Loving by Attention

How being seen and known in my training as a spiritual director, an essay with a long name, and a podcast about guns helped me see attention as fundamental to loving well.

I remember sitting with my supervisor, Lynn, talking through some of my early spiritual direction sessions.

Lynn is a retired Quaker pastor with a penchant for seeing rightly - she has an earnestness in her gaze that goes unmatched in my experience. She also has a plucky, optimistic bent to her very plain speech, and she carries herself as someone who is acquainted with the heights of love and the depths of sorrow. She’s really real. It was intimidating to be with her and, somehow, totally comfortable.

I was in training at the time, and I don’t know that I had any right to be: I had been allowed to skip the first full year of the training in spiritual direction because of previous experience working with people and had gone straight to practicum. I was out of my depth.

Part of that training program was to bring session dialogues to a trainer to process what happened. The goal was to create space for me, as a director-in-training, to process my shaky moments in the seat. I was confident, though. Overly confident, I suppose. I had to really look to find shaky moments. I think I was oblivious.

I brought a dialogue where I had worked with a directee to help them process a discovery in their faith journey – they were beginning to see that God really loves, and I was able to name with this person that God also really likes – he has intensely high regard for this person.

I felt like a champion. I was basically the kind of doing spiritual direction. Maybe I should have been the teacher!

“Hmmmm,” she started with a sigh.

Her demeanor changed in a way I didn’t expect. She looked intensely at me, and the smile on her face stayed in its same position, but something changed. It was like a pressure drop in the air. It’s just me, I thought, because I know this is a killer session dialogue. I waited with baited breathe for a stark congratulations from this woman I respect so much.

“You really like to open people’s presents for them, don’t you?”

I was shocked and aghast and a little disoriented. I didn’t have words, and it showed. I stumbled a bit. I felt both confronted and, somehow, deeply comforted. There was something consoling in her gaze and her words, even as they cut through the noise to a core problem I had (and still have) with control. She had given sufficiently good attention to my way of being with people for long enough that she was able, somehow, to translate that gaze and those words into something deeply meaningful for my formation into Christ’s likeness.

I learned that day that there is something way more important in spiritual direction than knowledge, something core to the practice that I was overlooking in my exuberance to help others grow.

I had missed the very thing Lynn gave to me: attention.

Attention in Spiritual Direction

I feel like it might be a coming-of-age for a writer to write about Simone Weil. I can’t think of a writer I know personally who hasn’t spent time in her essays and who hasn’t committed serious time to writing about her reflections. Happy birthday to me, I suppose.

Simone Weil was an activist, philosopher, contemplative, and, my some accounts, a mystic. Notably, she had a seriousness to her sense of spirituality that emerged early – by age ten she was committing to fast and send rations to those on the front lines who were going without as an act of willful solidarity.

I remember drawing stick figure wars and just trying to do an ollie on a skateboard when I was ten.

One of her most famous essays, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” was written for a friend of hers – a Dominican priest named Joseph-Marie Perrin – to use with his students. The big idea is that academic work – reading, studying, and memorizing, for instance – is fundamentally the same kind of act as prayer. It’s an intriguing idea, and one I have found largely true. She writes,

...prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.¹

Prayer and attention are necessarily linked. It makes sense, too: what is prayer if it is not directed to God? What does it mean for me to talk to God or listen to him if I am also not paying attention to him? It would be like saying that I am listening to my kids while I sit scrolling on my phone reading stories on The Atlantic (I’ve never done this, ever, of course).

Attention is an act of orientation that requires focus: to give your attention, you must actually change how your mind, heart, and even your body are oriented to focus on what you are attending to. Prayer, too, is like this: it is a concrete act of attention, a reorientation of the self towards God – to receive from and to offer towards – such that I am focusing on God.

In spiritual direction, especially in a one-with-one modality, conversation is prayer. This might sound strange at first, but the practice of spiritual direction assumes, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the whole conversation is one long, shared prayer for the sake of the directee.

The attention is piercing and even a little disorienting. Because the conversation is so focused and the attention given is augmented by silence, there is a heaviness to the attention that feels alien and uncomfortable. It’s a level of nakedness that’s hard to describe – someone giving the gift of unadulterated attention acts like a spotlight on our insecurities and foibles. Yet, even in the discomfort of this experience of being seen, something like a longing emerges. Why?

Because we are being loved.

Attention is Based on Love

There was a season of my life when I was at weddings 5-6 times a year. I married my wife, and it seemed like we were in good company – so many people from our broader community got married, and there was a lot to enjoy about that season: free food, good dancing, memory-making. It was a joy, honestly.

Now, if you spend any time at weddings, you will be able to pick up a sort of “officiant’s playbook”: there are passages from the Bible that often come out at weddings and feel almost as commonplace as the vows themselves. One of those passages has become one of my favorites in the New Testament: 1 Corinthians 13. It goes like this:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:4-7,13 NRSVUE).

I think this passage is important for a number of reasons. It is certainly one of the most poetic and clear articulations of love in Western history. It makes winsome claims about what love is and what it isn’t, which I find personally very helpful: if I can’t pick love out for what it is, I can at least identify what it isn’t like. This passage also connects love with concrete acts – it isn’t just a matter of feeling affection or fluttery feelings for someone or something because love does stuff.

