Reynolds Price On Paying Attention

Much of our growth in knowing God involves learning to pay attention, as Leighton writes in The Attentive Life. The late novelist and professor Reynolds Price wrote of his own lifelong journey of paying attention, in his book Letter To A Man In A Fire.

“Starting on a warm afternoon in the summer of 1939, when I was wandering alone in the pine woods by our suburban house in piedmont North Carolina, I’ve experienced moments of sustained calm awareness that subsequent questioning has never discounted. Those moments, which recurred at unpredictable and widely spaced intervals till some thirteen years ago, still seem to me to be undeniable manifestations of the Creator’s benign, or patiently watchful, interest in particular stretches of my life, though perhaps not all of it. And each of the moments – never lasting for more than seconds but seeming, in retrospect, hours long – has taken the form of sudden and entirely unsought breakings-in upon my consciousness of a demonstration that all of visible and invisible nature (myself included) is a single reality…I’ve heard what amounts to a densely complex yet piercingly direct harmony that appears to come from the heart of whatever reality made us and watches our lives”

How about you? When did you first pay attention to God? How do you hear God speaking to you these days? How are you cultivating a watchful, listening heart towards God?

photo cred: wikipedia.com