…what Albert Borgmann calls focal practices-activities that center, balance, focus, and orient one’s life…
Focal living… helps us identify and perceive the ‘something more’ that people seek. When our existence seems shallow and unfulfilling, he commends focal concerns that ‘center and illuminate’ our lives. The word ‘focus’ comes from the Latin word for ‘hearth’-a woodstove or fireplace, an essential item for comfort and even survival in many climates. A hearth – as its name implies – is often at the ‘heart’ or center of a house. A lot of attention goes into maintaining a hearth, keeping it in good and safe working order, supplying it with fuel.
-Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus, pp. 10, 11, 13
He continues,
Though some have opted to live ‘off the grid’ and find the lifestyle rewarding, my point is not that we should abandon contemporary technology and naively take on previous hardships, and all become- using familiar biblical terminology- ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ (Josh 9:27). Nor do I believe we should pine after the ‘good old days.’ Rather, my hope is that we consider which hearths can hold us together, which wells can help us drink in abundant life (p. 16).
That raises the major question of the book so far: what are we going to place at the heart of our lives?
I titled this post “Hearths Everywhere” because the phrase has a possible double meaning. Modern people are trying to center their lives around everything that buzzes and glows. The problem with that is that it doesn’t allow for centrality – it tears our hearts in a multitude of different directions (we’re not only double-minded, we’re dozen-minded). If our hearts are given over to a thousand transient things, then we have no chance of retaining any sort of deep focus. But, on the contrary, if we can focus on a few ‘centering’ things, then we can find ourselves centered everywhere we go and in everything we do. Call it worldview integration if you like. Everything becomes related. We can find a hearth anywhere we go, because our ‘centeredness’ allows us to maintain our primary focus.
For a Christian this means at least that Colossians 1:18 has to be at the very heart of the hearth: “That in all things He [that is, Christ] might be preeminent.” With that unifying focus, we can see all focal activities, whether reading, or walking, or playing chess, or having conversations, as means of deepening our focus on the true hearth. We don’t have to simply ‘put off’ new things, we have to put on Christ. We have to find ways to allow new technologies and the like to serve the purpose of keeping us focused on the main things.
I am reminded here of Hebrews 12:2 “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” The words “looking unto Jesus” works well with the conceptual term “focal practice.” Other translations often render it as “fix our eyes,” which certainly gives the feeling of focus.
“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18).