This is Chassidy Menard. I was first introduced to Simone Weil House in 2022 through their Bible Year and to Simone Weil while teaching at a classical catholic school in Lafayette, LA.
Attention has been on my mind and heart since 2019 after listening to an Ezra Klein podcast. During the podcast, he raised concern about attention as the central question of our age. What stuck out to me more than the alarming details about how Silicon Valley wants to hijack people’s mental processes to hook them on products was Ezra’s reflection that life is the sum total of what we pay attention to.
That I find that reflection frightening is why I’m joining this experiment. I hope, over the course of the experiment, to develop my faculty for deep attention and to learn to become more attentive to He who is always and already attentive to me.
Thanks, Chassidy. I find that a frightening idea, too! We’ll return to this in week 4 I think, but it reminds me of Weil’s writing about attention’s creative capacity. We make and remake the world by means of our attention – it’s interesting to think about that in the sense of making my life, rather than in its more external sense of shaping the world out there.
Sorry for the late response, everyone. I am Celeste Espinoza. . I know some of you in this group through St. Irene’s in Portland, Oregon, but I am currently based in Los Angeles, California. My work involves response and recovery for the recent January 2025 wildfires in LA county, so needless to say I’m here to center myself in not only Lent but also whatever my little bit of work becomes.
I struggle with attentiveness in general and often find myself on side quests. In the span of writing this introduction:
– I’ve gone back to check on something in Slack
– checked Google Voice for a message back for survivor engagement
– pushed myself to say a prayer for internally getting irritated at my cousin
– and then come back.
I’m finding myself in a cycle of avoidance in Los Angeles, in situations where my usual stand-bys of popping into a mass or for reconciliation are either unavailable or require extensive planning. In this last month, I’ve realized that while I may pray often, I rely on other things to keep me centered rather than a deep attentiveness to how my faith and G-d move through the fabric of my life. It’s been troubling me even before I signed up for this experiment.
So, I guess I’m here to begin resisting the things that fade and moving forward on the things that bring me closer to where I want to be. I’m looking forward to being a part of this community and seeing where this experiment takes us collectively.
Thanks, Celeste. We miss you here in Portland. I find myself often doing the same sorts of things, especially with writing, whenever I encounter the smallest bit of resistance. Even though I recognize how much better I feel overall when I don’t make the “side quests”!
Hello, my name is Helia and I have been a community member at Simone Weil House since January 2025. I first encountered Weil in a class I took freshman year about transcendence. We read Gravity and Grace and selections from Waiting for God, including the school studies essay for a week on the stakes involved in cultivating humanity amidst crisis. Her image of thought suspended, empty, waiting without seeking, as the substance of prayer made a profound impression on me, and my senior thesis explored her reception by the philosopher and novelist Susan Taubes in the unpublished dissertation “The Absent God.”
The question of attention feels especially significant in our accelerating society, over which clocks and clicks rule, and in which it can feel impossible to attend, to live our time as fully as we should. Maybe all ages have been afflicted with expectations of civilizational catastrophe, but ours is also the age of fast food, fast fashion, fast cars, mass-produced and standardized for mass-produced and standardized lives. The proliferation of online content and privileging of sensationalism over substance present new opportunities to waste time. “We” are not even obviously the subjects of this wasting; it is the unregulated operation of the attention economy at work. So, I’m hoping this experiment in attention will help deepen my spiritual life, regulate my experience of time, and perhaps also inform how I think about the ways in which we frame inattention—as an inevitability, a psychological disorder, a social condition—and what naturalizing or pathologizing it might mean for a broader social critique.
A friend of mine who writes on attention calls the sort of economy you’re describing as one fueled by “attention fracking.” I appreciate the way that image draws our attention to the continuity of our experience of attention with the other aspects of the “civilizational catastrophe” you describe. And at the same time, as you alluded to, there’s also the sense in which this is the fundamental, timeless human problem: as one professor writes in a reflection on Augustine’s meditations on time I hope we’ll read parts of together, our very sense of time itself is infected with the “hubris” of trying to extend ourselves into an imaginary past and future – resisting the awareness of our ephemerality that comes with true attention. Oh, the lengths we’ll go to avoid that!
Hello! I learned about Simone Weil from the artist Mako Fujimura, at one of the Glen Workshops hosted by Image Magazine. I became immediately both fascinated and horrified by her, and found her personally both inspiring and challenging. I’m a writer and artist, and went on to write a dissertation on Weil’s account of attention, especially attention to suffering, and the way the work of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz can help us learn such attention.
