Attention and Distraction
“Humanity has never run short of ways to distract itself, but in the media age, distraction has become a way of life.” (Sarah Clarkson)
“Modern people have a hard time setting their hearts and minds on any one thing. Intervening in our lives is an endless number of media and electronic disruptions. Being “single-minded” may be another thing that contemporary society has left in the past. Many studies have noted the shortening attention span of modern people. The ubiquitous flickering screens all around us and which we carry with us, cause our brains to expect change in scenery every minute or so. We live with constant distraction impeding our ability to concentrate. Our electronic devices contribute to us imagining that we can and should multitask all the time – which often is just another way of being constantly distracted.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“Distraction is becoming increasingly more difficult to deal with. There are many different reasons for this, but one of them is how highly we value multitasking. We’re all capable of juggling multiple thoughts and tasks, but for the most part human beings can only give their full attention to one demanding thing at a time. I’ve said many times over the years that the face of evil often comes with a smile, meaning that many of the people or things that are most harmful to us don’t appear that way at first. Distraction is one of those things. So is our propensity to monetize and commoditize everything, even attention. With the rise of digital technology and living in a digital age, we are essentially living in an attention economy. What’s ironic about this is that the people who have learned to monetize attention, whether they’re social media influencers or producers of reality television, are, in their efforts to capture our attention, creating even more means of distraction for everyone else.” (Sacramental Living Ministries)
“One of the greatest enemies of good prayer is distraction, when the human mind, fleeting as a winged horse, doesn’t concentrate on the words of prayer but flitters around from one thought to another. Or it happens that besides the words of prayer, the mind relentlessly pursues some obsessive idea and there’s no escape from it. Or it happens that the words of our prayer barely penetrate into our consciousness, remaining on the periphery of thought and failing to capture the soul; they’re read like a mandatory assignment, and prayer becomes almost mechanical.” (St. Gregory of Shlisselburg)
“Where does this distractedness lead us? Perhaps it is not really all that harmful or dangerous? This may seem so only at first glance. In actuality, it brings an infinite amount of evil into man's life…The man… whose meditation is always upon God drives away the demons from himself and uproots the seed of their wickedness. The heart of the man who oversees his soul at all times is made joyous by revelations. He who gathers within himself the vision of his understanding beholds therein the Radiance of the Father. The man who despises every distraction beholds his Master within his heart.” (Archbishop Averky Taushev, St. Isaac the Syrian)
“St. Peter — always the most zealous of the disciples — then made an extremely bold reply: “Lord, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Thee on the water” (Matt. 14:28). And Christ — always so patient and so condescending with us sinners — answered: “Come” (Matt. 14:29). And St. Peter too began to walk on the water, even amidst all the tumult of those stormy waves. But then St. Peter made a terrible mistake: he took his eyes off Christ. He began to look around. He began to look at the roaring winds and the crashing waves. He began to think of the terrible danger surrounding him on all sides. He began to realize about the utter impossibility of what he was doing. And as he did so, he began to sink into the depths of the sea. My brothers and sisters, each one of us ought to take this Gospel story closely to heart! It reveals to us a terrible but extremely important truth: that something so seemingly insignificant as our attention can be the difference between finding salvation from even the most terrible dangers one the one hand, and perishing totally on the other. As long as St. Peter fixed his attention on Christ, he was able to do the impossible. But as soon as his attention became distracted from Christ, he nearly lost his very life itself.” (Hieromonk Gabriel)
“The man of many concerns can never be meek and peaceful, because the necessary demands of his affairs, in which he wears himself out, compel him to be involuntarily and unwillingly disturbed, and completely disperse his calm and stillness, but without distractions the devil has no means of entering the soul….We cannot be open to that Word of God unless we attune ourselves thereto with regularity, with faithfulness and with humility….The purpose of spiritual reading is to keep the intellect from distraction and restlessness, for this is the first step towards salvation.” (St. Isaac the Syrian, Fr. James C. Meena, St. Peter of Damaskos)
“Face-to-face conversations between people rarely last more than a few minutes without being interrupted by the ring of one of their mobile phones. The call is almost never left to ring out leaving the caller to ring later. Instead, it is given priority over the person to whom one is speaking. The flow of the conversation is interrupted, breaking it down into loosely connected fragments…this may seem relatively benign but it goes against the principle that the most important person in the world at any given moment is the person directly in front of you. ” (Jean-Claude Larchet, Sacramental Living Ministries)
“Clear mindedness is connected to our prayer life, to our relationship to the Holy Trinity, and with our willingness to love others rather than to engage in self-centered love. This clear mindedness is the slowing down of the mind when it runs amok in fear, distress, plotting, anxiety or nervous uncertainty. Spiritual writers use various imagery about our thoughts – they are like a swarm of buzzing flies or a tree full of screaming monkeys, lots of motion and distraction but little focus. The spiritual life is our effort to gain control of our emotions, passions and thoughts so that we might single-mindedly love God and our neighbor.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“Our time is primarily one of distracted lives, and understandably so. For, as we have said, the self-assertive human pride that prevails today sets as its aim not the cleansing of the heart, but the accumulation of a maximum of benefit and profit for the self, all of whose desires are considered legitimate and deserving to be immediately satisfied.” (Archbishop
Averky Taushev)
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