“For lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.” – Evelyn Underhill
Foreword: The Vortex and the Cathedral
After the South African 2019 National Election, I decided to pull myself off all news and political online pages. I had realised that I was being sucked, voluntarily and gleefully, into the black-hole vortex of (dis)information. I decided that if the vortex in my head was fertile ground to be colonised by other people’s narratives, I was going to become fiercely selective about what colonised my mind. If Jesus is the answer to transcendent humanness, then He was the only one to whom I would relinquish the rights to transform my thinking.
This is not to say that I now live under a rock, grunting in some neanderthilic rhythm, with naturally tousled dreadlocks and yesterday’s hunt stuck between my teeth. Hardly. I still seek information and the truth beneath that information. I am a student, after all. But I am no longer letting all and sundry live rent-free in the cathedral of my mind; I’m measuring all things against the truth of Christ.
Working in a highly person-oriented industry, the “news” inevitably finds me. Yet taking time to think, to think as an act of worship, has proven far more productive than floating the white-water rapids of digital opinion as they plunge to interpretive ruin.
Giving attention rather than having attention taken from me is yielding interesting results. Who knew that freedom includes exclusion from things, and solitude to just breathe? Not a bad turnabout for someone who once suffered chronic MOFO: the fear of Missing Out syndrome.
“Who’s Driving This Scroll?”: The Worship of Distraction
Neil Postman warned us, decades before Instagram existed, that we would “amuse ourselves to death.”¹ His argument was not that media merely distract, but that each new medium transforms the way truth itself is conceived. “Our media are our metaphors,” he wrote, “and our metaphors create the content of our culture.”² What we consume becomes what we know; what we attend to becomes what we worship.
In a television age, attention was shaped by images; in the digital age, it is shaped by the algorithm, a liturgy of likes. News, once a communal event around a table, has become a continuous feed, stripped of memory or meaning. The scroll never ends, and neither does our subtle liturgical participation in it. We kneel, thumbs poised, at an altar made of pixels.
Postman, drawing on the Second Commandment, saw this centuries-old connection between media and idolatry: when we trade the Word for the image, we risk worshipping the form rather than the Truth behind it.³ What we attend to, in other words, forms us. Attention is not neutral, it is devotional energy. Every click, scroll, and notification becomes a liturgical act in an unacknowledged religion of distraction.
Saint Simone and the School of the Soul: The Theology of Attention
Simone Weil, brilliant, austere, and heartbreakingly honest, argued that attention is the purest form of generosity.⁴ For her, the mind’s capacity to wait in patient receptivity mirrors the soul’s capacity to pray. In Waiting for God, she writes: “Prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.”⁵
Weil’s theology of attention is not about productivity but presence. It is the art of un-selfing, of emptying oneself so that truth can enter. Every act of study, every moment of waiting, becomes a small sacrament of love. Even a failed geometry problem, she says, “has brought more light into the soul” because the effort of attention is never wasted.⁶
In an age that equates attention with monetisable focus, Weil’s view feels subversive. She sees attention as moral formation, a quiet participation in divine patience. To attend rightly is to consent to God’s rhythm rather than our own. The attentive person does not seize truth; they receive it.
Perhaps, then, scrolling is not the problem so much as unexamined scrolling. When we attend to noise without discernment, we train our souls in impatience. When we attend to God in stillness, we train our hearts for love. To love one’s neighbour, Weil writes, is “to know how to say: What are you going through?”⁷ Such attention heals because it mirrors the gaze of Christ Himself, who looks, listens, and loves without distraction.
Deep Work, Shallow Hearts: Cal Newport and the Discipline of Devotion
Cal Newport doesn’t write theology, but he may as well have stumbled into asceticism. His idea of “deep work,” the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks, reads like a Benedictine rule for the modern mind. He argues that attention is the cornerstone of meaning, and that a life fragmented by constant connectivity loses not just productivity but purpose.⁸
Newport cites Winifred Gallagher’s finding that “who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love – is the sum of what you focus on.”⁹ To live a “deep life” is to reclaim the moral weight of attention, to choose substance over spectacle, presence over performance.
