Paying Attention

I recently finished reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari and have been urging friends to hasten out, get a copy, and do likewise.

In this lively personal narrative, grounded in copious research of the kind deeply curious (and slightly compulsive) people are prone to, he explores some of the main reasons for our dwindling attention spans. He goes well beyond the obvious in spelling out how all of us who use electronic devices and social media to shop, vote, or eat are ensnared in systems designed for distraction. 

Ads “catch” our attention when we’re trying to “pay” attention to something else. The verbs matter. The attention we pay is the tax we pay for being “connected” or living “on the grid” or having a “platform” or just for living in North America now. We have been conditioned to think of ourselves as “consumers,” an identity sometimes more pertinent to our daily lives than “citizen” or “neighbor.” An identity that casts its shadow over the deepest one: member of the family of God.

Here I want to reflect on a few of my own learning moments as I consider the matter of attention, the problem of attention deficit, and what it means to be attentive. 

When I was in graduate school I taped a quote from musician Roberto Gerhard on my wall to help me maintain focus on the work at hand–at that point a dissertation. I still find it helpful: “Attention, deep, sustained, undeviating, is, in itself, an experience of a very high order.” In itself. The idea that paying attention has intransitive, not just transitive value was enlivening. 

I recognized that when I paid long, close, deep attention, the questions that led me there had new questions behind them. The text or image or argument “opened up” in unanticipated ways: new facets, new implications and applications began to reveal themselves. 

An hour spent on a canto of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets or a passage from the Gospel of John was a visceral experience. Eliot’s passing reference, for instance, to “things ill done, or done to others’ harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue,” surprised me into a fresh, oddly refreshing, approach to examination of conscience.

Reading Jesus’ simple words, “Abide in me and I in you” I began to envision a current of energy flowing between my heart and his–a kind of Moebius strip, paradoxical and fascinating and endless. Pausing over passages, lines, phrases, or single words, I sometimes found myself in an altered state. At its best, deep attention is a kind of ecstasy. 

For years I’ve kept two photos on the wall of my study. One is of a little statue that stands in the library lobby of a Catholic school. It’s an image of St. Catherine in ecstasy. Everything about her is open to what comes from above. Utterly unself-protective, she is enjoying God: she has entered into joy. This, I think, is what it looks like to be taken up, caught up, held, and enjoyed in return. It speaks of a quality of attentiveness that lifts us into the arms of God.

The other is Fra Angelico’s lovely image of a monk reading. His attention to the words he is reading is complete, calm and untroubled even though behind him Jesus is being mocked and spat upon, prepared for crucifixion. The monk’s serenity offers some measure of the freedom won for us in that pain: it made our peace possible. In that monk Fra Angelico offers an image of quiet contentment that approaches the “condition of complete simplicity” Eliot speaks of that costs “not less than everything.”

Both these images help me remember, on days full of distraction, what it is to pay full, deep attention. 

Attentiveness may not in itself be prayer, but it is prayerfulness, a state of receptivity that allows prayer to happen in us. Translations of the French verb attendre include to wait for, to watch, to abide. All of those suggest a state of focused wakefulness, alert but not worried, prone to notice, ready to consent. Hopeful. 

These turbulent days I find myself especially thankful for reminders to pay attention, and for those who model that luminous quality of attentiveness that is devoutly to be wished. I notice a neighbor patting earth around a newly planted azalea; a parent squatting before an unhappy child, encouraging her to use her words; a street person for whom the public library is a refuge enjoying a comfortable chair, utterly absorbed in a book. I notice an old woman resting her cane on a park bench gazing at the river, moved, it seems, but unmoving, and see that she has, like Eliot’s roses, “the look of flowers that are looked at.”

In the Byzantine liturgy the priest raises the altar Bible high above his head before reading the Gospel of the day and intones the words, “Wisdom! Be attentive.” It’s a call to wakefulness and presence and expectation when we “find ourselves” once again at “the intersection of the timeless with time.” Any moment we might find ourselves at that still point, if we pause and pay attention.

Header photo by Kerde Severin on Pexels