The Generosity of Attention ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
November 12, 2023
One of my fondest memories of relief trips to the Gulf Coast was the day in Pearlington, Mississippi, when we had two lunches. Both of which involved fried catfish.
We were given an assignment to help an elderly lady restore her vegetable garden in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s floods. It was early spring, and just about time to plant, so the garden was her top priority. My crew found the house, met the folks, and began work. We also had been invited by local organizers to join in the daily community lunch, which we were eager to see. So as the morning drew to a close we set off in our rental vans, completely befuddled by the driving directions, which involved a series of left and right turns in a town that had no street signs left, and finally, a left turn at the fork in the road with the live oak growing out of it.
The hot lunch was organized by the local residents of Pearlington, who had begun serving volunteers as soon as they began showing up. They fed people seven days per week. It took us awhile to find the spot, but we pulled in and joined the line, feeling pretty tentative and not at all sure we had earned the right to this generous offering. But we were greeted warmly: “God bless y’all! Thank y’all for coming!”
Older black men were frying catfish out on the deck. Inside, food lined three walls, with large tables in the middle. It was indescribably beautiful.
We had, after several trips, finally adjusted to the need of residents to feed us. At first, it had felt wrong to accept a meal from people who clearly had virtually nothing left. And here we were in this tiny town that had been practically leveled. The streets were lined with sets of concrete front steps, with no other evidence of the houses that had been blown or washed away. “Stairs to nowhere”, we called them. But we had come to understand that there is a human need to meet generosity with generosity – to reciprocate. Early on, when friends of a homeowner appeared with pots of red beans and rice, we felt reluctant, a little embarrassed. But we came to know peoples’ warmth, their gratitude, and their generosity, and we learned quickly to say thank you.
For how else could we have created relationship? We offered them our hands and backs and materials. They offered us attention and friendship.
We ate quickly in Pearlington that day to make room for the volunteers who continued to pile in behind us, and we found our way back to our worksite. There, we were met with some consternation. Where had we gone? The family was going to serve us lunch!
And so Lunch #2 unfolded in Miss Ida’s dining room, with all of her best things on the table, and us in our grubbiest clothes. There was more fried catfish. I myself count that as a good thing. Miss Ida and her daughter and grandkids joined us, and as always happened, they told us the stories of their survival. Again, there was mutual generosity, and reciprocity – our time and effort, their wonderful food. Again, there was attention: us listening intently to their stories of floating to the church next door so they could get up into the attic, and them learning more about this group of white northerners who had landed in their dining room. There was always prayer; a blessing.
The next winter, my home church’s youth group was gearing up for another service trip to the Gulf Coast. There was a planning meeting for parents and youth. One parent got up finally and asked why we would go to all the trouble to raise money, arrange accommodations, pay for airfare, budget for food and equipment. Wouldn’t it be better to simply raise the funds and send a check? After all, the relief organizations would then have the full value, the full use of all the funds raised, without the loss of the travel costs.
I wondered what would happen next. After all, the dad was being practical: technically he wasn’t wrong. So I was overjoyed to watch the youth have a collective stroke. “We’re raising these kids right,” I thought. These high school students understood better than this dad the value of connection, of relationship, of witnessing the circumstances of other people.
The youth went to NOLA. We all continued to go. And we know things, and people, that we would never have had an opportunity to know. The experiences changed us, transformed us.
All too often, generosity is seen through the lens of writing a check. It’s a transaction – I’ll write a check and I’ll get to feel the satisfaction of having done a good thing. And that is fine, as far as it goes. But when you think about what generosity can do when the opportunity is created for it to be reciprocated, when the opportunity for relationship exists, the simple writing of a check pales in comparison. There’s no opportunity for transformation.
We saw in our reading how different it can be: when a local farmer saw the abundant crop of serviceberries she had during the pandemic, and chose to invite surrounding residents to the farm to pick them for free. What was that experience worth, for people in lockdown? How would it compare to paying for a container of berries at the farmstand?
Generosity transforms lives, and it does it by offering attention to one another.
