The potholes of the mind
The wife hates it when the car slumps into a pothole. Having served as the family driver from day one, she has kept a regularly updated note of these potholes and would issue a warning, more to alert herself than anything else, when one was in the offing.
Wear and subsidence have left one such pothole yawning in the road in the city’s central area. And one evening, while we were on our way home, the car dived into it. The jolt made us scream. “We should have stopped talking,” the wife said, laying the blame on our conversation for her failure to avoid the fall. The topic had engrossed her and put the hole out of her mind.
“What is the government doing about the condition of the roads?” I asked, feeling compelled, since it was I who did most of the talking, to say something to mitigate my responsibility. And for good measure I added, quoting Isaiah, “Every valley shall be filled.” Immediately I realized the unsuitability of the line, because, in the same breath, Isaiah says, “and every mountain and hill shall be made low” – which, if literally carried out, would result in the degradation of the environment.
Of course, Isaiah wants his words taken metaphorically. And when, in Luke, John the Baptist recites this line, he means spiritual conversion, repentance, the change of one’s life.
It seems to me that what the potholes really demand is attention. And that, unlike the road, the mind – whose fabric is a weave of thoughts, concerns, distractions – needs to have a hole here and there. There is need to interrupt its preoccupations, for gaps in which it can silence and collect itself, regain peace and be whole once more.
Isaiah speaks of mountains and, of course, as Gerald Manley Hopkins writes, the mind has mountains. But for our purposes these are not the turmoil in the soul – what Hopkins describes as “frightful, sheer cliffs of fall” – so much as reminders of the Lord’s presence, of, as Isaiah puts it, the mountain of the Lord’s house, which “shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills.”
The gaps in the busy mind call up the fissures in the rain clouds through which the splendor of the sun breaks out. May there be, at every hour, many of these gaps.
In a pamphlet entitled “The Game with Minutes,” Frank Laubach urges Christians to keep God in mind for at least one second of every minute. In this way, Christians can assume the attitude of constant prayer.
“Select a favorable hour; try how many minutes of the hour you can remember God at least once each minute; that is to say, bring God to mind at least one second out of every sixty. It is not necessary to remember God every second, for the mind runs along like a rapid stream from one idea to another. Your score will be low at first, but keep trying, for it constantly becomes easier, and after a while is almost automatic. It follows the well known laws of habit forming.”
One can do this while on a bus or in a crowd, while in conversation, while at table, while reading a book, when thinking, when walking alone. And then at night, before retiring, one can make God one’s last thought.
“We shall not become like Christ until we give Him more time,” Laubach writes. “A teachers’ college requires students to attend classes for twenty-five hours a week for three years. Could it prepare competent teachers, or a law school prepare competent lawyers, if they studied only ten minutes a week? Neither can Christ, and he never pretended that he could. To his disciples he said: ‘Come with me, walk with me, talk and listen to me, work and rest with me, eat and sleep with me, twenty four hours a day for three years.’ That was their college course — ‘He chose them,’ the Bible says, ‘that they might be with him,’ 168 hours a week!”
It goes without saying that the road of time must have a pothole to shake up the complacent mind every so many meters to remind the traveler of his destination.
And so I thank God for hollows in the road. They make me, a scatterbrain, pay attention, not just to the road but also, because of the silence that follows the jolt, to myself, and from there to that which the noise might have made me deaf – the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.
