August 11, 2023

Letters to the Editor

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Despite advances, stay in the right direction, keep prayer at the heart of your life

We are advancing exponentially in science and technology. If we don’t likewise advance in religion and spirituality, we may well become slaves to our inventions and artificial intelligence.

There is a looming spiritual crisis adrift. Smartphones, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and gadgets of all sorts have our attention. Attention is precious.

Nineteenth-century psychologist William James said, “Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

Information propagation has a long technological history—from papyri and codices to the printing press and digital media.

But there is something new, profound and worrisome about the capacity of smartphones and devices to master us.

Never before has so much information been so straightaway available and well-packaged.

With push notifications, you don’t even need to go surfing. The tempest of information assails you freely, carrying you where it will, shaped to your personal search and purchase history. And our devices aren’t neutral platforms for information delivery. They inform, form and shape our thoughts and character and desire.

Attention is the mind’s desire. Our desires determine our priorities. We attend to what we want, what we need, what we find interesting, fascinating, attractive and so on. Consequently, the problem is less about distraction than about desire.

Our declining capacity for attention reveals our ruptured worlds of desire—hyper-temporary, dazzled by light and color, gathered together by restlessness rather than meaning. We have lost our ability to give our attention to the right things, in the right degree, at the right time. We don’t give our attention at all anymore. Our phones and devices take it from us.

The French philosopher, mystic and factory worker Simone Weil once wrote, “The habit of attention is the substance of prayer.” Prayer is attention pointed in the right direction. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

-Kirth N. Roach | Order of Carmelite Discalced Secular, Indianapolis

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