The church book group just finished reading To Speak for the Trees by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. It’s a fascinating story which includes a memoir of the author’s childhood, raised in both England and Ireland by relatively inattentive parents. Then, when Diana was just entering her teens, both parents died in quick succession. Diana was left in the care of her mother’s brother, Uncle Pat.
Diana’s mother seemed to have been a reluctant parent, and was embarrassed and angered by any recognition of her daughter’s clear intelligence. She trained Diana to seek no attention, to call no attention to herself. In the wake of her mother’s death, in the house with her even more inattentive uncle, with distraught relatives coming and going, Diana realized after a few days that no one ever remembered to offer her food. And she didn’t know how to ask. She recounts that she didn’t really know when her Uncle Pat ate his meals; apparently there were no meals. Until she learned how to cook for herself, she practically starved; she quite literally was starved for attention.
Thankfully, for the sake of botany and ancient wisdom, Diana’s mother had taken her to the Irish countryside each summer to visit the family that still lived in the region called Lisheens. This area, in the 1950’s, was one of the few places where Celtic culture, language, and folkways were still being practiced. The people there believed that orphans belonged to everyone, and so, when Diana returned that first summer after her mother’s death, emaciated and withdrawn, even the poorest members of the community would offer her their choicest fruit, maybe even one gooseberry.
Diana had never known that her grandfather, Daniel O’Donoghue, was a descendant of Irish kings, and had been renowned in his lifetime for his knowledge of Gaelic and of ancient Celtic culture and laws. It was decided among the remaining relatives in Lisheens, that this knowledge was Diana’s birthright, and that the local people would join together in teaching her everything that they knew – about plants and their medicinal value, about care of animals, about Celtic law and lore. This went on for years, summer after summer, until Diana left for Canada and a doctoral program. When she left, they gathered together and predicted her future, and told her that her destiny was to share all that she knew; to keep all this ancient knowledge alive.
The contrast in attitudes couldn’t have been more stark. On the one hand, Diana had people in her life that couldn’t remember to offer her food. And then she had the indescribable wealth of a community that was completely committed to her care, her success, and her future. (The fact that all of these people were actually related is something that I am still trying to understand.)
The farming community in Lisheens didn’t give Diana lavish gifts. They ate two meals per day, rode horseback and walked everywhere, harvested peat for their fires. And yet, their generosity was boundless, from their best piece of fruit to the secrets of the plant world. But most importantly, they offered their time, care, and attention to a young girl who had grown up hearing “I wish I had never had you.” “Don’t call attention to yourself.” She was made to feel worthless, she was ignored, and unable to ask for help. Her farming community offered her the generosity of their attention, and restored her sense of self-worth.
The French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By ‘attention’ Weil did not mean the word the way we often use it – telling our children to ‘pay attention!”, to look at us when we’re speaking, to listen. No, her definition was more complicated and more difficult to carry out. In an essay, Robert Zaretsky wrote, “To attend means not to seek, but to wait; not to concentrate, but instead to dilate our minds. We do not gain insights, Weil claims, by going in search of them, but instead by waiting for them…” (https://lithub.com/simone-weils-radical-conception-of-attention/)
To wait. To allow another person to open up and reveal themselves. To suspend any judgment as we listen. It’s a path to relationship based on compassion, and on humility. And when we offer someone that kind of attention, that creates space for them, that helps them to safely unfold, then that is an incredibly generous gift.
I felt glimmers of that in Pearlington, and elsewhere. We were taught to stop working to listen, and to not judge. Was a new vegetable garden the most important thing that Miss Ida needed? Well, she thought so. And so it was. We learned to ask: What does help look like to you? In that question lay the generosity.
The youth group could have held car washes and bake sales and sent a big check to the UU Service Committee. The farmers in Lisheens could have mailed some books and some food to Diana Beresford. But had that happened there would have been no true attention paid: no connections over fried catfish, no learning the smell of herbs, no understanding of what keeps people tied to their land, even when it floods. After all, the greeters at the lunch in Pearlington Mississippi didn’t say ‘thank you for the checks, or even thank you for your work.’ They said, “Thank y’all for coming.”
We are capable of such compassion, so much understanding, when we offer the generosity of our open hearts.
Amen.
