with Pooh doing an equally as Noble Thing by welcoming Piglet into his home. Giving someone a home who needs a home is something that rings true around these parts.
But it’s the “in a sort of dream” line that really gets me.
Good reads: a bibliography on attention
Writing the post about Psalm 90 and attention had me revisiting articles I had saved on attention and technology over the years. I believe this is the issue of our time, and if you want to take a further dive into the topic, so I wanted to share some of those articles (and one book).
“Look at Me” by Patricia Snow | First Things, May 2016
“Habits of Mind in an Age of Distraction” by Alan Jacobs | Comment, June 2016
“How to Look at a Tree” by Joshua P. Hochschild | First Things, June 2017
“Mary Oliver’s Poetry Helps Capture Our Relationship with Technology” by Franklin Foer | The Atlantic, May 2019
“Pandemics, Digital Media, and Anxiety” by Michael Sacasas | Tabletalk Magazine, June 2020
The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place by Andy Crouch | Baker Books, 2017
Good tunes: my spring playlist
Since high school, my music-listening habits have become tied to the calendar. What I listen to is just as much about when listen to it. Kinda like how we all mostly treat Christmas music, except for all music. Songs / albums / artists have been appointed their due season(s). How certain albums / artists get assigned a certain season is somewhat vague, but usually goes like this: I happen upon an album or song in X season, listen to it over and over again in said season, and then my subconscious permanently associates that music with that particular season, and the thought of listening to that music in a different season gives me time-and-space whiplash. This way of approaching music helps me know when I am. It’s like a musical-liturgical calendar.
Anyway! It’s spring, and so I am listening to my spring playlist. I love my spring playlist. I’d describe it as hopefully moody. It’s mostly a bunch of Canadian alt rock (Tragically Hip) and lots second / third wave emo. With a healthy dose of Counting Crows for good measure. Counting Crows is excellent spring-timey music.
Let me know what you think. I’d also love to hear what “spring-time” music sounds like to you.
Thanks for being here. See ya next time!