Finding God in a Distracted World
Every single day, an unspoken battle takes place over a resource we rarely think to protect: our attention.
I felt the weight of this recently at our annual regional Quaker gathering. My friend C.Wess Daniels delivered the gathering’s plenary and spoke powerfully about this exact crisis of human focus. (He also wrote about this in his own sermon to Camus Friends Church) We are constantly told that our hyper-connected world is designed to bring us closer together. But beneath the surface, a massive industry is working overtime to pull us apart. They want to lock our gaze onto whatever generates outrage instead of empathy.
This doesn't happen by accident. Wess pointed out that scholars like D. Graham Burnett at Princeton trace this back to an "unholy alliance between psychology and Madison Avenue." Today, that alliance has become an industrial machine. Activists call it "attention fracking" or "human fracking." Think about that imagery. They are pumping a high-pressure, addictive slurry into our faces just to drill a little bit of profitable focus out of us. It is a fifteen-trillion-dollar industry designed to turn our awareness into a commodity.
We are seeing the tragic results of this experiment. In his book The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points to a massive shift that happened between 2010 and 2015. He calls it the "great rewiring of childhood." Almost overnight, face-to-face play and real-world independence vanished. They were replaced by endless scrolling, comparison, and algorithmic pressure. Haidt notes that we trapped our kids in a terrible paradox: we overprotected them in the real world, and left them completely unprotected in the virtual world.
As former Google strategist James Williams puts it: "There is a deep misalignment between the goals we have for ourselves and the goals our technologies have for us."
Friends, as a community of faith, we have to wake up to this. Where we place our awareness is not just a psychological issue. It is a fundamental spiritual challenge. When our attention is thoroughly fracked, our capacity for deep connection collapses. Today, the ancient wisdom of scripture calls us out of this trap. It invites us to see uninterrupted presence not as a luxury, but as a direct act of holy defiance.
Steering human awareness away from what truly matters is one of the oldest tricks of structural power. Empires have always used a standard script to keep people busy, compliant, and numb to the suffering right in front of them.
Wess shared a fascinating bit of history about this. In the 1920s, a psychologist named Herman Francis Brandt created the "Brandt eye test." He used film and light to track exactly how a human eye moves across a page, all to maximize commercial persuasion. By the 1940s, the military was using this data and was funding "vigilance studies" to see how many hours a human could sit perfectly still, staring at a radar screen. Labor was no longer about digging holes or laying bricks; it was about monitoring dials.
When George Fox founded the Quaker movement in seventeenth-century England, he fought the exact same battle. His spiritual journey began with long stretches of solitude, wandering, and deep prayer. Out of that stillness, Fox realized that the dominant culture was actively training people to be superficial. He wrote in his journal about testifying against the "wakes, fairs, may-games, sports, and shows" of his day. Fox saw these as empty spectacles engineered by the empire to distract people from structural corruption and the movement of the Holy Spirit.
To break free from this relentless pressure to optimize our lives, we have to recover the diverse ways God created us to experience reality.
Modern culture wants to capture our immediate, short-term focus—what James Williams calls "Spotlight" attention. We need that localized focus just to get through the day, but relying on it exclusively burns out the soul. The Gospel invites us to widen our gaze.
Wess built on this by outlining four kinds of spiritual light we can use to reclaim our focus:
Starlight: Our capacity to navigate life by our highest goals and values. It helps us remember who we actually want to be.
Daylight: Our shared capacity for reflection and reason. It allows us to define our long-term values and do collective work together.
Earthlight: The grounded experience of awe and wonder. Choosing to slow down, put our feet on the ground, and tune into the physical reality of creation.
The Inward Light: The intentional choice to listen deeply for the eternal truth that exists beyond our immediate self-interest.
In her beautiful manifesto See No Stranger, Valarie Kaur reminds us that "Wonder is our birthright." When we choose to wonder about the world and the people around us, we bypass our evolutionary defense mechanisms. In a world that uses algorithms to make us fear each other, wonder is the first step toward love. It demands that we look at a stranger, or a broken piece of creation, and say: "You are a part of me I do not yet know."
We see this exact tension play out on the road leaving Jericho in the Gospel of Mark.
Jesus is walking with a massive, rushing crowd. A blind beggar named Bartimaeus is sitting by the roadside, shouting for mercy. And what does the crowd do? They sternly tell him to be quiet. They tell him to keep running the script of a busy, efficient procession. They are completely swept up in the momentum of the crowd, the rules of their social roles, and the urge to get to the next destination. Their eyes see the disruption, but their algorithmic programming tells them to silence the man on the margin so the system can keep moving.
