Maggie Jackson, in her book Distraction wrote, “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.”

While some cognitive neuroscientists believe that attention is an organ system, like our respiratory system, we at least know that attention is the basic organizational power of our lives. Attention is, continues Jackson, “key not only to higher forms of thinking but to our morality and even our very happiness…in a world of information overload, we need brevity and distillation…We are adapting to a new world, but in doing so are we redefining ‘smart’ to mostly mean twitch speed, multitasking, and bullet points?…How do we keep from getting lost in these mercurial and diffuse realms, where time for reflection and focus is increasingly lost as a valued part of life?”

I write this as one who has discovered rather late in life that I am the victim of my own distracted habits. Having suffered migraine headaches for many years due to various stresses, I blamed them on chemistry or biology forgetting that the mind, body, and emotions are all inextricably connected. These migraine headaches increased in frequency and intensity until they culminated in the great migraine attack of my life in January of 2008. The attack left me intellectually scrambled, disoriented, and physically immobile for some time.

My father’s counsel, coinciding with those of my dear friends and the great C.S. Lewis, was that God had used pain in my body as a megaphone and encouragement to slow down in life. Since I did not listen to those warnings, God had, in some respects, forced this rest upon me. During those weeks of immobility, I came to see my life and mind as analogous to fields for planting. Like an incompetent farmer, I had over planted the field and left it undernourished. Rather than rotating my crops and giving regions of my mind and life opportunity to rest, I developed those overly-busy habits of life so common amongst evangelical Christians. O, sure, I pretended that those few minutes driving hither and yon with music playing were sufficient moments of reflection, but they were nothing more than a continuation of that stream of distraction that had come to define my life.

Attention acts as a plow to loosen the soil of the mind and prepare it to receive the seed that is planted there. Split-attention and hyper-productivity, my dominant habits of life, would be akin to a farmer who skips his plow along the surface of the soil and then throws his seed as quickly as possible: not an effective farming method and certainly not effective for developing a reflective lifestyle. Effective intellectual farming is a more patient process requiring attention so that when the seed is planted, whatever that seed might be, then contemplation can water and nourish the seed.

I believe that the development of a contemplative life is a Christian obligation and I suspect that it will take the rest of my life to unwind the cords of busyness and distraction that so entangle me. The body tremors, sudden onset of fatigue, and idiopathic Narcolepsy that developed in the year following that migraine attack might very well have biological causes, but I am certain of one thing: a split-attention lifestyle combined with hyper-productivity have undermined my intellectual, physical, and spiritual clarity. I am not alone in this, I am sure.

Maggie Jackson’s questions are poignantly relevant and her comment that “we are becoming a nation of the untethered” is spot on. Like water spiders, we skim on the surface of life, unable to taste deeply, incapable of substantial self-reflection, and absolutely satisfied with surface observations. We have either forgotten or ignored the fact that wisdom does not sink her roots into the soil of distraction.

If we want wisdom, which is the first goal of every Christian reader, then we must be people of attention. The Latin mother of our word “attention” is the word attendere: literally to stretch toward. Being so well trained for a lifestyle of distraction, we have difficulty stretching our minds toward anything for any significant length of time and this inability has social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual consequences.

The current intellectual skill set amongst many of the next generation is more akin to skimming, to data selection, than to anything like rumination. One can hardly blame them for this tendency since we have built the world that has raised them and gave them suck, but it seems altogether strange that so few are willing to question the rudimentary shape of modern society itself. The social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual consequences should come as no surprise.

We are so wired for sound, so primed to pursue the latest novelty, that we gutted our modern lives of any opportunity to ruminate quietly, to practice attentiveness. Not only have we removed such possibility, but we have actively filled the spaces that were left from the removal with objects or activities that force either multi-tasking or abandoned intellectual myopia. The explosion of technological capabilities that have aided in this elimination of rumination have perhaps intoxicated our humanistic longings so much so that while we know that we can, nobody is asking whether we should.

