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Andy Dreitcer Gives His "Last Lecture"
Wednesday, October 24, 6 p.m. in Haddon Conference Room

"If you knew you had one final opportunity to give a lecture, what would you say?"

Each month, the Last Lecture Series will ask a different Claremont faculty person to answer this question. The series is a great opportunity to get to know Claremont faculty more personally and hear their current intellectual and personal interests.

Andrew Dreitcer, associate professor of spirituality and director of spiritual formation at Claremont, inaugurates the Last Lecture Series this year at CST. The title of Dreitcer's last lecture is "Pay Attention."

Andy Dreitcer earned degrees from Wabash College and Yale Divinity School before receiving the Ph.D. from Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. He taught for many years at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, Calif., before joining the Claremont faculty in 2001. Dr. Dreitcer has been a Presbyterian pastor, seminary instructor, director of seminary programs in spiritual formation and spiritual direction, retreat leader, and spiritual director.

His teaching interests include the role of scripture in spiritual life, congregational spiritual formation, and the place of spiritual formation in theological studies. Dr. Dreitcer's spiritual life was significantly shaped by a year spent in the French community of Taizé. He is co-author of Beyond the Ordinary: Spirituality for Church Leaders (Eerdmans 2001).

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"Pay Attention"
by Andrew Dreitcer

There are so many things I'm tempted to talk about in this last lecture. I could spin out theological formulations, which I do like a lot. I could speak of what I've learned from students or from being a pastor or from trips to build houses in Mexico. I could talk about how I structure the study of spirituality - always a scintillating topic for everyone. Or I could describe my recent work on the relationship between neuroscience and spiritual practices. All that stuff is very important to me and truly interesting. But I'm not going to focus on any of that. Instead, I decided to focus on the thing that flows through all the pieces of my life right now - work and play, study and painting, family life and personal musings. And to do that, I'm going to tell a story. (Frank Rogers would be so proud.) It's the story of an event that happened several years ago that seems to me to be something of a doorway into the second half of my life (though "half" has more to do with quality of life experience than with quantity of life years).

The setting of this story is beautiful, one of the most beautiful I've ever experienced. Terribly beautiful. It was in our dining/living room -- the main room in the manse that I'd designed and helped build for the church where my wife and I were co-pastors. It was about 10:30 at night. The room was dark, except for candles. The antique oak furniture and dark wood floors glowed in warm light. A recording of Ella Fitzgerald's torch songs was playing; Ella's rich voice and music surrounded us - as did the scent of roses from bouquets placed around the room. Darkness, candle-light, music, roses. Beautiful. And my daughters were there - Hannah, 15 years old, and Monica 13 - also both beautiful.

My wife, Wendy, was there, too, but not in the usual way we think of as 'being there.'

And that's the thing that makes this story worth telling in a last lecture: In the place where our dining room table normally stood, was a bed, a hospital bed. On the bed lay my wife - or rather my wife's body. Her life in this beautiful place had ended a few minutes before.

After 10 months of fighting brain cancer, and after 10 days in a coma, she had breathed her last breath.

And now we were bathing and dressing her -- Hannah and Monica and I, with Ella's voice and the roses and the candlelight. The girls had chosen a dress for her a few days before. Rose-scented water had been prepared for this moment. Hannah is sponging and drying her mother's body. Monica is making sure the ribbon meant to close her mother's jaw was the proper color and attractively tied. We put the dress on her. Hannah, the dancer, places her ballet slippers on her mother's feet. Monica, the musician, attaches a piece of jewelry, her tiny gold saxophone, to her mother's dress. We laugh some and weep a little and sing along with Ella and admire our handiwork on the body of this woman who had filled our lives.

There have been other times - turning points in my life - in which it seemed I experienced deep truths. The time at Taize in my 20's during a weeklong silent retreat when I had a sense of warm light - and thought "Finally, there IS a God. It's about time." Or the time in my 30's when working 3 jobs and studying and caring for babies meant no time for silence - including the sleeping kind -- and I discovered that rocking an infant was the only place that seemed to bring God's light to me.

