Episode Transcript  

One

St. Bernard and the Farmer

There’s an old story about St. Bernard of Clairvaux. It seems that one day St. Bernard was traveling on his horse to a retreat where he had to preach, and as he rode, he spent the time praying. A farmer, working his fields, saw St. Bernard and scoffed, “Must be nice, having nothing to do but pray all day.” St. Bernard responded, “Well, if you think prayer is so easy, I’ll make you a deal. If you can say one Our Father right now, and not think of anything but God, I’ll give you this horse I’m riding on.” The farmer eagerly accepted, and went off to pray his one Our Father. But in the middle of the Our Father, he suddenly thought, “I wonder if the saddle is included in the deal?” And since he was an honest man, he admitted that he hadn’t been able to do it.

So he didn’t get the horse, but he did learn that prayer isn’t as easy as it looks. That it requires discipline of the mind and practice maintaining attention.

So are we disciplining our minds? Are we practicing paying attention to God?

Two

Attending to God

Prayer just means trying to focus our minds and hearts on God. And it’s really hard to focus our minds and hearts on God. That’s actually why most people don’t pray. They say they don’t pray because they don’t have the time, but actually, they don’t pray because trying to focus on anything, and especially on divine things, is really difficult. It’s a struggle. It takes a lot of practice, and until you get good at it, it’s actually mentally kind of painful. But it’s the only way to unite with God. Because the way the soul unites itself to anything is by focusing on it, attending to it. Which is why attentive prayer is the prerequisite to holiness.

Three

Attention as the Glue of the Soul

Attention, focus, concentration - this is the only thing that can unite the soul to something else. If you want to be united to another person, you have to learn how to pay attention to them and what they’re saying. If you want a piece of knowledge to stick in your head, you have to focus on it a long time until it’s memorized.

So really, focus is like the superglue of the soul. Have you ever tried to superglue two things together? You know how it works: right after you apply the glue, you have to hold the two things together, with the glue in-between, for like a minute or two. Then those two items will be bonded. But let’s say you put some superglue on something, and then you hold that thing to another thing for ten seconds, and then to something else for ten seconds, and then to something else for ten seconds. That glue is going to lose its power to stick. It’s going to harden on the first object, but it won’t be able to bond that initial object to anything else. And that’s true of the mind as well. If you can’t focus your attention on something for an extended time, then your soul can’t be bonded to anything. Including God. Which is scary. Because a lot of us are destroying our attention spans every day.

Four

Destroying the Attention Span

Go to any public place where people are sitting around: a doctor’s office, an airport, a subway, and you will see people using their phones to systematically destroy their attention spans. They look at one ten-second video of a girl dancing, and then another fifteen-second video of a time-lapse of a cake baking, then they take a few seconds to respond to a text, and then they read a political tweet, and then another eight-second piece of advice on a new diet trick, and then an eleven-second video of something cute by a pet or a child. And they do it for hours at a time!

They take their mental attention, this God-given glue that can unite their souls to the greatest of created goods, and ultimately to the Infinite Lord Himself, and they direct it at so many different objects so quickly that nothing meaningful ever unites to their minds, their souls, or their hearts. Just like a random thing with a hardened blob of glue on it, they become unjoined, and unjoinable, isolated and incapable of communion with truth or goodness or beauty, incapable of communion with God or neighbor.

But the good news is, the glue hasn’t hardened completely yet. There’s still time to bond our souls to something.

What will it be?

Five

Resolution on How We Spend Our Time

Superglue needs time to congeal, and our attention needs time to bond us to what is good, and ultimately to God. Thank the Lord; He has given us more time. But the time is running out, because the glue is hardening. We can use that time to become like St. Bernard, capable of focus and delight in the goodness of God in prayer. Or we can use that time to become like the farmer, and like so many scatterbrains all around us, incapable of concentration on what is actually worthwhile.

What should our resolution be? I suggest this: Put your phone away and go to the silence of nature, or the silence of an adoration chapel, or just the place of prayer in your home. Go there, and practice prayer. Practice concentrating on God for an extended period. Learn to unite your soul to God through sustained attention, and let the adhesive of prayer bind you to Him forever.

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