We have all assumed that more data at our fingertips is a good thing without counting the cost of such an unending stream of information. The written word today is far less “fraught with meaning and deeply embedded in our psyches, than the transparent carryall of burgeoning info-bits” (ibid). These info-bits and lightning access to any given piece of data has given us the illusion of knowledge, but this is not actual knowledge.

Actual knowledge is acquired only by intellectual chewing, rumination or contemplation, by stretching one’s mind toward a given thing. Contemplation is especially necessary for the act of reading because it allows for the reader to ingest the text rather than skim along its surface.
Practiced contemplation, therefore, bridges the gap between the higher things found in reading and our own inadequacy and fickleness. Attention and contemplation are necessary tools for the Christian who desires to remain a cognizant and reflective observer of all God is teaching whether in nature or in literature.

“Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.” -Alasdair MacIntyre

A peer of mine, bemoaning the inept vacuum we were unfortunate enough to share, once called it, “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Having both read Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, we shared a good chuckle over that; a moment of shared community that was elevated above simple complaining by the nature of the comment. What a wonderful example of a Christian with a mouth full of books who sees every minute detail of life colored by a life of stories. With one simple comment, my colleague enriched the event of a broken vacuum with all the energy, philosophical angst, and theological meaning inherent within that moment in “Macbeth”.

A person able to speak literature into a moment of shared frustration over a broken vacuum cleaner is a person able to speak literature into moments of much greater import. Cases of law and jurisprudence, the fields of medicine and education, the spheres of government, the church, and the family all have their myriad moments that are best explained, informed, and colored by something from literature. The ability to make such an apropos comment comes at the end of a great deal of reading: it is the fruit of a lifetime of good reading habits.

These good habits are formed by readers who love stories enough to willingly be informed by those stories-readers who do not impose themselves upon the story but approach stories as events, as things that happen to them.

As Eli Wiesel once wrote, “story is something that happens to you as much as a car wreck or a job promotion or falling in love” (The Gates of the Forest). The event of reading a particular book can and should be so dramatic that it will propel us toward personal appropriation. For a Christian, this appropriation means that a story either draws us closer to Christ or away from him, just as any other activity either draws us closer to or farther away from Him. As a result, Christians readers keep certain principles in mind.

First, reading, like any other activity, ought to comply with the great biblical mandate to love God and to love our neighbor.

Christ summed up the law and the prophets with this command and our obedience to Him includes our reading. In many respects, our reading helps us to love God and to love our neighbor better. Stories, while not finally redemptive in and of themselves, can pull us toward God and toward the saving blood of Christ. The Christian tradition believes that only Christ’s redeeming blood saves from spiritual and physical death and only the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit transforms our actions into God-honoring actions, but literature serves as a helpful vehicle to lead us into a richer understanding of the world around us and a richer understanding of how God works within that world.

Second, reading leads us into a deeper understanding of self and of God.

John Calvin once wrote that “nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves” (Institutes of the Christian Religion) and Socrates believed that the key to living was to “know thyself.” While Greek philosophy and Christianity agree in principle that one must know oneself, they differ in two key respects. The Greeks believed that the knowledge of self was the final good, but Christians cannot agree with this. The Greeks also concluded with the humanists that we have the potential within ourselves to be godlike and dazzling as the stars. Christianity, on the other hand, believes that we are broken, lost, and self-defeated-that we clamor for noise and kick against all restraint so that we might, as Pascal aptly put, “lick the earth.”

The Scriptures and much of Western literature is rife with the truth, whether explicit or implicit, that outside of Christ, there is only death all of the time. Augustine elaborated as well on this theme of the Apostle Paul that all deeds, even apparently virtuous deeds, are motivated by a puffed up pride and are, therefore, still vices. “According to this view,” writes Caroline Simon, “the humility that arises from knowing who God is and who we are is the beginning of wisdom and the beginning of virtue” (The Disciplined Heart). Christian reading must, essentially, better inform our knowledge of man and our knowledge of God.

Third, and very simply, the act of reading should make us more compassionate, not less compassionate. I hope that needs no explanation.

