Today’s daily exercise and excerpts from the readings really came at such a pivotal moment for me today to reflect on. Especially when it came to the mention of being motionless in our attention. When we truly are motionless and aren’t able to focus on a specific thing, we wander. Our minds, our imagination runs a foul, and we can quickly become stuck in a perpetual cycle of what ifs and if I just did that, etc. And this does become exhausting. Your energy changes, your body language morphs, and you focus your efforts towards this new reality that you’ve created. And I was cofnrotned with that today and over the weekend. But I made a concerted effort to actively focus my attention on something useful. My attention did not become motionless. My attention became action. With that action, I felt renewed and strengthened. 

Attention and Will

Question 1: Have you experienced yourself “tightening up” your muscles in your attempts to attend in meditation, prayer, or to your neighbor?

Yes, I found myself  getting locked into a somewhat rigid posture of (pseudo)-attention while listening to someone speak; then I had to turn my gaze to look out the window to relieve the tension; then, catching myself, I turned back to look at my neighbor with a “muscular action” to impose my will on my wandering eyes.

The same pattern is exhibited when I try to meditate; the little jarring thoughts or inner commentary pull my mind away from the breath I am willfully trying to follow.

Question 2: How might that be related to pride?

The self-satisfied feeling that arose when I made an effort to “tighten my muscles” and resume listening or breathing was a reward for giving some of my precious time to attending to another person, or to gazing into the void. As Simone Weil says, “There is a lack of grace” in the proud person.

Question 3: How might you transform this pride into supplication?

As Weil says, the “inner purity, or inspiration, or truth of thought” necessary for true attention are not the result of one’s will; rather, “we can only beg for them. To beg for them is to believe we have a Father in heaven”.

Temptation, Attention and Will

Assignment: Describe our response to Simone Weil’s description of temptation as either an intimidating challenge to our will power or an invitation to attention.

Weil says that we have to try to cure our faults by attention, and not by our will. When our temptation (the bogeymen in our heads) consists of sarcastic or critical remarks that are dying to break out when we are in the company of a certain neighbor, our will can soon get exhausted, and capitulate. The insulted person becomes either embarrassed or angry, and responds in kind. Weil asks how can we escape from inevitability of this kind? She answers that “real good can only come from outside ourselves, never from our own effort.” The way we achieve true attention to the other person is to “make a quietness within ourselves, … silence all desires and opinions… [and] bind our whole soul to think ‘Thy will be done’” That is when the temptation becomes exhausted, and we acquire the energy to forego the critical remarks.

—————————————————————————————————————–

This principle can also be seen in Luke 18:9, The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, as explained by Archbishop Anthony Bloom in his book, Beginning to Pray: The tax collector dares to ask for mercy because

Is this “something” that Fr. Bloom described not the same as what Weil called “necessity”, the act of mercy that comes from true attention, not from the will of the giver, but from the will of God?

An interesting point in this week’s readings was the idea that we are always in danger of giving base inclinations a noble object; we desire to be right, to be in control, etc. so we convince ourselves that we are serving God in proving ourselves right, in gaining control.

My personal take-away from the experiment to date is that my meditations are not as useful as they might be because they are too much of a contrast with the rest of my life. They can become just one more thing to “check off” in a busy and chaotic day: OK, done meditating, on to the next thing! I need to become better at maintaining attention and inner calm throughout the day.