A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on June 3, 2007, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

            “What is humanity that you should be mindful of us? Who are we that you should care for us? Yet you have made us barely less than God, and crowned us with glory and honor.” Out of these lines from our Psalm this morning shines the single word “mindful.” In Buddhist practice, “mindfulness” is that calm, centered place inside ourselves that allows us to pay attention to the here and now, no matter, as one writer puts it, whether we are chopping wood or carrying water.  Most of the time in most of human life, we are distracted and concerned with a hundred different things and not really living in the present, not really paying attention.  And so we miss much of life.

            In interpersonal relations, it turns out, mindfulness may be one of the greatest gifts we have to offer anyone else.  The non-profit research group, Search Institute, has been studying the growth of young people in the United States for about 25 years and has surveyed more than 2 million youngsters.  They’ve identified what they call “developmental assets” which help kids grow into strong and healthy adults.  The fewer developmental assets present in a kid’s life, the greater the chances of falling into unhealthy behavior like drug use, unsafe sex and violence.  Chief among the developmental assets that help us grow up healthy are the relationships with adults with whom we have frequent conversations of substance.  In other words, mindfulness, having someone pay attention to us and really listen to us, makes a difference in how we grow. Unfortunately the latest statistic from the Search Institute is that only 41 percent of American youth claim this developmental asset.  For over half of us, there isn’t anybody paying attention to us.

            My theory is that most of us have trouble being mindful because we are so busy paying attention to ourselves that there’s no room in our minds left for the present or for the people in our lives who need us to pay attention to them.  I think we are too busy worrying about the future or about whether we are getting ahead or measuring up to live in the present.  And when we are with other people we are too busy thinking about how we’re coming across and about what we are going to say next to really listen and pay attention to the other people—no matter how important they are to us.  In other words, the great enemy of mindfulness for us is our desperate need to matter.  We could be mindful, calmly present in the here and now, and we could be mindful of others, really listening, if only we could rest assured that we already do matter in the great scheme of the universe.

            The key to our mindfulness might well be here in Psalm 8: “What is humanity that you should be mindful of us?  Who are we that you should care for us?  Yet you have made us barely less than God, and crowned us with glory and honor.” We are free to pay attention to life in the here and now and we are free to pay attention to the people who matter to us because God is—inexplicably, but undoubtedly, mindful of us.  To see how God’s mindfulness looks in human terms, we can pay attention to Jesus.  Note how he paid attention to the poor and weak, took children on his lap and cared for them, and even noticed a self-effacing woman who touched the hem of his robe one day.  On the cross, he placed his mother and his best friend in each other’s care, being more mindful of their comfort than his own.  The message of this life again and again is that God is mindful of us. When we rest in that assurance, we are free to be mindful of life and to be mindful of others.

            Writer Calvin Trillin’s 36-year marriage to his wife Alice is a kind of model of mindfulness. Trillin’s New Yorker pieces often paid attention to the details of Alice ’s life and personality in a way that made people jealous of their relationship.  A young woman once wrote Trillin to say that “she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and asked herself, ‘but will he love me like Calvin loves Alice ?” For those who didn’t get enough of their relationship—mostly, surely, himself—Trillin wrote a book when Alice died called About Alice . One of the most telling incidents in the book helps explain why their relationship worked so well.  Alice was volunteering at a camp for terminally ill children and befriended there a young girl called simply ‘L.’ L was “a magical child,” severely disabled, but also courageous and optimistic. One day while L and the other children were engrossed in a game, Alice saw a letter L’s parents had written her and sneaked a peek at the first few lines.  She read, “If God had given us all the children in the world to choose from, L, we would only have chosen you.”  Alice handed the note to a fellow counselor and whispered, “Quick.  Read this. It’s the secret of life.”

            The Psalmist says God loves us with the same single-minded focus, the same mindfulness. God crowns each of us with glory and honor and focuses more attention on us than we can possibly know.  The only appropriate response we can make is to rest in that divine attention and to be mindful of one another.  Alice was right.  That’s the secret of life.                                                                                                           AMEN