Focused Attention
Simone Weil on a new way to understand prayer—for atheists, skeptics, and believers
And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
What is prayer?
Unfortunately, like charity or pretty much any other good action, prayer can be performative: an opportunity to show off. And in this passage we see Jesus condemning that form of prayer.
But what is prayer? And is there any value in prayer even if you don’t believe in God, or aren’t Christian?
I believe that there’s a definition of prayer that aligns with what Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount, and which can also be useful to you even if you don’t believe in God.
It comes from a French Jewish-Catholic mystic-philosopher (yes, she was a complicated person) named Simone Weil:
Prayer is focused attention.
Focused attention. Weil lived in the first half of the twentieth century, but understood that attention was already in crisis in our modern world. She understood, too, that the common definition of prayer—a sort of talking to God to try to get things or change things in the world—is at least a greatly diminished vision of prayer.
So, what does it mean to suggest that prayer is focused attention? Prayer as focused attention can help us distinguish prayer from a number of other common practices, habits, and cultural patterns. We’ll be better able to understand what prayer is if we understand our own habits of mind better first.
Daily Life: Unfocused Attention
If your daily life is anything like mine, it’s probably more characterized by unfocused attention than anything else.
Even when I first sit down to work in the morning—the most peaceful time of my day, typically—I’m trying to attend to a dozen different things: reflecting on how the morning went with my family, taking care of my animals, looking ahead to big projects I want to start on the homestead, getting and eating breakfast, planning my work for the day, checking email.
I don’t feel distracted, but I certainly don’t feel focused, either. I’m attentive, but trying to attend to too many things at once. Most days, my mind is characterized by a lot of unfocused attention.
Phone Life: Unfocused Distraction
Punctuating the unfocused attention, there are many opportunities for unfocused distraction, too.
I’ve noticed that the quality of my days often depends on how close I keep my various screen-based devices. When they’re nearby, I tend to think about, and use, them often. When I leave them in the kitchen, I have an easier time attending to my work. (Though I do recommend the app Opal as a useful way to limit screen time.)
Screens are like “windows onto the whole world,” we’re told—they open up many possibilities for us. But the point of a window isn’t to open up more possibilities. The windows in my house open up to the same possibilities: possibilities for attending to what’s near me, the life that’s always around me.
Though I’m grateful for the opportunities that screens make possible for me, I’m also most miserable when I make screens everything, because in a constant state of distraction and newness, I make myself nothing.
Meditation: Focused Inattention
You might ask: doesn’t defining prayer as focused attention just turn make it a sort of meditation, then?
No, I don’t believe so. I think that prayer as focused attention is a very different, and very important, practice that shouldn’t be confused with meditation as it is commonly understood.
Simply put, meditation as it is commonly understood and practiced is focused inattention. The aim of meditation is clearing your mind, freeing it of the constant buzzing, noise, and internal dialogue that constantly fills it. I think in this sense, meditation can be a useful precursor to prayer—but it’s not the same thing as prayer.
Focused Attention and Devotion
I think prayer—focused attention—is the highest form my thinking can take. Particularly in the world we live in, which presents so many opportunities for both unfocused attention and unfocused distraction, focused attention is a rare and profound gift. Meditation—focused inattention—can be a good way to clear the ground, but ultimately our minds are for something. Simone Weil would suggest that this is prayer.
In prayer, I devote my mind. That doesn’t mean I just ask, though sometimes that’s part of it. My best attention is both focused and open—it’s focused on a subject, but it’s open to receiving new insight on that subject, new inspiration about how I can respond.
“Attention” comes from Latin roots that together mean “stretching towards.” Interestingly, the word “temple” has the same root. Temples are places where we collectively stretch towards God; when I pay attention I’m stretching toward the object of my attention.
Prayer is a temple for your mind. I believe you’ll find it worthwhile to start spending some time there.
How do you understand prayer? Does defining prayer as focused attention help you? Or are you troubled by it?
How much time do you spend in focused attention? What about unfocused attention or unfocused distraction?
What would change about your life if you started spending 10-15 min each day in focused attention?