All of that is really important, but here’s something: how does attention factor into all this?

It might sound odd, but I think that 1 Corinthians 13 assumes attention as the mechanism by which love happens. That is to say, all of the positive actions described in the passage are only possible by paying attention to someone else.

Similarly, all the negative actions described in the passage are only possible by failing to pay attention to someone else.

Attention is love.

Or it might be more true to say that giving attention is fundamentally the first and constitutive act by which love comes to bear on someone or something. You might be able to act hatefully towards someone or something when you pay attention to it, but you certainly cannot love someone or something without paying attention to it. It’s impossible.

Simone Weil gets at this really well in the same essay, and she is worth quoting at length here:

Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.²

What’s she saying?

In essence, attention and love are interrelated in the same way that prayer and attention are. This means that love for God in prayer is attention. Now, and this is important, it seems that she is saying that loving God and loving others is fundamentally the same thing; that is, loving God and loving others are the same kind of act – we are capable of loving others and God because we are capable of loving.

This might sound overly philosophical, but it’s really significant: Weil is releasing us from a trap that I know I have fallen into, thinking that I had to do something very strange and darn-near impossible to love God because it was different than loving anything or anyone else. Giving someone the gift of sustained attention – not “warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity” – is nearly impossible and miraculous, and also the same act that we engage in during prayer.

Paying attention is a gift where, we give something away for the good of someone else. We are choosing to let go of our agenda for our day in order to make room for the other person. Paying attention is a radical act of hospitality.

Attention is love. Love is attention.

Giving Unadulterated Attention is Loving Another Person

And this is where the rubber meets the road. If attention is love, and love is at least attention, we need to think about what this means for us. We don’t have to be spiritual directors to give good attention, nor do we have to be superhuman to love our neighbors by giving them our attention.

If I have learned one thing from my work in spiritual direction, it is that spiritual direction concentrates some of the most normal, everyday acts in such a way that it highlights their significance everywhere else. Spiritual direction is an ancient practice in the Church, and it sounds really mystical. I suppose it is, but it isn’t mystical in the sense of a paranormal occurrence or miraculous abnormality. Spiritual direction is mystical because it is a living sacramental theology, a practice that helps us see God in ordinary, everyday things.

Everyday things like attention-giving.

We live in an attention-starved time. If I think only about this writing session (about 45 minutes long at this point), I can feel my attention being taxed. I have checked my email three times, looked outside to watch my kids play, checked my phone, done Google searches, and thought about a thousand other things besides my writing.

One recent survey found that the average American checks their phone roughly 186 times a day (just over 11 times an hour). Just under half of the respondents to this survey experienced anxiety when separated from their phones, and around 29% use their phone while driving, and 40% will look at their phones while on a date with someone.³

The phone, I suppose, is a bit of a straw man, but I think it also serves as a proxy for talking about how our attention is stretched. Insert other things, and you will find similar results: whether the technology is in our palms or our TV screens, our cultural moment in the West forms us to be inattentive or, at least, distracted. You might even say that attention is adulterated – we are cheating on what we need to focus on with what we don’t need to focus on.

Loving another person is like this. We can’t love someone if we are, implicitly, cheating on them with our attention. We actually demonstrate a lack of care when we are distracted and have a disoriented gaze.

Parable of the Good Samaritan by Balthasar van Cortbemde (1647) - http://collectie.kmska.be/, Public Domain.

In a series called “Guns,” author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell lent his unadulterated attention to the problem of gun-related violence. Throughout the series, he told many compelling stories, but in the sixth episode, he changed course. He spent an entire episode unpacking the parable of the Good Samaritan and Christian moral teaching on loving neighbors.

In the parable, found in Luke 10:25-37, a man is beaten, robbed, and left for dead on the side of the road. Two religious and cultural leaders pass by, moving on to their responsibilities and abandoning the man to his fate. A third person, a cultural outsider and racial enemy, stops and takes care of the man.

For Malcolm Gladwell, as well as ethicist James Keenan, this story says something central about sin and love and being human:

“Sin is a failure to bother to care.”⁴

The nature of sin in the parable has little to do with historical accidents of who might have been on the road that day (it’s a made-up story used by Jesus to teach a lesson, remember), and I think you could easily sub out the Jewish religious elites in the story for any other well-respected religious office. Similarly, it matters less that the good person in the parable was a Samaritan (although that was important to Jesus’s audience and early Jewish Christ-followers) than it matters that someone who is ostracized and on the underside of oppressive power structures acted on behalf of their enemy.

What matters is that the one who had likely gone unseen by the majority was the only one who was able to see and give attention. He was able to bother to care, able to stop, and able to prioritize the good of another at great personal cost.

In essence, he was able to love. And love is attention.

1. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, (New York: Routledge, 2021), 105.

2. Ibid., 114.

3. Trevor Wheelwright, “Cell Phone Usage Stats 2026,” Reviews.org (January 1, 2026). Accessed April 26, 2026. https://www.reviews.org/mobile/cell-phone-addiction/.

4. Malcolm Gladwell, “Guns Part 6: ‘Sin Is the Failure to Bother to Care,’” Pushkin Industries, October 5, 2023, https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/guns-part-6-sin-is-the-failure-to-bother-to-care.