“The prospering of God’s cause on earth depends upon His people thinking well.”
Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart
The fruit trees are putting on their annual color show, a kaleidoscope of crimson, white, peach, and pink decorating their once sleepy limbs with optimistic hints at forthcoming abundance. Bee song buzzes in my ears as a small, though mighty, workforce bounces from bloom to bloom; fed by, but also facilitating, the process unfolding before me. Then a gust of wind stirs up a cocktail of scents compiling into something with an almost citrusy tone, and I watch as a cluster of fuchsia petals take flight and then land like confetti at my toes.
For a moment I am lost in the beauty of it. And lost in wonder at the One who has composed and orchestrated each note of this complex and compassionate symphony of the senses. Our Creator whose heart and mind converged in the grand decision to feed creation like this. God could have just given us bread or a stone for sustenance. Something void of color, flavor, texture, and depth. But instead, God prepared an intricate feast - a visual, audible, touchable, smellable extension of God’s own delight.
What a gift. And just what exactly does a gift like this mean?
But then my thoughts are interrupted by the sound of rustling leaves a few feet away and my attention is rerouted to the rooster who is silently stalking me from a not-so-distant distance.
His presence here is an unfortunate accident. I never wanted a rooster. My affection for them is remarkably low. The only creatures that I like less than roosters are venomous snakes, wasps, and fire ants. And I’m starting to think that I like snakes more than them. At least they keep to themselves and try to avoid confrontation.
I have no idea how roosters have managed to make their way into so much of the nostalgic farm life art over the years, anyone who lives on a farm knows that they represent the underbelly of masculinity. They are like the jacked-up guy at the gym who is obsessed with being regarded for his size and his strength, and then behind closed doors beats the crap out of his girlfriend. That’s who a rooster is.
And it’s for this very reason that this rooster was removed from our coop. Because his presence had created something of a living hell for my hens. And I wasn’t having it.
To be honest, I didn’t think that he would survive one night outside of the pen. We have all sorts of predators roaming about and my silent wish was that a coyote would recognize his crow as a dinner bell and come running. But that didn’t happen. Instead, he has thrived in his newfound freedom and now I am the focus of his predation. Which means that, for the time being, I can’t focus exclusively on the beauty of this garden, because there is a threat in my periphery and now my attention is split between the presence of goodness and the presence of evil. And the fruit of my fragmented attention is a division between worship and defense.
A similar divide is outlined in the story of the first garden. In the beginning, Adam and Eve are present in the garden, in perfect communion or intimacy with God, they are sustained entirely by the fruit of God’s goodness, and they are made to live lives of worshipful response. But then, after they consume the fruit of the tree of knowledge of both good and evil, something shifts in their minds. This decision to consume the fruit didn’t create evil on earth, evil was always here. It also didnt grant power to evil, the conversation itself is evidence that evil already had agency. But somehow by consuming that fruit they developed knowledge of evil, and the result was that their worship was fractured by their newfound awareness of their exposure to evil’s threat and their subsequent need to defend themselves against it. Sin represents the actions we take in response to this knowledge. The fig leaves of pride, gluttony, anger, envy, sloth, and lust that we use as covers against our exposure to the threat that our consumption of evil has made known to us.
Which is why Jesus invited people to repent, which is translated from the Greek metanoia, or – change your mind. Rethink how you are thinking. Because our thoughts give shape to our lives. To our benefit or our detriment. For good or evil. For life or death. For the Kingdom of Heaven or the kingdom of darkness. This was echoed by the Apostle Paul who urged the church in Rome to “renew their minds,” and to the Philippians, “guard your minds.” And later by Evagrius Ponticus, the fourth century Christian monk who went to the desert of Egypt to fight the devil and then later provided the outline of what we now refer to as the “seven deadly sins.” Evagrius summarized the battle between good and evil as being a war against your logismoi which is Greek for your thoughts. Its a battle that begins, and ends, in the mind, and that is controlled by attention.
Which means that paying attention to what we are paying attention to is an essential piece of our spiritual formation (or malformation). Recognizing that everything that is given attention has a formative effect on us. The news, social media, entertainment, influencers, advertisements, culture, video games, books, hobbies, relationships – every single thing. It’s all forming us into the image of something or someone. It’s just a question of who or what that image happens to be.
As M. Robert Mulholland once noted,
Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all of your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself , or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it its joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other.
And while the power necessary to do this is provided by the Spirit, it hinges on our choice. Our exercise of will that decides who or what will control our thoughts. And just as I can’t expect some nameless coyote to come deal with the rooster in my garden, evil is not going to go away without a fight. We have to take an active role in the opposition of evil on behalf of ourselves. Which I think is why the serpent was allowed to access the garden in the first place, because God choose to give us free will and He intended our relationship with him to be established on choice not accident or ambivalence.
In Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ Dallas Willard once wrote,
“The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.”
“Our fight with the devil is first and foremost a fight to take back control of our minds from their captivity to lies and liberate them with the weapon of truth.”
Practice: Visio Divina
Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Romans 1:20
So how do we do this? How do we actively attune our attention away from the threats of evil, towards goodness instead?
By fixing our attention on God’s goodness as it is revealed in the person of Jesus, in the message of Scripture, and in creation. One way that Christians do this is through a prayer practice called, visio divina, or holy seeing. This is a practice revealed in the life of Jesus who often encouraged his listeners to consider the lilies, the birds, the mustard seeds, the yeast, and even the weeds, and to let these physical illustrations lead them to increased knowledge of the heart and mind of God.
And while the name of the practice may sound complicated, it’s as simple as sitting quietly in nature, silencing your phone, and clearing your mind of any distractions or concerns. Invite the Holy Spirit to come and help you see, with a prayer as simple as “Come Holy Spirit, come. Open my eyes so that I might see.”
You can do this on a park bench, a dog park, an insectarium, a local farm, your backyard, through the pictures in this post, or on a hike or nature trail somewhere. All that this practice requires is your attention.
Sit for ten minutes and just look, listen, breathe in, and even touch your surroundings.
What do you notice? What does it seem to say or mean? What passages of Scripture does it remind you of?
What do you think or feel in response? Do you have a question? Do you feel gratitude? Are you confused? There is no right or wrong answer here, it’s just an invitation to begin an ongoing conversation with God. Can you write this down to God like a letter?
This is also a great practice to teach to kids. In a world where there are so many things jockeying for their attention, they need to learn how and where to look in order to see and know Reality in this increasingly complex and chaotic world.