Getting Our Eyes Ready to See

I sit on a mountain ridge, facing north and watching the sky for migrating hawks. At some point, though, the watching doesn’t become about seeing the hawks anymore. It is an invitation to silence, like a prayer that runs out of words and becomes only an open waiting. ​“Silence,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem ​“The Untamed,” ​“Holds with its gloved hand / The wild hawk of the mind.”

Below me is an area designated as a state wildlife management area. In a few weeks hunters will climb into the trees and sit, waiting for deer. It’s a more common pursuit in these parts than birding, but the two cross over easily. Many of the best birders I know started as hunters.

I’ve never hunted, but when I talk to friends who go to the ​“deer woods,” many admit that what they love isn’t the actual hunt but the waiting. ​“I just like the peace of sitting out on the deer stand,” more than one friend has told me. Sometimes we need permission, in a world of hurry and demands of productivity, to sit and wait and watch. Hunting, fishing, and birding are forms of that permission — an allowance to be quiet and sit.

We might think this is a modern problem, born of capitalism and the industrial economy, but it seems our problem with patient waiting goes back even further. In seventeenth-century England, one of the most popular books was Sir Izaak Walton’s The Complete Angler, or The Contemplative Man’s Recreation. ​“Money-getting men,” writes Walton, ​“spend all their time, first in getting, and next, in anxious care to keep it.… We Anglers,” he says, ​“pity them perfectly, and stand in no need to borrow their thoughts to think ourselves so happy.” Instead, Walton invites us to stand before rivers, which, he says, ​“are made for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without consideration.”

The same could be said for a mountain ridge or a hawk watch platform. Against the rushing world demanding always more, we step away and contemplate the sky. We may even feel a hint of pity for those who can’t catch the joy of watching…

Silence, then sudden thrill — that is the pattern. Birding is a mashup of monastery and casino: contemplation turning to the ring of the jackpot. And like gambling, birding stimulates a powerful system of reward. Slot machines are engineered to provide intermittent rather than regular rewards. Our brains are wired not for predictable returns but for repeated efforts that sometimes (but not always) bring a big result. It’s an addictive process, one casinos engineer into their games, but I think it has a deeper purpose going back to our hunting and gathering ancestors. If we just kept hunting as long as we were rewarded with game, then we’d quit easily when nothing showed up. It is the random, occasional reward that keeps us coming. It is this kind of primal patience that helps us stay through the waiting.

But this patience, this deep persistence, is also at the heart of all mystical pursuits. We keep showing up in the world with quiet prayers and meditations. So often, for months and even years at a time, this showing up results in nothing. We’re just waiting. And then, epiphany! We see a light we wouldn’t have encountered if we hadn’t been watching, waiting, getting our eyes ready to see.

It could be said that the root of all our problems comes from the inability to wait. That, at least, is how Blaise Pascal put it. The seventeenth-century gambler and mathematician became a Christian and took up residence in a monastery. There he worked on a book on the nature of life and faith. He jotted down little notes for the book on scraps of paper and put them in a drawer. Pascal died before he could put the book together, but the collected scraps, called his Pensées or ​“Thoughts,” contain a treasury of insight. Among the most famous of those scraps is this: ​“I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

It’s a thought worth pondering quietly, alone in a room, or at least considering on a mountain ridge where no humans are about. What Pascal is getting at is that there is something deep within us that cannot stand waiting. We often prefer chaos and disaster to waiting one more minute. To escape the wait, we also tend to turn toward distractions, settling for the junk food of body and mind rather than staying hungry for what will truly satisfy us.

Such an inability to wait is at the heart of the Jewish story of the Exodus. After the people of Israel are liberated from the pharaoh of Egypt who made them work relentlessly, making bricks for palaces and pyramids, the people find themselves in the stark emptiness of the wilderness. Looking for instruction, Moses goes up Mount Sinai to hear what they are to do next. He’s gone a long while, and in the waiting, the people decide to make their own god, one they can control — a golden calf. It doesn’t end well, but it was all because they couldn’t persist with hope. Moses hadn’t come, and they thought it time to make a god they could control.

Another French philosopher, several centuries later, commented on this link between waiting and idolatry. Jacques Derrida, in his lectures on hospitality, wrote: ​“Those who make idols are not those who know how to wait; they themselves need to produce what they wait for, to produce gods. In other words, the break with idolatry consists not only in not making images; it also consists in knowing how to wait.” I can imagine Derrida in the lecture hall of a Parisian university, his shock of white hair combed back, his expressive eyebrows furrowed as he takes a toke from his tobacco pipe and says: ​“Not knowing how to wait is idolatry, it is to produce from oneself what one wants to allow to come.”

Not knowing how to wait is idolatry, and it is also violence. Without waiting, we move quickly, acting with speed. ​“Speed,” as the theologian Stanley Hauerwas has put it, ​“is just another name for violence.” Patience, then, is training in nonviolence, non-coercion. It knows that while justice and goodness and beauty are urgent needs in the world, neither can they be forced or manufactured without undermining their very existence. 

To learn patience is to learn that the world is not ours to bend to our whims, that others are not objects to control for our purposes. Like the Holy Spirit, known at times to come as a bird, the wind blows where it will. And in the waiting, when all seems over, the magic comes.