The next time a waiter takes my order, I’ll ask for an “empty cup of attention”. OK, not really. As if that’s ever on the menu, especially in an attention economy that grows rich off keeping our eyes glued to our screens.
Still, that empty cup captures something I crave, both for my own presence of mind and in my relationships with others: attention. Money may make the world go round but my faith tradition teaches me that true riches are found in our capacity to attend to the world, and everyone and everything in it. You can’t put a price on that.
The image of the empty cup comes from Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove, describing the care and concern a busy doctor shows his grateful patient – “so crystal-clean the great empty cup of attention that he set between them on the table”.
If only we could all gift this to each other: the present of our presence. This apparently empty cup is nonetheless full of stillness, patience, an alert willingness to let a moment breathe between people. Bliss.
But everywhere I look, people are head down, lost in the oblivion of infinite scroll. Me too, on my commute. On the upside, I no longer feel so judgy about poker machine users, with their glazed eyes and vacant expressions. That’s my resting reel-watching face. It turns out flashy lights and bright colours are mesmerising, and I have an insatiable appetite for nonstop memes, yoga poses, animal videos, well-lit cooking videos and other ephemeral content.
As much as I want to blame Silicon Valley for everything, the best I can accuse the tech industry of is building a profit-hungry machine exploiting the very human difficulty of being alone with one’s thoughts. Which is still pretty bad, sure, but let’s be clear: chronic inattention predates the internet.
Here’s the Christian writer CS Lewis from 1952, long before the invention of smartphones:
It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.
Granted, Lewis is talking about the difficulty of letting Jesus take the wheel of one’s life (ie, being Christian). Still, “wild animals” doesn’t just describe our onrushing wants and needs first thing in the morning, but the pull of our feeds. The incessant chatter of life online is a roar once you’ve had an overnight break from it.
Also, if agnostics today are listening for any inner voice, it’s their own. Not Lewis’s “other voice” that belongs to Jesus. But the practice of prayer brings both into conversation, producing mindful peace: attention, by any other name.
St Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century Carmelite nun and the first female doctor of the church, can school us here. She described the human soul as “a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions”.
Prayer, St Teresa believed, led the soul deep within the seven “mansions”, or the various stages of spiritual growth, of this “interior castle” – if, that is, we first had the mental game to get past the “vipers and poisonous creatures” (more wild animals) lurking outside, symbolising wealth, business affairs and other distractions that diluted our focus. Passing through the mansions, St Teresa wrote, led one to the “chiefest mansion where the most secret things pass between God and the soul”.
This probably sounds terribly abstract: prayer as a mystical mind palace. But Teresa’s account of the soul-as-diamond stays with me. This is what you, and your precious attention, are worth. The question is how to save the latter – especially for the non-prayers among us.
Think of prayer as birdwatching, counsels Rowan Williams, theologian and former archbishop of Canterbury. In other words, endlessly frustrating but with momentary flashes of insight. “You sit very still because something is liable to burst into view, and sometimes of course it means a long day sitting in the rain with nothing very much happening,” writes Williams of the parallels between prayer and spotting birds. “But the odd occasions when you do see what TS Eliot called ‘the kingfisher’s wing’ flashing ‘light to light’ make it all worthwhile.”
It sounds as though relaxed attentiveness is the secret. The prayer-as-birdwatcher isn’t entitled to spiritual insight but creates the right presence of mind so they’re primed for it anyway. Attention is a byproduct of that commitment.
Everyone can start small. Putting down the device is a start. Then, the next time you’re outside, see if you can spot a bird soaring up high in the sky, watch it with intent, and remember: that’s the only wild animal we want taking our spirits along for the ride.
Justine Toh is senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity
