What Are You Paying Attention To?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Frank Laubach and his remarkable experiment in learning to turn his attention toward God, minute by minute. Laubach called it the “Game with Minutes.” His goal was not to withdraw from ordinary life but to discover whether ordinary life itself could be lived in continual awareness of God.

Recently I came across an article about a philosopher I had not thought much about since my school days: Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was a seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher whose ideas about God are certainly not the same as Christian faith. But one of his observations caught my attention.

Spinoza believed that much of our unhappiness comes from simply reacting to life.

Someone says something that hurts us, and we become angry. Something doesn’t go according to plan, and we become frustrated. We read something online, and suddenly we are irritated with someone we have never met. Before we know it, an event that lasted thirty seconds has occupied our thoughts for the next three hours.

Spinoza believed that freedom begins when we become aware of what is happening within us rather than simply being carried along by it. Instead of immediately judging, blaming, or reacting, we learn to notice. We become curious about our anger, our fear, our resentment, our desires. Understanding what is happening gives us some freedom from being controlled by it.

That made me think about the Christian contemplative tradition.

Christian teachers have been saying something similar for centuries—but with an important difference. Christianity does not simply ask us to become more aware of our thoughts.

It asks us to become more aware of God.

One of my favorite examples is a seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother whom we know simply as Brother Lawrence.

His name was Nicholas Herman. He had been a soldier and later worked as a servant before entering a Carmelite monastery in Paris, where he took the religious name Lawrence of the Resurrection. He was not a famous theologian. He did not become a bishop or priest. Much of his monastery life was spent working in the kitchen and later repairing sandals.

Yet people began seeking him out because they sensed something unusual about him.

Brother Lawrence had learned to live with an almost continual awareness of God’s presence.

After his death, some of his conversations and letters were collected into the little book we know as The Practice of the Presence of God. It has become one of the classics of Christian spirituality.

What fascinates me about Brother Lawrence is that he did not discover God by escaping ordinary life. He discovered God in ordinary life.

He found that washing dishes could become prayer.

Preparing a meal could become prayer.

Walking from one place to another could become prayer.

Talking with another person could become prayer.

The issue was not what he was doing.

The issue was where he directed his attention while he was doing it.

That connects Brother Lawrence with Frank Laubach. Centuries later, Laubach experimented with the same question: Can I remember God this minute? What about the next minute?

Both discovered that attention can become a spiritual discipline.

And perhaps that is something we desperately need.

We live in an economy built around capturing our attention. Our phones want it. Advertisers want it. News programs want it. Social media wants it. Political arguments want it. Almost everything around us is competing for a few more minutes of our consciousness.

Brother Lawrence asks a wonderfully simple question:

What if we gave some of that attention to God?

Not only Sunday morning.

Not only during our morning prayers.

Not only when something has gone terribly wrong and we suddenly remember that prayer might be helpful.

What if, throughout an ordinary Tuesday, we simply remembered:

God is here.

While driving to work: God is here.

While washing dishes: God is here.

While sitting in a doctor’s waiting room: God is here.

While talking with someone we love: God is here.

And perhaps most importantly, when someone irritates us: God is here too.

That last one may be where Spinoza, Brother Lawrence, and Laubach unexpectedly help one another.

Spinoza might tell us: Don’t simply react. Pay attention to what is happening within you.

Brother Lawrence might add: Now become aware of the presence of God.

And Laubach might say: Then try it again next minute.

For the Christian, however, there is something more. We are not merely training ourselves to become calmer or more self-aware. We are cultivating a relationship.

The God whose presence we practice is the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

That means prayer does not always require many words. Sometimes prayer may simply be the turning of our attention toward Christ:

You are here.

I am here.

What are we doing together in this moment?

I increasingly believe that one of the great spiritual questions is not simply, “What do you believe?”

It is also:

“What are you paying attention to?”

Because whatever continually receives our attention eventually begins shaping our hearts.

Brother Lawrence discovered that even a monastery kitchen could become holy ground when he learned to recognize the One who was already there.

Maybe our kitchens can too.