Day, Eliot, and the Meaning of Distractions
Let me tell you about my morning.
I got out of bed around 6:30, made a bowl of cereal and some coffee, and read a short essay about Dorothy Day by a writer named James M. Lang in the latest issue of Commonweal magazine. It seems that Ms. Day viewed herself primarily as a writer, but was so distracted by the cares of the world (not her cares, but the cares of the poor and marginalized with whom she surrounded herself) that she never quite was able to find enough time for her writing. At one point, she interrupted her extraordinary life to enter a long-term retreat at a Dominican convent, but found that her mind wandered too much for her to settle into a life of contemplative prayer. Before long, she left the retreat and returned to the Catholic Worker community, where she resumed her mission of caring for those in need and working for social justice. As Lang describes it, the needs of those around Day were the distractions that kept her from her chosen vocation of writing, and they inspired the work that in turn has inspired her millions of admirers (myself included).
By the time I finished reading the essay, it was past 7:00 a.m. I was intrigued by the subject of distraction, so I looked for the T.S. Eliot poem I read in college (“Burnt Norton”) with the line I’ve always enjoyed, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” I did a Google search to see what people were saying it meant, but the interpretations I found all seemed superficial – yes, we humans tend to be easily distracted, end of story. I think Eliot was saying something more, that the ordinary activities of our daily lives distract us from the greater meaning of our existence, from the crucial, the eternal, “the point of intersection of the timeless with time” (or, as Christian doctrine would have it, “the Incarnation”).
So, within the first hour of my morning, I wandered from Dorothy Day’s seemingly mundane but serendipitous distractions that allowed her to fulfill her life’s purpose, to Eliot’s observations about those less meaningful distractions that keep us from fulfilling ours.
But wait, there’s more.
While I was doing all of this deep thinking, I also managed to find time to reply to some Facebook messages, order a product I’d had my eye on, pay some bills, and follow Lang on Twitter. Yup, I literally was distracted from the topic of distraction by distractions. Eliot would be proud.
We live in a world of distractions, compounded mightily in recent years by the ubiquitous presence of social media. (Even as I’m writing this, I am reminded by frequent pinging sounds that I left Twitter open on my computer, and I now see that I have received 101 new tweets since I last checked a few minutes ago.) We’ve wired the brains of more than one generation of children with iPhones and apps that constantly cry out for their attention. Any daily goals we set for ourselves quickly falter behind the virtual sounds, images, and advertisements posted on imaginary walls by people and companies we don’t know. And, with the holiday season now officially upon us, we will be distracted by the annual preparations for buying and exchanging gifts, writing and sending holiday cards to friends, and attending family gatherings and perhaps even some COVID-safe holiday parties and events.
The holidays can be and usually are joyful, especially when they provide us the opportunity to gather with our loved ones. And many holiday distractions certainly are welcome and should be enjoyed, especially during challenging times. But the day-to-day onrush of holiday activities also can distract us from things that matter more.
So, if you’ll forgive another Eliot reference, amidst the constant motion of the turning world, what is the still point towards which we should fix our gaze? Lang sums it up in his essay’s conclusion:
“Love means answering the mail that comes in,” Day wrote in [a] diary entry, “and there is a fearful amount of it. That person in the hospital, that person suffering a breakdown of nerves, the person lonely, far-off, watching for the mailman each day. It means loving attention to those around us, the youngest and the oldest (drunk and sober).” Day reminds us that our primary vocation in life is to love one another—and that we are most frequently called to that love by our distractions.
Called to that love by the types of distractions that Dorothy Day allowed to occupy her life, that is. Not the 541 tweets that now await me.
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You can find James Lang’s essay here.