Member: jayd808

CollectionsYour library (3)

Reviews3 reviews

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GroupsA Pearl of Wisdom and Enlightenment, Catholic Apologetics, Christianity, Club Read 2009, Dantisti, Pro and Con, Pro and Con (Religion)

About meThis is the about page from my personal weblog, payingattentiontothesky. It pretty much says who I am and what I am interested in (if you overlook the pseudonym).

“His second night in Talkingham, Hazel Motes walked along down town close to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all of time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.”
From Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

"Paying Attention To The Sky is written by a recent convert to the Catholic Church (2006), Derek Jeter, who is the unknown but consumate icon of the famed New York Yankee shortstop of the same name and is auditing courses from time to time in the Masters in Ministry Program at St. Johns Seminary in Boston.

Mr. Jeter lived and worked 23 years in Japan and after returning to the states in 1994 worked in a series of Training and Curriculum Design positions at Boston area companies.

He is semi-retired (working as a Sys Admin/Site Manager for a computer training center in Downtown Boston) and currently exploring (what the Catholic Church calls “discernment’) his vocation with the Church.

Mr Jeter is dedicated to paying attention to the sky and other metaphors that echo the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:2 when he recalls Jesus’ warning to his followers to be on the watch — a warning about expectation of the end-time, which will come upon sleeping humans like “a thief in the night” (Matthew 24:43).

Simone Weil, a Christian mystic whom Mr Jeter finds fascinating, urges a Christian poetic that insists on educating the reader into paying attention to people and to language and to things, because the cultivation of attention directed to the other (the suffering neighbor; the created order as God intended it, or shalom; the created order as it is, broken; and God) is fundamental to the ethics of Christianity.

One cannot love or help a person one refuses to listen to; one cannot redeem a world one doesn’t look at; one cannot serve a God one doesn’t engage with, ask questions of, listen to, study. And, as Weil points out, one cannot space out and pray, prayer demands attention. Perhaps a Christian poetic might insist on nourishing a broken faculty of the modern mind – attention.

If you visit the stadium in New York, you may see me during long at bats for an opposing team’s batter, scanning the sky and smoothing the ground in front of my position. You might even wonder what I’m thinking about. Well, rest assured, it’s much the same as I am writing here — all part and parcel of the same thing, paying attention to the sky, alert to the next crack of the bat, anticipating the pitch."

My great love of baseball comes from the lessons the game teaches us.

About my libraryHaven't had the time to list everything here. I purchase books for seminary courses but for change of pace tend towards detective fiction (Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender books) or thriller historical works (Alan Furst).

Homepagehttp://payingattentiontothesky.com/

LocationSouth Wellfleet MA and Matsudo Japan

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Account typepublic, free

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Member sinceJun 4, 2009