Day by Day
In our culture, we are repeatedly given two paradoxical/contradictory messages:
1) Be Yourself
2) Be Better.
So, on the one hand, we’re asked to never denigrate who we are in favour of whom we “could” be, but at the same time, we’re asked not to undermine the possibility of whom we could be by insisting that `we are who we are’ and that’s good enough!
How do we navigate between self-acceptance and the goal of transforming into the best version of ourselves? Perhaps by approaching any and all of our changes slowly, minutely, one day at a time, we can create change that is stable and permanent. The idea of a gradual but continuous striving for a transcendent life, is what connects a thirteenth century Catholic saint to a contemporary Jewish American musical theatre composer. The following prayer comes from the 1971 musical Godspell, adapted by Stephen Schwartz, from a daily meditation by the English Bishop, Richard of Chichester.
Day by day, day by day,
O, Dear Lord, three things I pray:
to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly,
follow thee more nearly, day by day.
St. Richard’s version is almost identical, but with one significant change in the first line
May I know thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly
The prayer astonishes in its beauty, brevity, simplicity. And yet the further you probe its language, the more complicated these seemingly artless instructions appear. What does it mean to “see” or “know” God?” Can anyone ever see divinity “clearly” or even “more clearly”? And what about the sequence of the prayer: see [know]-love-follow. Why in this order? If loving is the ultimate goal of all of life, why does it occupy a middle position in Richard’s desire? As for the suggestion to “follow more nearly” – more nearly than what? Nearly how? Are these three tasks the prayer’s summary of fulfillment? What if you strive for them and still feel empty? Can you pray these words with feeling and urgency if you are not a believer in God or some “higher being”?
To See Thee More Clearly
Can we see what is not there?
Our prayer refers to the seeing of the mind and heart, the way we transpose the meaning of sight into mental metaphors—“I see your point”—or emotional recognition – “I really feel seen by her.” Seeing God is less about an actual experience of divinity, and more a forging of a new sensibility towards the world and the things in it.
Whether it is God one wants to envision, or just the people in our lives with more clarity, it is always about making a conscious decision to see. This sounds absurd - doesn’t one simply see what is there? Not really. What psychologists call “motivated perception” is another way of saying that we see what we want to see. Everyone who was there last night observed that your partner utterly ignored you at the party and made jokes at your expense, but when asked about it, you say “I didn’t notice anything.” We see what we want to see.
“Day by Day” is not about an actual God sighting, as if the divine is some elusive UFO and humans are camped out on the hills with our telescopes hoping to have a glimpse that we can capture and share with our co-conspirators. Rather, it talks about a quality of desire within a person. The desire to see—more clearly--is to move beyond the static noise of the conversation you’ve had a thousand times, the spinning of the laundry, the numbing whirr of the everyday, into a dimension where you realize what you are here for and how to navigate this. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in another vein, the purpose of philosophy is to show “the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” To “see thee more clearly” is to begin that journey upward out of the bottle that limits what we can envision and about what we can dream.
Love Thee More Dearly
What emerges from Richard’s exhortation about love is that it is not a feeling but an activity. To love more dearly is a lifelong enterprise, not something that happens to you but something you cultivate, less an accident of desire and more a skill or a commitment to uphold. Finding love is not the goal here, rather learning how to love better is.
The psychologist-philosopher Erich Fromm lays out the options of our cultural expectations of love: “Is Love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one "falls into" if one is lucky? Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.”
Both for Fromm and for St. Richard, the issue is how to love more dearly, not how to be loved or to be attractive. He does not ask for us to love the other as though it were an object, but rather to consider one’s own ability of love as a faculty that needs to be tended to and improved. Love thee more dearly is not a theological statement – it is the secret to loving, a seismic shift in our most important relationships.
Follow Thee More Nearly
Until recently, nobody wanted to be “a follower.” Leadership is one of the mantras of our age. And yet, with the advent of social media, being a follower has gained a new traction. It does not just have to be about me. There is of course an inherent risk to “following” someone or something that is unworthy of such devotion. But the problem is not in the act of following - it is in the choice of our attention.
Following, like the loving we spoke of earlier, means that I am not the centre of attention. Following is an activity, but one that is always coordinated to the movement of the other. Following is not surrender, but a partnership between two. Yours may not be the first step, but without you, there is no dance. Out of the spotlight but never out of the frame.
No one grows up and says I’d like to be a follower one day, and yet so much of our life—the great majority in fact-- is spent in the art of following. Without following, there could be no learning, no listening, no loving. When your partner asks you, with undisguised irritation, “did you follow the instructions?” after you yet again did not pay heed to a crucial step in the accomplishment of a task, the indispensable quality of following becomes readily apparent.
Thee
Above and beyond all of the specific prescriptions of the prayer lies one central word: “thee.” The essence of “Day by Day” is to tell us to transcend ourselves and devote ourselves to another. When the self is the sole or the guiding concern, then every day is a roller coaster of emotions, blindly following the highs and lows of whether we feel the world is “falling our way.” But the universe does not revolve around us.
It’s not easy to make this adjustment at times. We spend each day trying to protect ourselves, boost ourselves, defend ourselves, even if the pursuit of approval and self-soothing can find us caught in a desperate loop that is never ending.
Change is hard.
In Immunity to Change, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey cite a study showing just how resistant people are to tweaking their lifestyle, even if the price of not doing so is the loss of their very life: “When doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don’t change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully. Desire and motivation aren’t enough; even when it’s literally a matter of life or death, the ability to change remains maddeningly elusive.”
“Day by Day” tells us to change our life by altering the object of our attentions. Can we see beyond the “me” to the “thee,” to the other who is there just beyond our self-preoccupations? Each day can be revolutionized by asking one simple question: what can I do for someone else today?”
Day by day.