In this sense, deep work becomes a spiritual discipline. Christians might call it contemplation, or stewardship of the mind. If the Spirit renews our minds, then depth is not an elitist hobby, it’s obedience. As Newport notes, “a deep life is not just economically lucrative, but also a life well lived.”¹⁰
The shallowness of our hearts often mirrors the shallowness of our attention. To attend deeply is to love deeply. And love, in the Christian sense, always involves cost: the cost of time, silence, and unhurried gaze.
Keeping Up with the Resonant Joneses: Hartmut Rosa and the Noise of Modernity
Sociologist Hartmut Rosa believes that modernity suffers from a pathology of acceleration.¹¹ We live in an age of constant motion, where self-worth is measured by momentum. Life, he argues, has been reduced to resource accumulation: we expand our reach, networks, skills, and data in the desperate hope of achieving the “good life.”¹²
Rosa’s solution is “resonance,” a recovered relationship to the world that vibrates with meaning. We no longer touch the world, he says, but manipulate it. We have lost “resonant connection,” the ability to stand barefoot on reality and feel its pulse.¹³
Christian theology offers the answer Rosa only intuits. Resonance is not merely aesthetic, it is incarnational. The Word became flesh; God entered resonance. Christ’s life is the restoration of true relationality: between God and creation, heaven and earth, sound and silence.
When Jesus retreated to pray, He was not escaping the world but re-tuning Himself to the Father’s frequency. Sabbath, then, is not rest from resonance but rest for resonance. It is the space where the soul learns again to listen.
An Audience of One, The Christological Resolution
All attention, in the end, finds its centre in Christ. He is both the object and the model of divine attention. He sees the unseen woman at the well; He notices the touch of the desperate hand; He looks upon Peter not with condemnation but compassion. His gaze restores.
Where Postman warned of the media’s power to deform, Weil teaches us to attend, Newport trains us to focus, and Rosa calls us to resonate, Christ fulfils them all. In Him, attention becomes worship.
The ethics of attention, therefore, is not about avoiding screens or fleeing culture; it is about sanctifying our gaze. To give attention rightly is to love rightly. To withhold attention from distraction is to reclaim our humanity.
The gospel reveals that we are the objects of divine attention: “What is man that You are mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:4). The God who upholds galaxies still notices sparrows. The One who commands angels also calls our name. That is the great inversion of the digital age: the universe’s most significant attention is already fixed upon us.
And so, we scroll no longer to be seen, but because we are already known.
Practical Application
Practise attentional Sabbath. Choose a regular time each week to be unreachable, not as a protest against technology but as a rehearsal for eternity.
Turn information into intercession. When the news overwhelms, pray before you comment. Let awareness become compassion, not anxiety.
Redeem study as devotion. As Weil said, every effort of attention bears fruit in prayer. Treat your work, reading, and learning as quiet acts of worship.
Look at people, not profiles. Christ’s ministry was one of noticing. Make it your practice to give undivided attention to whoever stands before you.
Prayer
Lord Jesus,
You who fixed Your gaze upon the Father and yet noticed every face along the road, teach us the holiness of attention.
Deliver us from the idols of noise and the tyranny of the scroll. Give us hearts that listen, eyes that rest, and minds that dwell on what is true.
May our focus be our offering, our stillness our song, and our attention our act of love.
In Your Holy and Glorious Name, Messiah, King, Lord Jesus,
Amen.
TRACK TO ENJOY:
Notes
1. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 1985), 8-9.
2. Ibid., 15.
3. Ibid., 9.
4. Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 105.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 106-107.
7. Ibid., 114. Cal Newport, Deep Work (New York: Grand Central, 2016), 6.
8. Ibid., 47.
9. Ibid., 154.
10. Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 32-33.
11. Ibid., 39.
12. Ibid., 65-69.
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