A key human capacity, one that has always been understood as crucial to spiritual life – the ability to pay attention – is being attenuated…
William McNamara vividly described contemplation as ‘long, leisurely, loving looks at the real.’ Weil wrote: ‘Prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God’…
The priority of careful observation is contradicted by our ‘systemic distraction’ culture. We live in an age of technologically induced and reinforced attention deficit disorder. Maggie Jackson bluntly writes, ‘We are on the verge of losing our capacity as a society for deep, sustained focus.’ It is sobering to be reminded by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton that most psychological pathologies ‘are characterized by “disorders of attention'” and then to consider how our attention may be misdirected and malformed by technology.
-Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus, p. 84
First, my experiences, almost on a daily basis, confirm Boers’ points here. Several of his phrases are helpful:
1. Our ability to pay attention is being attenuated: Our attention span is like Bilbo Baggins: “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
2. We live in a culture of systematic distraction: Don’t you get tired of seeing screens everywhere you look?
Second, the point about Attention Deficit (induced and reinforced by technology) is interesting. With my background in psychology and pharmacy, I could go on an epic rant about this, but I won’t (it’s amazing how quickly people get offended when dealing with this subject). Suffice it to say that our culture is creating A.D.D. in us all. Let’s just pray that we don’t all end up on medication. There is a more excellent way.
The more excellent way (of 1 Corinthians 13 fame) is the way of love. Love is attentive, even poetically attentive. Love is not distracted, it is inspired. If it takes its attention off of something, it is only because that thing has inspired it to raise its attention to something higher.
I’ll write more about this. For the time being, I simply want to express my amen to the quote above, and remind myself, and my discussion partners, that we are called to gird up the loins of our minds (1 Peter 1:13) in the midst of this ADD culture. The question then becomes, How are we going to go about doing that?
Where’s this discussion at? I want to be in on this.
Everything I’m posting right now is a part of the discussion. We’re working through Living Into Focus. You’re welcome to comment and discuss anything you want.
It is interesting to note just how complicated a problem can be, and just how little of that information ends up being necessary for dealing with that problem. You don’t have to be an expert on “attention” to go on a hike, feel more focused, and then realize that this is good medicine you will now purposefully take. You don’t need a double-blind study, or a microscope. Such knowledge is useful because it may lead us to take a certain action, will help reinforce our actions, and will help us to guide others, but it isn’t necessary for us to successfully “take our medicine.”
Love “covers a multitude of sins”, and yet we don’t always know what sins are being covered. We just seek to Love. So part of learning how to “gird up our loins” in the face of ADD is actually to focus less on the problem and more on how to practically act out the solution (Love).
I want to be careful here and note that this is not the same as saying one should purposefully ignore the problem, or that knowledge of a problem is entirely useless. Infact, sometimes we discover what the positive Way of Love is by looking at the negative way of sin and trouble-shooting a way that is “not that.” When the Bible says to “flee temptation” we ought to then ask “if I am running FROM temptation, what then am I running TO?” Thus, in this situation, a knowledge of the problem helps to yield a knowledge of Love’s answer. Still, it was not intrinsic in performing the solution, which is my point.
When we just seek ways to act in Love, we will eventually begin to see how it “covers a multitude of sins.” We will eventually look behind us and say, “wow, I had no idea that was going to solve that particular issue with attention.” We don’t have to get frozen, analyzing the problem to death. Total understanding of a sin isn’t necessary for Love to cover it.