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Good Morning.

Something worrying has happened to our ability to pay attention. As we scroll our phones and watch TV, juggle zoom calls and childcare, most of us know this. We are attention saturated and attention poor. This theme of attention – it’s loss and the need to reclaim it - is the subject of a recent book by Julia Bell. Her stark claim is that we live in an attention economy where our scrolling and clicking produces constant data - which sells. Our broken attention IS a lucrative product.

This isn’t a new worry, we’ve been worrying about attention since at least the industrial revolution. But I found myself thinking again about attention this week during a phone call to a colleague in Ukraine. Fr Vitaly is a Catholic priest who works full time with the street homeless, and internally displaced. I was surprised that whilst deeply worried about the situation, he was calm. The source of his calm was the sense that finally the situation had captured the attention of the world. After 8 years of feeling deeply isolated, he felt some small measure of hope. ‘Real attention brings hope’, he told me, because careful attention to what’s really going on, on both sides, is the only hope, for both sides, of de-escalation’. ‘We need careful attention to what is happening to the architecture of our world and to what we believe our deepest human values to be’ he said.

The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil argued that deep attention was the greatest gift we can give to another person, and incredibly rare, because in truth really paying attention is, if we are honest, incredibly difficult. When true attention is paid to us it appears like a miracle, it is transformative. The deep attention of a teacher changes a pupils life, careful attention to a text from the past speaks truth to us, the deep attention of someone when we are in trauma can bring us back to life. Weil believed that it was through prayer, where we open ourselves to a God who pays pure attention to us, that we learn how to return that attention to the world; how we learn what deserves our attention and what does not. Bell notes in her book that in English we talk about ‘paying’ attention, in Spanish we ‘donate’ or loan attention. I like the Spanish version – we loan our attention, onwards and onwards, so that it multiplies. That is what Weil believed, and what Fr Vitaly is hoping for.

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