Now I live in Lake Oswego (long story; if anyone on here is not from around Portland, it’s the rich white suburb, which is saying something, since this is Portland) and am a mom moonlighting as an artist and writer. I have some experience with a couple of different forms of meditation but have not managed to sustain one practice over a long period of time, partly because I’ve never found ongoing community around meditation.
I’ve also found motherhood to be incredibly challenging on just about every possible level. Most relevant here, maybe, is the fact that having young children makes me simultaneously acutely aware of how high the stakes are in being fully present; and it seems to make it vastly more difficult for me to be fully present. This creates a tension that can sometimes feel overwhelming.
But Weil would call it a perfect setup; there is no better place to practice attention than my own failures. So here goes.
It’s good to finally have a chance to connect, Stephanie! (I just looked back on our email thread from 2020… I’m so sorry I dropped off on that!)
Thanks for the prompting to look up Käthe Kollwitz’s work. I hope we have a chance to hear more of your reflections about her – especially in our later weeks on attention and suffering.
Also… thank you for linking to your own work! I poked around a little, and I especially loved this graphic essay of yours. Seems like you’re in the right place 🙂
Thank you, all, for your open-hearted and -minded reflections. I am grateful to journey with you.
@David, I, too, am going to especially consider “where attention meets emotional resistance” this Lent.
@Derek, I really appreciate your comment about what is going through and on our hearts. May God – pure love – be our filter and our yoke.
@Mary, your reflection on prayer, attention, and your friend’s sought-after miracle is beautiful. Thank you.
I am committing to 5min nightly reflections this Lent on personal/moral ‘liabilities’ and ‘assets’.
From Mary, Day 2. For yesterday’s Meditation Practice I chose the breathing meditation because I have had some experience with the Jesus prayer. Last year I read The Way of a Pilgrim, where I learned to use the Jesus prayer throughout the day, not as a sustained meditation, but to break up random thoughts or distracting internal commentary, sort of what Emma in her post called a “second track”. The few times in the past when I had tried the breathing meditation, I encountered problems; one was that thinking about breathing made me take control of each breath, and soon I would feel “out of breath”, and would need to recover by taking a deep breath, so I could never relax and I soon gave up. Other times I relaxed so much that I just dozed off. Yesterday I set a timer and started the exercise, struggling with thoughts from my “inner resource manager”, but I was interrupted only 6-minutes-in, and had to stop. I tried again, and was interrupted again. The third time I got through the whole 15 minutes, but I took a peek at my timer when there was about 2 minutes left. I shall try again tonight, hoping to experience less need for “imaginative supplementation”.
Hi everyone and thank you for your reflections. My name is Madeleine and I’ve been a community member since last May.
When considering why I am participating in this experiment, I am reminded of the line from the Roman midday prayer — “Lord, may we live our lives in quiet joy and with the help of the Virgin Mary’s prayers, safely reach your kingdom.”
I love that image, that pursuit — of living quietly and under the protection of Mary one’s whole life.
Regrettably, these past couple of years (post undergrad) have not felt so quiet for me, largely because discernment has felt so loud and dramatic and equal parts certain and uncertain in ways that it really didn’t have to be, but couldn’t have been know by me as not having to have been with the knowledge that I had. And, of course, some of the problem was the loud interior dispositions that I cultivated and possessed. Alas …
These past couple years especially, my attempts to cultivate attention (which I think of in terms of “living more quietly interiorly”) have taken the form of reassessing my relationship with technology and going to Adoration when I can. I look forward to the ways this experiment might continue to help me in the hope for life marked more by this “quiet joy.”
Hello, everyone!
My name is Matthew, and I’m very thankful for the opportunity to join this experiment. I first encountered Simone Weil in the book Waiting for God, which my mother gave me about 30 years ago (when I was 20). The book didn’t take for me at first because I suppose I was inattentive in the extreme at the time, but I have since come back to different parts of the book many times, even occasionally assigning “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” to my students. (I teach writing and liberal studies at Notre Dame.) My problems with attention still run deep, but I’m hopeful that this time (this Lent and this experiment) will help me begin to understand their source and contours a little better.
It’s been a great joy to know Bert for many years, first meeting him not long after my family and I arrived in South Bend, Indiana. We met at St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker (in 2013, I think, during a community production of Les Miserables!). He was a key player (both at the Worker and in the production), and I and my family were sort of in orbit around the Worker. We’re very glad now to be somewhere in the orbit of Simone Weil House as well, especially after becoming friends with Emma along the way!
Peace be with you all.
