paying attention - 2nd week advent tuesday 2013

If you are familiar with psychology, then you may have encountered the importance of attention, the capacity to pay attention.  The first sign that a child’s mind is working is when he seems to pay attention to something sa bagay nga kon kaisa gina-ignore niya ikaw, ukon wala sia nagasapak sa imo mga utis-utis.  The child is paying attention to something and that is a very good sign because that is the first indication of the child’s capacity for consciousness – he is trying to focus on something.  We can learn only when we are able to focus.  We can relate with one another when we are able to focus, when we are able to give our full attention to something or to someone.  Actually most abnormalities are had kon makadto ini sa extremes - either wala sang focus ukon amo lang ina ang focus niya sa bagay nga naga-withdraw na sia sa mga kinahanglanon sa kabuhi.  An abnormality may at times be a deficiency of focus or it may be when there is too much focus on only one thing.

To pay attention, the capacity to stay focus on something is the root of consciousness – the root or the beginning not just of learning but even of relating.  I brought this to mind because our gospel today speaks of a shepherd who would be willing to leave for a moment the ninety nine in order to pay close attention to the one sheep who had strayed.  In other words this is a shepherd whose flock is not just a number of sheep.  This is a shepherd whose flock is not just statistics.  This is a shepherd whose flock is not just the needs of the majority versus the needs of the minority.  This is a shepherd who can focus on the individual.  This is a shepherd who gives his full attention to the individual.  And that is who God is.  God does not just love humanity.  God loves each one of us.  God did not just save all men and women.  God saved every one of us, he saved me, he saved you not just from generic sins but from sins that are peculiar to me and peculiar to you.  God did not just call all men and women to himself.  No he called each of us by name, from a particular situation to a particular calling, to a particular mission and purpose.  This is the point of Jesus.  God is capable of focusing his attention to an individual as if no other person exists.

And this is also the challenge to all of us.  Only when a person ceases for us to be just one in the vast crowd can we really become a comfort to others, a mission that our first reading is asking us – comfort my people, give comfort to my people.  It is the individual attention that we give that creates a difference in the lives of people.  It is the singular attention that we accord that creates a sense of being loved, a sense of being attended to, as sense of importance, a sense of belonging.

This is the challenge of advent, of the coming of the Lord.  As he comes to us in our individual situation and in our individual needs so also we must come to others in their individuality, in their particular and unique situation.