But from the perspective of a last lecture, this experience of terrible beauty in my 40's is the most important. It has set the tone, established my touchstone, for the truths I teach myself -- whenever I remember to teach myself those truths - which is not often enough. I take this talk this evening as my chance to share with you what I try to teach myself, the lecture I try to remind myself to give myself every day. Now, as I begin my 50's, that lecture consists largely of what I learned from the experiences distilled in that terrible, beautiful evening 3 ½ years ago.

Here is the first point in my lecture to myself: Pay Attention. (That is - by the way - the last point, too. And any in between.) In general, by "pay attention" I mean to pay attention to the nature of your experience, the flavor of it, its warp and weave, its textures and colors and movements. Many of you have heard me say this before. But it's worth repeating. So I will. After all, this is my last chance, you know. So, pay attention. Pay attention to how you respond to what life brings you: the thoughts that come to you, the images, the emotions, the physical sensations, the assumptions and motivations, stomach gurgles and clenched jaws, wonderings and wishings, musings and memories, beliefs and biases. All those many movements are the canvas and pallet and paintbrushes of the Spirit's life-long conversation with us. It is through those movements, those dynamics of, in, and with our bodies, that all our information about life, the world, others, and ourselves comes to us. There is no other way. Our embodied beings are the medium for the message. Even a direct shot from the mouth of God would reach our consciousness only through these movements. So paying attention to them is a good strategy if you're at all interested in tracing and following the Spirit's invitation in your life.

I used to believe that if I paid close attention to those movements, worked to track the Spirit through the tangled undergrowth of my neuropsychological physiology, I would get closer and closer to an experience comprised of One Thing. That One Thing, I believed, would be a sort of singularity - one emotion unsullied by others, or one single idea of myself or only one intention or just one longing - without all the other babbling voices I constantly hear. And I believed that this One Thing was what we humans were finally supposed to experience when we encountered more fully that Mystery I call God. Which brings me back to that terrible, beautiful evening I described in my story. For in that evening I stopped believing in the necessity of an experience of only One Thing. Here, after all, was perhaps the most intense and Spirit-infused experience of my life - the veil between heaven and earth was very thin, as the Celts would say - and the experience I had was not a simple, unitary thing. It was a complex union of opposing emotions and thoughts and longings. It was all beauty and it was all horror. It was complete presence and it was complete absence. It was my daughters full of their futures and my wife with only a past. I watched a horrible form of dying in a lovely room I knew intimately -- and I was inside a womb watching a birth into a place I couldn't reach. I was soaking in grief and I was flooded with relief. It was all death and it was all life.

As I look back at this terribly beautiful night, I realize that it was the formative experience of a sense of Eternal Mystery and life that has gradually grown and been confirmed in the years since then.

In fact, in the years since that night astonishing things have happened to expand my sense of that experience. I got to know a wonderful woman named Steffani. We became best friends and more. We married and live in what I must be the loveliest little house in the world. I cannot imagine a better marriage, a better life with another person. (People tell me that will change after a couple of years. I don't believe them.) Not only that, Monica and Hannah are thriving - and occasionally grieving as part of their thriving.

I have never been more at peace, more settled, more joyful, more content.

So every day I try to remember to give myself a little lecture. I say, "Pay attention. Look around. Savor what you have been given. You might not get another chance. So many people don't. Give thanks for one thing in this moment. The color of that tree. The ability to read. The taste of this cookie. Work you love. Astonishing daughters. The chance to share your most intimate self with the most wonderful woman in the world. The fact that YOU have been blessed to live life with your daughters beyond their 13th and 15th years. The rare reality that your daughters love their stepmother very much -- and she them (in spite of all the fairy tales to the contrary)."

So I try to give myself my daily lecture. I know whatever difficulty I have had in my life pales in comparison to the lives of most of the world. I can barely even begin to imagine what those lives might be like. So, daily I remind myself to pay attention to what this good life brings me. I don't find that easy. Far from it. It is a training exercise. It is practice for living - in the grand traditions of asceticism (which means "training" or "practice" - in the way of athletes). But this small move - the effort to notice the experience of each moment - the move to notice it and name it and consider it (even to enter into it, with God's presence) and not allow it to control me - this small move, done over and over, contains in it all the potential to change the world.

