We can tap into 50 million Web sites, 1.8 million books in print, 75 million blogs, and other snowstorms of information, but we increasingly seek knowledge in Google searches and Yahoo! headlings that we gulp on the run while juggling other tasks. We can contact millions of people across the globe, yet we increasingly connect with even our most intimate friends and family via instant messaging, virutal visits, and fleeting meetings that are rescheduled a half dozen times, then punctuated when they do occur by pings and beeps and multitasking. Amid the glittering promise of our new technologies and the wondrous potential of our scientific gains, we are nurturing a culture of social diffusion, intellectual fragmentation, sensory detachment. In this new world, something is amiss. And that something is attention.
–Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2008), page 13
How very true. too many fall into a virtual life that is no life at all.
During the summer while scanning through a huge backlog of unread blogs in my RSS feed reader, I came across the following amazing quote and filed it away for some-day posting at Lent & Beyond (it will, in fact appear in our Lent quotes series later this month…)
[blockquote]Writing in 1957, Catholic theologian Romano Guardini (in Prayer in Practice) warned of the threat to spiritual health in a life characterized by flitting and restless distractedness. Guardini counseled that the only way to enter into the spirit of prayer was to learn to concentrate. “Above all, we must prepare ourselves for prayer. The same applies also to all worldly matters. No one with a serious task before him will approach it unprepared, but will concentrate on the demands he has to face. If we appreciate good music we shall not arrive at the performance at the last minute, allowing for no transition between the noise and unrest of the street and the opening bars of the concert. We shall be there in good time and hold ourselves ready for the beautiful experience before us. Anyone who has the right feeling for things which are great and important will, before tackling them, banish distraction and collect himself inwardly.”
Guardini notes that “distraction” is historically described by “spiritual teachers” as a “state in which man lacks poise and unity, that state in which thoughts flit from object to object, in which feelings are vague and unfocused and the will ineffective. Man in this state is not really a person who speaks or who can be spoken to, but merely an uncoordinated bundle of thoughts, feelings and sensations.” Collectedness, by contrast, is a condition in which the person aspires to be a “unified whole. This is the state in which he may, when the call comes to him, answer in the words of Moses, ‘Here am I.'”
http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/2008/09/thats-why-they.html%5B/blockquote%5D
I think it was actually Isaiah who said “Here am I” (though in effect, Moses also made himself available to God…), but apart from that quibble, what a great and prescient quote!
Hmm.. I just tried to pull up the full article from Evangelical Outpost that I linked above and I get a forbidden message. But the [url=http://209.85.229.132/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/2008/09/thats-why-they.html&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq;=%5Dcache is available.[/url]
There’s a hymn from John Wesley that was included in a Lenten devotional on TSM’s website yesterday. I posted the hymn at L&B;a few hours ago. The first verse speaks powerfully to the idea that ever since we lost our perfect union with God we have been chasing after “ten thousand” other things to replace the lost “bliss”
UPRIGHT both in heart and will,
We by our God were made ;
But we turn’d from good to ill.
And o’er the creature stray’d :
Multiply’d our wandering thought,
Which first was fix’d on God alone,
In ten thousand objects sought
The bliss we lost in one.
Go read the [url=http://anglicanprayer.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/tsm-march-3-devotional-wayward-hearts-john-wesley/]whole hymn and background at L&B;[/url]
I am thankful for our home small group from church. We recently did a session on contemplative prayer. Just being silent and listening to God, for the still small voice. We are to do this for at least five minutes, with all TV, radio and music off, in a quiet place, and to journal daily. It works best with your daily reading. It I am now on the 46th day of this. It helps me feel peaceful and slows down the pace of my life. Try it.