The Most Important Thing In the World

I poked my head into a colleague’s office door at Campbellsville University. Ray had known about my brother since his ALS diagnosis two years ago. I let him know Mark had passed.

Ray was at his desk when I told him, mid-task, mid-day, in the ordinary flow of work. What he did next has stayed with me ever since. He stopped. He stood up and embraced me. Then he walked to two chairs in the corner of his office, settled into one, and gestured to the other. When I sat down, he asked, simply and without hurry: “How are you doing?”

That was all. But it was everything.

Ray had, without using the term, practiced something close to what Jewish tradition calls sitting shiva. 

In the days following a death, in the Jewish faith, family and friends come to comfort mourners, not to fix or explain or fill the silence with noise, but to be present. Visitors are taught not to speak first — to wait until the mourner speaks, to follow their lead, to let grief set the pace. It is a countercultural act in any age, and perhaps especially in ours. 

We are not good at sitting still with sorrow. We rush to comfort, perhaps with a condolence message, a bereavement card, or even a casserole dropped at the door. Shiva asks something harder of us: to remain.

Ray remained. And in doing so, he offered me a kind of grace I did not know I needed.

The visit was short. I was on my way in less than fifteen minutes, but Ray would have been willing to sit the afternoon with me had I needed it. 

Lent is a season of discipline. We know its familiar rhythms — the giving up of chocolate or social media, the adding of prayer or fasting, the slow march of forty days toward the Cross and the empty tomb. These are good and ancient practices, and they shape us in ways we may not fully understand until much later. 

But there is another discipline worth considering this Lent, one that costs us something different: the discipline of stopping, turning toward another person, and truly listening.

In his book, How to Know a Person, The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, David Brooks quotes author and therapist, Mary Pipher, who once told Brooks, “To be able to understand people and be present for them in their experience— that’s the most important thing in the world.”

It is not easy listening to people. It’s harder than giving up dessert. It requires that we lay down our own agendas, our discomfort with grief, and our impulse to solve what cannot be solved. It asks us to trust that presence itself is a gift.

When Jesus heard of his friend Lazarus’ death, he traveled a two-day journey to his home, presumably to sit shiva. When Jesus and his disciples arrived, Lazarus had already been dead for four days. The time of sitting shiva was usually seven days. The Hebrew word, shiva, means “seven.” Jesus intentionally waited two days before making the journey, arriving to sit shiva when the family had already been four days into it. But they knew Jesus was there for them. They didn’t have a clue what He was about to do for Lazarus, the miracle that prompted the religious authorities to go after Him in full force. 

But even in that, isn’t the Cross the ultimate act of remaining? Christ did not rush past human suffering. He entered it. He listened not only to the Father but to the hurting ones he encountered on his journey to the Cross. 

This Lent, we might practice, in our small and ordinary ways, doing the same.

As Pipher said, “It’s the most important thing in the world.”