As I have pushed away from expressions of faith that can be damaging and divisive, I have sought to see faith expressed in ways that bring people together. Much of evangelical expression had to do with articulating difference. There were categories, “the saved and the lost,” “Christian and non-Christian,” “people who pray and people who do not,” “believer and unbeliever.” I have come to a place in Christian faith where I find more true faith not in seeing how difference divides, but actually how difference can reflect transcendent presence and love. One of the areas that this is evident is that of attention and prayer.
Who prays?
Do only believers pray?
Yesterday I was speaking with a friend who has been on the board of a retreat centre that hosts gatherings of people, as well as retreats for individuals. One of the options is for people to stay in small cabin accommodations that are entirely off-grid. That is, there is no reception or wi-fi. My friend told me of a couple of well-known writers who have recently been using such space and she also pointed out that the off-grid retreat accommodation is popular with young people.
I bring this up because I think that matters of attention, focus, and mental space have to do with prayer.
One of the repeated quotes in the work that I do is from Jewish mystic writer Simone Weil:
Attention, taken to its highest degree is the same thing as prayer; it presupposes faith and love.
When you hear something like that you can think of attention (and thus prayer) in a way that stresses what we have in common with other people, not what divides us.
If you pay attention to anything, according to Weil, that sustained attention becomes prayerful. The expression of hopeful faith can help us to see how other people who don’t believe the same things we might believe do have this blessing of attentiveness as part of their life. We all also experience the battle for our attention and the lure of distraction.
I read a review of two recent books that each address how we struggle to focus. One, called “The Loop,” is by Jacob Ward. The other, called “Stolen Focus,” is by Johann Hari. In “The Loop,” Ward outlines how artificial intelligence, algorithms, and other technology now not only predicts our behaviour, but often causes it. The technology does not expand options, but narrows them all in aiming to direct our attention away from sustained focus. Hari’s book argues that we are losing the ability to focus because we have too much information, stress, surveillance, and diagnoses and too little sleep, sustained reading, mental space/contemplation, and nutrition.
Reviewer Cathy O’Neil aims to offer positive suggestions, one of them being “transcendence.” The call is to emulate people, including, in her description, young people, who know how to overcome the constant pull for our attention.
Perhaps, instead of lamenting that there are not enough people who pray, we can articulate the common struggle that almost all of us face to be truly attentive. Helping one another see the value and hopeful practice of attentiveness can, for those who are interested, be a door to the spiritual practice of prayer.
I knew a writer who felt her writing was her way of praying. When she asked her spiritual teacher about it, he told her that the attention and focus she put into her writing was akin to prayer. I think the same is true of painting, drawing, etc....I don't think these things take the place of more traditional forms of praying but who knows! Thanks for another great article!