There are three holidays when I think talking politics is especially important: Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and July 4th. It’s on such days when we think, respectively, about the costs of our political decisions, the people who are often in harms way in our names, and what we are celebrating on this special anniversary, the 250th year of our country’s founding. I admit, at the moment I’m not feeling especially proud. Please don’t get me wrong: I love this country as any person might love their nation, and I think the so-called American Experience of rebellion, revolution, democratic experimentation, and idealism still holds enormous potential to benefit humanity and history. I spent almost half my career serving the military in some way, and would do it all again. But what to do with a day like today, where there is so much to celebrate, and so much to lament? What does a call to action look like this July 4th, a call that is reverent of the occasion and irreverent to what is so wrong right now?
This morning we’re going to focus on what it means to pay attention, in the context of the “now,” and being ready. I was thinking this week about what in my life has taught me to pay attention, I mean really pay attention. It begins with a story about the Bulletin Clock I introduced in my story about the artist Martel. Known in the media as the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin Clock has been maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a symbol of global danger since 1947. I’ve met Martel twice, and both times (this was important to her), she told me she never considered the clock a symbol but a “design she invented to convey a sense of urgency.” She never even intended for the hands to move, she said. For her, a symbol holds meaning with a perpetual weight. A good design, to a designer and artist like Martel, a good design begins and maintains a conversation with the viewer. That’s what she wanted when she designed the Bulletin Clock: a conversation. And what a conversation it’s been.
But this is not where my story about the Doomsday Clock begins. My story begins sitting on my patio back in Oak Park about a month after I had been hired by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as an editor.
I was sitting with a school teacher who lived in the upstairs apartment of our rented Victorian in Oak Park. “No, really,” I told him. “We keep the clock up in the attic, next to the ping pong table.” My friend had come of age in the 1960s, when the Doomsday Clock was the icon denoting the dangers of nuclear weapons. He had grown up like so many of his generation watching the metaphorical minutes tick away toward some point of no return. A group of scientists and policy makers, many of them Nobel laureates, vote annually on where the hands are placed.
“What’s it like? the Clock?” my friend asked.
“Nothing special, really. It’s a two-foot metal disk with hands that move.”
“You can move the hands?”
“Yeah… it’s really just a prop for press conferences,” I told him.
“Have you moved the hands to midnight?”
“Oh yeah…” I said, “everyone does it once.” It didn’t feel good.
“And there’s a ping pong table in the room?”
“Yep. My boss is a ping pong fanatic. Every day we know it’s exactly 5:00 when her husband, Stanley, appears at the door with his paddle. The University of Chicago maintenance staff have fielded their best players to beat her, but nobody can.”
But my friend hadn’t heard any of what I said after ping pong.
“You play ping pong? IN the room with the Doomsday Clock? Every day?” He looked like I had described a sacrilege. Then a flash.
“Ah, it’s a reference to 1970s ping pong diplomacy” he said, “under Nixon and Kissinger,” when there was a brief thaw in U.S.-China relations.
“No, just a ping pong table.”
“Next to the Doomsday Clock?!?”
My friend walked away visibly disturbed and we never spoke of ping pong again.
You see, my friend wanted The Clock to be more than it was. He wanted it to be symbolic, to have weight. To the staff of the Bulletin, it was just something we lived with everyday: a perpetual reminder to pay attention because the stakes are very high. Putting it by the ping pong table meant we lived it with, hung out with it, saw it every single day. And then we’d go to work.
Many people of my generation, let alone Millennials and Gen Z’s, have never heard of the Doomsday Clock, but starting in 1947, through the nuclear arms reduction talks of the Reagan Bush years, it was a much-watched symbol of the state of security in the world.
The magazine itself was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons as part of the Manhattan Project. As its managing editor for five years, I not only wrote and chose articles for publication but also sat in on the 2002 discussions to move the hands from nine to seven minutes. I wouldn’t say it was a cheery staff, but they all had very interesting senses of humor. Former members of the Board of Sponsors include Steven Hawkings. Leo Szilard, Bertrand Russell, Arthur C. Clarke, James Franck, and Leon Ledderman. No, I never met Steven Hawkings, but I did have dinner with Leon Ledderman. And in my office files I once found a canceled $2,000 check from Albert Einstein, one of our founders, to kick-start the magazine.
What the Bulletin Clock has always taught us is the lesson to pay attention. This is not just any moment in history. This is not just the natural flow of human events. The Doomsday Clock illustrates the ways in which humanity has amassed so much more destructive ability than we’re capable of handling. This power isn’t just atomic, but social, political, and environmental. The Bulletin, founded as part of the Concerned Scientists Movement, was founded to shed light on the formerly secretive world of science. After the detonation of the first and second atomic bombs against Japan several of the bomb’s creators (including J. Robert Oppenheimer) created the organization so that science could never again hide behind a veil of amoral immunity.
I’ve come to believe that nuclear weapons and unjust policies, today draconian and regressive policies, have something in common: they both destroy and oppress the human spirit. The effect of living in a world with unchecked power, is that you are always living in fear. It was a way of scaring vast populations into states of perpetual elevated terror and submission where you never know when the world as you know it will end. It could be a post-apocalyptic landscape with smoking missile craters. It could be an ICE detention facility separated from your children, or being grabbed on the street in front of them, or having them grabbed in front of you. Doomsday has many faces.