The early Christian desert abbas and ammas knew this. They explored it in their own ways. The Buddha knew it - in his own way. Christian spiritual leaders throughout the ages developed their own ways. People like Hadewijch of Brabant, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola and even John Wesley - each one paid attention to the movements in and with them that they believed helped them trace the Spirit's invitation in their lives. They did it in prayer and meditation, and they did it in regular awareness practices. And now neuroscientists and brain researchers seem to be confirming what the spiritual traditions have been saying. The scientists have used various forms of brain scans to study how the brain forms in response to certain attentiveness practices - including, so far, a version of Centering Prayer and a kind of Insight Meditation. These practices of paying attention form the brain in a way that seems to increase empathy and decrease the trap of being controlled by our emotions and reactive thought patterns. In other words, they increase the capacity for compassion and they increase the ability to respond freely and compassionately to the needs of others.

That is how scientists describe the process. And Thomas Keating, the refiner of contemporary Centering Prayer tells the same thing with a story. In Centering prayer, as you may know, you do a very simple thing. You start with an intention -- the intention to be present to God. That is the point. And you sit in that intention. When you notice that you are paying attention to something else - say, your grocery list, the color of your husband's hair, the traffic that morning - you stop and pay attention to your intention again. This, then, is the move: noting what rises in you, letting it go, turning back to your intention (which is to be present to God). One time at a retreat, a woman told Father Keating, that she was frustrated by how often that move happens for her. "In 20 minutes" she said, "My attention wanders to other things 10,000 times." "Good!" he said, "10,000 times to practice returning to God!" In other words, 10,000 times to practice paying attention. The more times that move happens, the stronger becomes our capacity to turn to God - and to the Spirit's invitation to life.

Yes, that is one way the world begins to change, I think. My small, regular practice of paying attention causes small, neurophysiological shifts that form the embodied basis for changing my behavior. Put succinctly - Paying attention can lead to acts of love, justice and compassion. And that, I believe, is the ultimate point.

Here I might go on - to give more examples - of contemplative practices that nurture the capacity for paying attention, or of ways to pay attention in daily life. But I think I've said enough. If you're interested, you may ask me about those things later. Right now, I'd rather tell another story.

Some time ago my daughter, Hannah, told Steffani, her very new stepmother at that time, of a dream she'd had - a nightmare, in fact. In the dream Hannah had come to realize that her mother was still alive - that she had just gone away for a time, and was coming back. Hannah, in the dream, was ecstatic. But then horrified. Because in the dream she saw that this meant that Steffani could not be a part of her life anymore. Hannah so desperately wanted her mother back. And she couldn't stand the thought of Steffani leaving. As Hannah talked with Steffani about the dream, Hannah reflected on the tragic fact that the deep joy she had found with Steffani had come at the inconceivable expense of her mother's horrible death.

This, I think, is the kind of thing that hits us when we pay attention. It is not easy. But I believe it lies at the heart of what it means to be alive: the reality that any moment of deep love, divine presence, probably bumps up against some touch of great pain. Or the fact that intense joy may come only because of a horrible sorrow. Or the realization that blessings in my corner of the world correspond with sufferings in some other part of the world. Water always seems to be changing to wine, and wine to vinegar. The crucifixion and the resurrection together. Not in any particular order. Sometimes collapsed into the same thick moment. The ecstasy made all the brighter in the company of agony. The agony made all the deeper in the company of the ecstasy. And the hope that in the midst of all of that I will be free to live my life as an expression of God's love.

It's true: Within me (and within the life of the world) there is such a mass of entangled, complicated turnings and twistings and shoutings and moanings and laughs and songs and wonderings and longings and aches and pains and joys. Much of the time it isn't pretty. But that's what I have to work with. That's what the Spirit has to work with. So, I keep reminding myself to pay attention - and trying to trust that "all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well."

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