Advent and Training Our Attention
This Advent, I encourage you to press the reset button by reading poetry.
What would you say is the greatest threat to the vitality of your spiritual life? What would you say is the most important aspect for a flourishing faith?
My answer to both of these questions has to do with attention. I am convinced that one of our gravest contemporary problems – or the perhaps foundation upon which all other problems is built – is a lack of attention. Consequently, attending to our attention is one of the wisest things we can do as Christians to live and love more like Jesus.
How are we to understand attention?
Attention is a bit like concentration. As the French priest and philosopher, A.G. Sertillanges, describes it, attention is the convergence of our focus on a particular point.1 It consists of being here now, where an individual is attending to a particular thing at a particular place and at a particular time.
Attention is a faculty. Like other faculties, its power of engagement can be strengthened through habitual practice. Like our muscles, the more you use them, the stronger they grow, the more they can lift.
Attention is also a finite resource. We cannot pay attention to everything and what we pay attention to matters immensely. Where we train our focus can either pay great dividends or can bankrupt our souls because what we attend to shapes us. As New Testament scholar Gregory Beale has said, “We become what we behold.”2 This is helps explain why when we pay attention to the noise and distraction, we become frenetic, anxious, and angry.
The fact is, we live in the Age of Distraction. Our eyes and ears, indeed our very souls, are pulled this way and that by smartphone notifications, the neverendingnewscycle, and Netflix. Over the years, one of the best practices I’ve found to help me reset and retrain my faculty of attention is by reading poetry during Advent. Let me explain why.
As an Anglicans, my year is formed by the Christian year. As a priest in an Anglican parish, the liturgical or Church calendar gives shape and structure to our individual lives and our life together.
The season of Advent is the start of a new church or liturgical year and, as such, it offers us the opportunity to inventory the past year and look ahead to the next. Advent functions as a kind of annual reset button. As Advent begins each year, we are reminded that Christ came, that Christ will come again, and that Christ comes to us even now by His Holy Spirit. Advent trains our attention. The convergence of our focus on Christ coming in the fullness of time can transform, little by little, how we live and love.
Where does poetry fit in?
The practice poetry dovetails beautifully with this annual rhythm of resetting that is possible every Advent. Reading (or even better: writing!) poetry helps to train and strengthen our faculty of attention. The practice of poetry helps us to be here now. You can’t read poetry while distracted.
This is because poetry rails against the habits of mind cultivated by our Age of Distraction. Poetry is a practice of resistance. It resists skimming. It resists speedreading. It resists mindlessness. It requires us to slow down, to pause, to chew, to think, to focus, to imagine, to contemplate. In these ways, the practice of reading poetry helps us to resist the pull of the newsfeed ripcurrent, the contextless soundbite, and the TikTok video vortex. It is a kind of antidote to The Algorithm that is engineered to not simply keep our attention but to enslave it.
In her book of essays, the late, great American poet Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”3 Poetry trains our faculty of attention. It helps us devote ourselves. This devotion, this attention is transferrable. Learning to pay attention to a poem, helps you learn to pay attention to God in prayer and in the world. Learning to pay attention to God helps you learn to pay attention to your friend who is talking to you (or would if only you would pay attention).
Read along with us
If you’re like me and find yourself in need of some training to strengthen your capacity to say “no” to the many – the noise, the distractions – the so that you can say “yes” to the one thing that is necessary, I invite you join me in reading Waiting on the Word by the Anglican priest and poet, Malcolm Guite. This poetry anthology includes a poem a day for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Each poem is also accompanied by insightful commentary.
For at least the past five Advents, my wife, Susan, and I have made a practice of reading these poems aloud together and discussing them. We invite you to read along with us. This year, Advent begins on Sunday, November 27. That means you have plenty of time to buy the book. Schedule a time each day - maybe in the morning, maybe in the evening - and read the poem aloud. Ideally, it’s best to read with someone and spend some time sharing what you noticed.
If you decide to join us, do please let me know. I’d love to hear about your favorite poems and how reading a poem a day enriches your experience of Advent and strengthens your attention.
A version of this essay appears in The Ascent, the quarterly magazine of Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh, PA.
A.G. Sertillangers, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, 138. What he calls “concentration,” I call “attention.”
Gregory Beale, We Become What We Worship: a Biblical Theology of Idolatry. It’s worth pausing to reflect on the connection between attention and idolatry.
Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays, 8.