What’s the point? Well, quite simply, just keep reading. It does a person good.

We have built a worldwide metropolis of glitz and clamor and so we are complicit in her faults. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we have built a monster and our monster has stolen both silence and quiet from us.

Silence, until the early 1900’s, was a fundamental condition for our daily contentment. James Houston defines this attentive silence as “the removal from agitation, bustle, and speed to see things in stillness. It is where we silence our passions and recede from our tensions” (“A Guide to Devotional Reading”, The Mind on Fire). Our world is anything but silent and our entire frame of reference springs not from cogitation and contemplation but from various sources of unbridled stimulus: music, movies, email, text messaging, television, computers, and billboards.

Moreover, our shared experience finds its source in television. Rarely do books enrich our shared experience and so we no longer share the same qualitative silence. Our primary shared experience is “the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy” as Neil Postman calls it. We pay less attention to reality and more attention to the secondary and virtual. To put it bluntly…

Our reality is no longer the here and now.

Instead, reality is shaped by the pseudo-connectivity of a flat world where nearly every interaction, both interpersonal and cognitive, is brief and, therefore, often shallow. Christians are not immune to this mess. Again, James Houston writes, “Christians are more concerned about the promotion of our faith than its private practice. Busyness is more significant than godliness. We are afraid to listen to God because we are more concerned about what other people think. The herd mentality and the tyranny of consensus-what Aldous Huxley once called ‘herd intoxication’-makes us afraid of solitude, of facing God alone…”.

Depth and fullness of relationship and thought are recoverable when we learn to carry an attitude of silence with us, but this silence is only attainable after we overcome a roadblock born from living in a chatty society. Silence gives us a feeling of gaping emptiness, not richness and fullness, and we feel the tremendous urgeto fill the void with something busy and rhythmic. Our world, as it currently exists, is antithetical to silence, but silence is the proper origin of words and the only proper context by which to evaluate and contemplate words. Since we have no silence, our words lack meaning and purpose. Even words, whose beginnings were found in the logos, are so proliferated and diffused that they have grown nearly meaningless.

Henri Nouwen continues, “A word that bears fruit is a word that emerges from the silence and returns to it. It is a word that reminds us of the silence from which it comes and leads us back to that silence. A word that is not rooted in silence is a weak, powerless word that sounds like a clashing cymbal and a booming gong. All this is true only when the silence from which the word comes forth is not emptiness and absence, but fullness and presence, not the human silence of embarrassment, shame, or guilt, but the divine silence in which love rests secure.”

Christians are called to respect words in a world that whores them.

To that end, we would do well to foster an interior silence and carry it with us. Only when we carry silence with us-not to rudely ignore others, but as the source of our conversation-only then will we more successfully discard our inward tendency toward anxiety and distraction as we rest in Christ. Jesus Christ, the great blueprint of holiness, was impactful in part because he preserved his solitude. He retreated from the crowds so that He might return to them more recollected, more devoted, more filled by silence and, therefore, more effective for ministry. He spoke out of silence and so people listened.

Jesus touched the throngs with what Sertillanges calls a “soul of silence”.

This purity of silence can be practiced even amongst the busyness of modern Americana, but the same things that destroy silence are those that easily erode the home of silence: the soul.
Richard Foster, in his book Celebration of Discipline reinforces this prioritization of silence in the Christian’s life: “If we are constantly being swept off our feet with frantic activity, we will be unable to be attentive at the moment of inward silence. A mind that is harassed and fragmented by external affairs is hardly prepared for meditation. The church Fathers often spoke of Otium Sanctum: ‘holy leisure.’ It refers to a sense of balance in the life, an ability to be at peace through the activities of the day, an ability to rest and take time to enjoy beauty, an ability to pace ourselves.”

This Otium Sanctum is a necessary characteristic of a mature Christian (a title worth pursuing, even though we will forever be chasing it…even in eternity) because if he is to live attentively, he must carry with him a spirit of silence that keeps at arms length the barking world.