Theologian and writer Brian McLaren names pretty much all of them in his book Life After Doom, where he explores the psychological, theological, and ecological collapse of modern civilization. While navigating the deep eco-anxiety of our age, he encourages us to move past despair to find new forms of courage, community, and spiritual resilience in a failing world.
The only way to do this, he says, is to focus on the love in front of us, the love we enact and apply toward change, not the optimistic outcome for which we may hope.
The Buddhists would call this “non attachment to outcome,” or the ability to cultivate love and action for the sake of love and action—not for the sake of change. The Buddha said over and over, stop clinging to some ideal you think you were promised, of happiness, security, justice, or fairness. You weren’t. Even the Declaration of Independence only promotes the pursuit of happiness and equality. But here’s the spiritual twist: as we work for the happiness, security, and equity of others, the love we put into the work itself becomes joyful and nourishing. Nobody says this was going to be easy.
For McLaren, the central hope is not a passive expectation of a happy ending, but an active commitment to love, agency, and human dignity regardless of the outcome. As he decouples hope from outcome—as did both Jesus and the Buddha—love becomes both our motive and the result of our work. He says when we stop working just for change, amidst seemingly hopeless scenarios of climate change and global oppressions, and focus on love as our motivation AND intention, hope can return.
We hope for love. We cultivate love. We get love. Dopamine fix. Repeat.
What I really learned at the Bulletin is that the lesson of the Doomsday Clock isn’t about quantifying danger, but paying attention to fear. It is hard to experience hope and love when you’re afraid. The Clock is a symbol of alertness. It asks us to pay attention.
It’s like ugly wallpaper. Years ago, in that Victorian rental house Cindy and I shared with our teacher friend, every room displayed a different ornate floral pattern on its walls. At first sight it was horrific; something had to be done about it. But as we lived with it and realized all the work that had to be done to get rid of it, time marched on and we learned to accept the wallpaper. Eventually we didn’t see it.
When we get used to things we stop paying attention. My fear today is that we will just get used to the injustices of our time. The surveillance state legally gobbling up personal data and digital rights. The goon squads sweeping up immigrants. ICE just clocked its most horrific stats to date. Voter registrations laws and redistricting initiatives eroding access to our constitutional right to vote.
Paying attention takes discipline, even training. At some point in my adult life, for example, we stopped paying attention and got used to atomic weapons. I remember growing up, the mass media would report regularly on how many nuclear weapons were on the planet. I remember SALT and START treaty negotiations and the numbers those agreements sought. The back page of the Bulletin tracked them every month. In 2003, the last year I worked there, there were between 30,000 and 32,000.
How many of us know how many there are today?
Well, I’m glad you asked. There are 12,187; 5,042 of which are ours, according to the still-published Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Then, like ugly wallpaper that’s too hard and stuck to the walls to remove, nuclear weapons drifted into the background of our lives—we got used to them. Let’s not let that happen with the terrorizing policies of the Trump administration.
My intention this morning is not to insight fear, but to remind us to pay attention. Earlier in the service, during our story for all ages, I spoke about Thich Nhat Hanh’s technique for paying attention. He lets everything be a bell of reminder. If he is stopped at a red light, he lets it be a reminder to stop and be aware of everything around. At Buddhist retreats this is a common practice. When you hear the sounding of a central bell calling you to meditation, you stop, open your senses and mind, and see what is there with you. Sound. Sensation. Thought. Emotion. Sight. It’s isn’t to suppress any of these, but to let them in and notice them.
I had an idea last night as I was listening, or rather, trying not to listen, to the unsanctioned, illegal July 4th fireworks going off all night. I resist. Push them away. Try not to be irritated because as my dog cowers and hides.
I wondered. What if I let every firework this July 4th week (because we all know they will continue until every last explosive is lit), what if I let every firework be a bell of reminder. The idea of spiritual practice, including paying attention, is that we train our minds to new habits. What an opportunity this July 4th, as we celebrate, lament, remember, and pay attention, what an opportunity to practice awareness.
So here is your call to action: pay attention to what’s happening, resist to the edge of your ability, pay attention to your self-care and limits, and look discerningly for what’s coming next. Let us do our best as we balance our highest ideals, mental health, zones of comfort and discomfort, sense of safety for our families, and our very bodies. That’s a lot to balance. That’s why we have each other.
Getting through these times with our souls intact is going to take new spiritual habits. Let us practice, together and alone, being aware and wise.
Getting through these times with our sense of hope alive is going to take new techniques of cultivating compassion and connection. Let us practice, together and alone, being gentle when we can, and firm when we must.
Getting through these times with our pride in what the United States has aspired since the signing of the Declaration of Independence 250 years and a day ago will require new expressions of words like patriotism and loyalty. Let us practice, together and alone, being as vigilant as Paul Revere and as fierce as Abigail Adams in our continuing struggle for equality and freedom. For all.
Doomsday has not arrived. The end is not here, now.
This present moment.
Feels.
OK…
spacious…
alive…
Go now and be attentive peacemakers in the world.