Distracted Prayer

Last updated on: August 7, 2017 at 8:25 pm by Chase Padusniak

Distracted Prayer 2017-08-07T20:25:57-04:00 Chase Padusniak

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In this sense, attention is the opposite of such a scattering of thought as I described above. It is a waiting, an openness to the issue at hand. To her eyes, this is also how love functions:

Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance […] The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.

How often is our prayer truly singular and focused, unimpeded by the minutiae of the day? How many of us can truly say that our prayer involves no temptation from without, no, as it might be put, attack by demons (I once heard a really wonderful sermon at a Russian Catholic Church on St. Anthony the Great and the—to probably misquote the priest—“demons of distraction”)? It is nearly impossible for the person with children running around to merely “get up” and avoid all thoughts and distractions as he or she rises out of the drowsy quagmire of a night’s rest. But even they—and how much more me, single as I am—can take but a moment to reflect in the silence of morning. In fact, reflecting on all this has got me thinking: is this not why it is good to greet and end the day with prayer? True, it is good to praise God at all times, to thank Him for the new and passed day, etc. But there seems to me to a practical dimension to such a practice too: we begin and end our days in silent concentration, in meditation that prepares mind, body, and soul for love of God as channeled through constant (as much as is possible) attention. Attention is like an active sleep—how fitting that it be associated with the liminal states right after and before daily rest.

To relate all of this to the beginning of my little post here, Simone Weil believed that cultivating concentration in any enterprise was a form of preparation for prayer. To learn to sit with a geometry problem, to learn to lose oneself in gardening or listening to another, is, in truth, the path to cultivating a mind prepared for true love of God and true love of neighbor. Of course, for her, pure attention was nearly never reached, but that is no reason not to pursue it. Easy things are rarely good; nothing is truly free (here I am slipping into truisms again). Remaining unified, not scattered, is hard—if at all possible—and yet, how much sterner and more necessary the command to pursue such love in a time when the sin of sloth strikes us less in absolute boredom than in losing ourselves in scattered distraction, dissipation of mind and spirit.

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