c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) After a week at home editing a book manuscript and poking around the used-car market, my study is a jumble.

I count seven stacks of papers, plus scattered notes and mail, plus a mind swirling with slippery details and questions. It’s time for sorting and closure. Sort the edits, sort the printouts of car data, make notes, make decisions.

It is time, in other words, for focus. See what needs to be seen, decide what needs to be decided, and set the rest aside.

But is that real? Or even possible? And if it were possible to turn off all distractions _ stop the newspaper, turn off e-mail and telephone, ignore competing claims, ignore other voices, avoid conversations on other topics _ would that be right? How would God get through? How can one be a servant if the door is closed?

The focused mind is a powerful force. If you concentrate your energies on a single task, you can do wonders. If you harness political energies to a single cause, you can prevail over the scattered. Single-minded ambition, single-threaded performance, single-issue politics _ they all work.

But reality is so much more complex and distracting. Your favorite cause is only one cause among many, and perhaps not as compelling as others. For you to win, someone else must lose, and living alongside vote-count losers is inevitably complicating.

Joy, truth and meaning tend to be surprises. The art of living isn’t to freeze the kaleidoscope, but to remain nimble and curious. The tightly focused mind tends to yield long-term weakness, not strength.

That’s why single-issue politicians are so effective in running for office and so inept and dangerous when governing. That’s why couples often do better at falling in love than in living together. It’s why people do better at arguing than listening.

As convention-goers discover after focusing energy on what they deem critical decisions, it is easier to make decisions than to live into them. Counting votes is easier than counting the cost. Declaring the outcome of a highly focused debate is easier than rediscovering complexities that were temporarily shoved aside.

When the Hebrews were crossing the wilderness, their leader Moses had a single-track focus: keep them moving toward Canaan, do whatever it took to keep them from turning back to bondage. For a time, God seemed to share that focus. Hence cloud and fire to give them direction, tablets of Law to guide their common life, and manna to give them sustenance.

Once they emerged from the wilderness, however, they needed to find their own way, make their own decisions, and plant their own grain. Not because God had abandoned them, but because faith ultimately is choices, and the only durable faith _ the only faith capable of being a “beacon to the nations” _ is the faith that learns to see all of reality and to shine in all directions.

Christians are tempted to see Jesus as the new Moses, single-mindedly leading his people to a single destination; and to see the church as the new Israel-in-Sinai, a beleaguered tribe facing harsh elements and needing to remain focused.

Jesus himself, however, was anything but a single-track mind. He wandered from place to place. He moved restlessly from one idea to another. To his disciples’ dismay, he opened his embrace to all manner of people. He affirmed the Law but then departed from it. He upheld tradition but then violated it. His friends and enemies tried to pin him down to a defining word. He dodged and resisted.

Jesus wasn’t the new Moses. He refused to promulgate laws or to rule by decree. His followers weren’t the new Israel-in-Sinai, forming a single column and marching eastward across the desert. They were to scatter, to be a servant people, to hear many voices, to touch many lives, and always to die to self.

The church’s eventual decision to form hierarchies capped by imperial rulers and to focus on selected thoughts, selected people and selected actions was a perversion of what Jesus seemed to intend. It has had tragic consequences, not the least of which is our current fascination with single-track issues to the exclusion of all else.

DEA END EHRICH