Sitting still and paying attention, according to our experts, is a very complex human problem. While tens of thousands of our compatriots have no difficulty paying close, focussed attention (if not sitting still) for over an hour to a rugby game they want to watch, and can recall every detail of it later, I for one am bored rigid in the first five minutes. I think that is because, wildly exciting as it may be, it seems to me not to matter.
And indeed, those who compile our TV programs are assuming at present, I think, that our attention is successfully captured for serious lengths of time only by relentless sport, or by the preparation of food to the accompaniment of much drama and tears, or by TV and pop icons locked in battle with their hormones. One bloke on a food program cooks what he himself has hunted and killed, so that combines two criteria, as it were, if indeed hunting and killing is a sport.
Paying attention is a large subject, I do realise. Our attention span depends on many things. When the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book was published in 1989 it was such an excellent thing it seemed to me, except for what they did with the Psalms. The old 1662 Prayer Book had instructed in the Preface: The Psalter shall be read through once every month... Obviously not everyone paid attention when it was, but some did, and expected it, and it tended to result in a red-blooded church in which, as one Benedictine Abbot pointed out, God was not expected to behave in ways prescribed in the manuals of doctrine. But now in 1989 the Psalms got selected for our tender sensibilities, and abbreviated for our attention span, the language was cleaned up, and they have become in our worship like little approved sound bites as it were. Some Psalms we never hear now because they might upset someone.
Well, when we come to pray as contemplatives, we are taking whatever attention span we might have -- and of course it will differ from day to day, depending on a lot of things -- and we are making it completely available in the present moment, whether it encounters difficulties or not, as it will. I had a lovely teacher in Standard 3, Mrs Stephens -- I think her husband was killed in the war, in that year, because suddenly we felt very sad for her without knowing why -- nobody told us. One day Mrs Stephens said, I would really like it if Ross Miller would pay attention and stop staring dreamily out the window. Well, Mrs Stephens, I have got better at it now. I have learned to sit still for 20 to 30 minutes and pay attention as completely as I know how to the present moment. I hear everything that happens in that time within my auditory range -- but I now know to decide not to start thinking about all that. I am content to be where I am at this moment, and to be still, and to be aware that I am in the presence of God, as is always the case, except that now I am paying attention. I am not expecting emotions or revelations or any such thing, and I would be very surprised to start levitating -- that would wreck my attention.
And that is all. My loving presence here is my very best response to God’s loving presence here, since God is always paying attention to me. And that in the end is the whole of prayer.
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