It was a warm, somewhat muggy summer morning. My friend and I were waiting on the first tee for the group ahead of us to clear the green. We passed the time continuing a conversation we started on our way to the golf course about “paying attention” as a spiritual practice.

These days, any conversation I have about spiritual practice is an opportunity for me to introduce my latest favorite book. At the moment it is Douglas Christie’s “The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology.” My friends seem willing to be patient with my enthusiasms (the word literally means God within), my children less so.

My children roll their eyes when I start to “share,” particularly if others are in the conversation. But on this day, it was just my friend and me, and we share a common interest in things spiritual.

Christie is a scholar of early and contemporary Christian monastics with a profound dedication to honoring and saving the natural life of our Earth. If we could see the sacredness of the natural world, Christie sings/cries, we would reverse the ethic that justifies the exploitation of all other life forms to the idol of human supremacy.

He sees the practice of monastics, particularly the early monks, as a model for how to see the sacredness of all things and join the ultimate work of our time, the saving of the whole inhabited Earth.

For the monks Christie studies and the contemporary monastics, spiritual practice, simply put, is “paying attention.” The practice is surprisingly sensual. Its goal was and is to gain “the vision of God.” Their practice is to develop every sensory perception they have to that end.

“They did not limit their account of this heightened perception to the metaphor of sight,” he writes. “They also spoke of the need to listen attentively for the still small voice of the Spirit, to become sensitive to the delicate, often-erotic touch of the Divine, to learn how to taste, to savor God’s presence, even become attuned to the intoxicating fragrance of the Holy One.”

As my golfing friend and I sat on that warm and increasingly humid day, contemplating what it means to pay attention, a soft breeze blew on us, which came as if from the mouth of God herself with pursed lips, as much a kiss as a kindness. Our conversation opened us to receive the blessing of the moment.

That is what spiritual practice is, being present to the moment with all the powers of perception one can open and offer to the endless initiatives of “the Divine.”

But the practice of paying attention is not all sweetness and light, although there are many times it surely is. Acknowledging the sourness and darkness of us and life is also integral to knowing, “seeing” ourselves and God. The monks speak of seeking a “pure heart” in order to be open to God. The purification of our hearts comes by being present to the breezes and the hurricanes that blow in and around us.

Arthur Miller’s play “The Death of a Salesman” entered our conversation on the golf course that day. I know of no more profound piece of spiritual writing having to do with the cost of not paying attention to life’s hurricanes than this. Not paying attention is to miss, by culturally conditioned blindness and/or denial, our incompleteness.

The play portrays and invokes the deep pain and spiritual loss of one refusing to see that he or she, as everyone else, limps. By implication seeing and accepting our common incompleteness leads to life.

Willie, as do we all, longed for love, and through it, life. He sought it in all the wrong places. His religious practice had been hail fellow well met, his discipline denial. He couldn’t risk paying attention to the truth of his own limp. To admit it was to fail and to fail was worse than death. His unconscious effect was sorrow. Paying attention to sorrow was heresy in Willie’s faith and the foundation of his family’s dysfunction .

Miller’s plea to us is made through the plaintive appeal of Willie’s wife, Linda. As Willie puts the last bricks into his wall of denial that ends in his suicide. Linda calls out of the sorrow, “Attention must be paid,” hoping her children, anyone, you and I would hear.

And the monks from ages past and the prophets and mystics over the years and of our day say, “Amen!”

Bill Gregory is a retired UCC pastor who writes and is into relationships. He can be reached at www.wgregor1@maine.rr.com.