How can we learn to pay attention to something other than ourselves? What does it mean to really pay attention? Iris Murdoch, the British novelist, gives a clue when she says, It is a task to come to see the world as it is." . . . Murdoch's suggestion is that paying attention is difficult and contrary to how we usually see the world, which is as she says, in terms of our "fat relentless ego." She gives a personal example: "I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. There is nothing but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important." There is a natural and proper part of us, she adds, that takes "a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer, alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones, and trees." The message is that we pay attention to difference, that we really learn to see what is different from ourselves. That is not easy. We can acknowledge a thing in its difference if it is important to us or useful to us, but realizing that something other than oneself is real, in itself, for itself, is difficult. To acknowledge another being as different — perhaps even indifferent to me, as for instance a hovering kestrel — is for most of us, a feat of the imagination.
" — Sallie McFague, Super, Natural Christians