Theological Journal – January 22, 2020 Attention (1)

Early last year I realized that the issue at the heart of our difficulties in being Christian is attention. Attention to God. I hypothesized that such attention was a matter of intention and repetition. Attention-intention-repetition was the process I began to think on and try to work out the details. And I failed, Through wrong focus and/or inability I came up empty with anything beyond the banal.

And then I turned my attention to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age because I believed needed to finish reading it because of its importance. And I was right – just not in the way I expected. Taylor was and is extremely important for me because he helped me recalibrate my focus on the issue of attention I had run into a dead end on. Of course, Taylor’s work is important in a number of other ways too. But it was his contribution to my grasp (or at least a beginning grasp) on the matter of attention that grabbed my interest.


Taylor claims that our contemporary “loss” of experience of God has often been tied to what he calls a “Subtraction” story. That’s the usual way we explain it. Reason became our sole method of discerning and verifying truth. And reason whittled away all ideas that could not pass muster by it. That meant faith, superstitions, taboos, and the like were all dismissed as “truth” and shuffled into the files of opinion, ignorance, or personal preference. Thus non-truth was “subtracted” from real truth and we emerged with a leaner, tougher version based on reason. Thus, we became secular people.

Taylor tells a different story of how this happens. In his version we don’t subtract elements as in the first story but rather numerous other elements are added to our field of vision and imagination that the divine has been crowded or squeezed out of our field of attention. God is not gone nor has reason rendered him unthinkable or unreasonable. Rather he has been pushed so far into the shadows by the numerous other attention grabbers we have been told are important and necessary to watch for that any have deemed him absent or non-existent.


Daniel Simon’s famous gorilla experiment illustrates this phenomenon. He gathered a group of people to watch a basketball video. Groups of white and black-shirted people were walking around passing a basketball between them. Viewers were told to watch the group and count how many times those in white shirts passed the ball between them. The groups started playing. After a few minutes a person wearing a black gorilla suit walked between the players waving its arms and then out the other side of their group. Fifty percent of the viewers of the video did not see the gorilla at all and were incredulous/indignant at being told there was one in it.


We think seeing is believing but the truth seems to be that in large measure we see what we told to look for and other things get screened out of our perception. 90% of us assume we will not miss something obvious happening right in front of us but 50% do in Simon’s experiment. It’s not because the gorilla is not there that many do not see it It’s because they been told to look for something else (the white-shirted players and the number of times they pass the ball to each other). Taylor makes a similar point. Over time we have been told to look for things different and other than God (a central preoccupation of earlier times and cultures). We now believe our world is flat and narrow, nothing but matter and immanent processes to see and look for. And that is what we look for and see. Thus many of us no longer see any signs of God’s presence or transcendence and consider it odd or perverse to claim seeing them.


So the first piece of the puzzle of attention I find in Taylor is that it is distraction not clear-eyed reason that makes attending to God problematic in our time. Though we feel it is the latter because of the story we’ve been told about all this developed, it is, in truth, a matter of recognizing and not giving attention to the additions to an earlier epoch’s “enchantment” with God and gods and other suprahuman powers which have “disenchanted” our world. This disenchantment is very strong and struggling against it is not easy or straightforward. But is a first step to attending to God in our secular age.


I’ll try to develop and refine this a bit more over the next few days.