Attention and Distraction
“St. Peter — always the most zealous of the disciples — then made an extremely bold reply: “Lord, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Thee on the water” (Matt. 14:28). And Christ — always so patient and so condescending with us sinners — answered: “Come” (Matt. 14:29). And St. Peter too began to walk on the water, even amidst all the tumult of those stormy waves. But then St. Peter made a terrible mistake: he took his eyes off Christ. He began to look around. He began to look at the roaring winds and the crashing waves. He began to think of the terrible danger surrounding him on all sides. He began to realize about the utter impossibility of what he was doing. And as he did so, he began to sink into the depths of the sea. My brothers and sisters, each one of us ought to take this Gospel story closely to heart! It reveals to us a terrible but extremely important truth: that something so seemingly insignificant as our attention can be the difference between finding salvation from even the most terrible dangers one the one hand, and perishing totally on the other. As long as St. Peter fixed his attention on Christ, he was able to do the impossible. But as soon as his attention became distracted from Christ, he nearly lost his very life itself.” (Hieromonk Gabriel)
“The man of many concerns can never be meek and peaceful, because the necessary demands of his affairs, in which he wears himself out, compel him to be involuntarily and unwillingly disturbed, and completely disperse his calm and stillness, but without distractions the devil has no means of entering the soul….We cannot be open to that Word of God unless we attune ourselves thereto with regularity, with faithfulness and with humility….The purpose of spiritual reading is to keep the intellect from distraction and restlessness, for this is the first step towards salvation.” (St. Isaac the Syrian, Fr. James C. Meena, St. Peter of Damaskos)
“Face-to-face conversations between people rarely last more than a few minutes without being interrupted by the ring of one of their mobile phones. The call is almost never left to ring out leaving the caller to ring later. Instead, it is given priority over the person to whom one is speaking. The flow of the conversation is interrupted, breaking it down into loosely connected fragments…this may seem relatively benign but it goes against the principle that the most important person in the world at any given moment is the person directly in front of you. ” (Jean-Claude Larchet, Sacramental Living Ministries)
“Clear mindedness is connected to our prayer life, to our relationship to the Holy Trinity, and with our willingness to love others rather than to engage in self-centered love. This clear mindedness is the slowing down of the mind when it runs amok in fear, distress, plotting, anxiety or nervous uncertainty. Spiritual writers use various imagery about our thoughts – they are like a swarm of buzzing flies or a tree full of screaming monkeys, lots of motion and distraction but little focus. The spiritual life is our effort to gain control of our emotions, passions and thoughts so that we might single-mindedly love God and our neighbor.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“Our time is primarily one of distracted lives, and understandably so. For, as we have said, the self-assertive human pride that prevails today sets as its aim not the cleansing of the heart, but the accumulation of a maximum of benefit and profit for the self, all of whose desires are considered legitimate and deserving to be immediately satisfied.” (Archbishop
Averky Taushev)
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