This is exactly where we have to practice what Valarie Kaur calls "Deep Listening." She writes that "Deep listening is more than hearing words; it is bearing witness to the human soul." The crowd on the road heard noise, but Jesus bore witness. Deep listening requires us to drop our itinerary, quiet our internal commentary, and suffer with the one who is crying out. It is a flat-out refusal to let the rush of the empire make us deaf to human agony.
The Catholic mystic Simone Weil wrote that "attention taken in its highest degree is the same thing as prayer." When Jesus hears Bartimaeus, he models this perfectly. He completely overrides the crowd's script of efficiency. He commands, "Call him here."
Jesus upends the corporate itinerary to offer absolute, localized presence to a single person's suffering. His focus turns into immediate, concrete solidarity. In that moment, he transforms a chaotic roadside into a living liturgy of care.
How do we cultivate this depth of presence in a world engineered to keep us constantly stimulated? The answer requires a radical willingness to embrace the unremarkable.
There is an incredible spiritual value in learning to become unexcited. The Catholic priest James Alison opens this up beautifully. He writes: "When people tell me that they find mass boring I want to say to them it's supposed to be boring... It's a long-term education in becoming unexcited, since only that will enable us to dwell in a quiet bliss which doesn't abstract from our present or our surroundings or our neighbor but which increases our attention, our presence, and our appreciation for what is around us.”
My friend and neighbor Dana Allen Walsh captured this exact struggle on her blog, The Art of Flourishing. Writing about her time in rural Vermont, she admitted how hard it is for our buzzy, over-activated nervous systems to accept fifteen minutes of unscheduled time without reaching for a digital fix. But she discovered that the sheer lack of cell service, drive-throughs, and next-day delivery created something beautiful. She calls it "joyful inconvenience."
She writes: "The friction turns out to be the point. It slows you down into other people... A hassle keeps turning into a small relationship... The good life I keep striving toward may look less like the frictionless, well-photographed version I’ve been sold, and more like a slightly inconvenient dirt road. A burger worth the drive. A neighbor worth the knock.”
Dana realized that instead of constant, engineered pleasure, what our souls actually need is what her grandmother called "puttering"—allowing one thing to lead loosely into the next, ungoverned by the clock.
Boredom and silence are not voids to be escaped. They are a sacred superpower. Stepping back from the noise is not an escape from reality; it is the ultimate way we check back into it. As the author, and another friend of mine, Doug Gwyn writes: "The wisdom of God revealed through our silent waiting together is the anti-intelligence. It sees what surveillance cannot detect, what torture cannot extract, what big data can never amass.”
When we purposefully turn off the background noise, our capacity for deep observation is restored. Like Jesus on the road, we begin to hear the cries that the rushing world tries to silence. We open up what Jonathan Haidt calls the capacity for "self-transcendence." To experience this, he says, we have to turn away from the things that bind us tightly to our egos, like time on social media.
Stillness is the exact space where empathy is reborn.
Conclusion: Creating Sanctuaries of Presence
If the frantic pace of modern life drains our humanity, coming together in an intentional, unhurried community is what restores it. In a space dedicated to deep listening, the artificial boundaries that divide us—consumer and producer, insider and outsider—begin to fall away. We become fully human to one another because we recognize that the Divine speaks not just through our own thoughts, but through the voices of those we least expect.
Our calling as a progressive, forward-looking church is to build genuine "attention sanctuaries.” Jonathan Haidt reminds us that tech addiction is a classic "collective action problem." No single individual or isolated parent can defeat these multi-trillion-dollar algorithms alone. If a child or an adult steps away by themselves, they are simply left socially isolated. The solution requires community. It requires a living, dynamic village of people to decide together that we will protect our brains, prioritize real-world relationships, protect unstructured play, and keep our sanctuaries sacred.
This week, I challenge you to dare to break the dominant script.
Follow the example of Christ on the road to Jericho. Refuse to let the momentum of a frantic world drown out the human suffering next to you. Give yourself permission to slow down. Sit with the quiet friction of stillness, and look up to see who is standing right in front of you.
Go and listen deeply. Amen.
Silent Reflection Questions
Where is your spotlight of attention being pulled most heavily this week, and how can you intentionally grant it a rest?
Think of a recent moment when you hurried past someone or something. What cultural script (efficiency, fear, comfort) were you following?
What would it look like for you to create a tiny "attention sanctuary" in your daily routine this week?