Tag: distraction

Doing one thing at the same time

You might remember a song from the ’90s called “Lucky Night,” by Björk’s unserious pre-solo band, the Sugarcubes. It starts, “I’ve tried a lot, and most things excite me; but what tops it all is doing two things at a time.” Björk and Einar then take turns listing possible pairings that she describes as “charming.”

Einar just sing-songs pairs of nouns:

Life and death, Glass and water
Rock and roll, wash and dirty
Christ and Jesus, time and hours… 

But Björk describes activities. You think maybe she is going to say something sexy and transgressive, but actually it’s very normal activities that apparently thrill her: 

To drive a car and listen to music.
To read a book and ride a train…

Sugarcubes’ songs are not designed to be analyzed, so I won’t do that. But for some reason, this one stuck in my head, and I can’t help thinking about how it wouldn’t just be a trifling little song today; it would be nonsensical. I never do only one thing at a time. It is always something—plus a phone. 

To drive a car and be on your phone
To listen to music and be on your phone
To ride a train and be on your phone
To fall in love and be on your phone
To not sleep and and be on your phone
To watch TV and be on your phone
To cuddle and be on your phone

Or in Einar’s mode:

Watch and phone
God and phone
Hammer and phone
Babies and phone

It is not something I try to do so as to make one plus one equal three, as the song promises; it is just how it is. I have my phone with me in the bathroom, in the car, while I’m cooking, while I’m eating, while I’m cleaning, when I’m working, while I am allegedly sleeping. When I am at church, I do turn my phone’s ringer off, but I sure don’t leave it at home. I would never.

Obviously, my phone isn’t all bad. I use it to listen to music, to identify birds and flowers, to be in touch with my kids in an emergency, to chat with my friends and my husband, to find recipes and instructions and helpful advice, and to take photos and videos of wonderful things that other people enjoy seeing. But overall, “Life and Phone” has not been an improvement, to put it mildly.

My phone’s omnipresence sucks the life out of whatever else I am doing. It always drains something from the other thing, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. It is like a needy infant that requires constant heightened attention, even when it is asleep; but unlike an infant, it never stops being hungry, and unlike an infant, it offers so very little compared to what it snatches away. 

That is what my phone does to me, a middle-aged mom from New England who is at least trying to be good and not waste my life. We don’t have to imagine what it does to foolish young men who are hungry for meaning, hungry for praise, hungry for clout, and who have their phones with them all the time, pouring poison into their faces morning, noon and night, sucking away their power to see humanity. We know what young men plus phones adds up to, more and more often. There is no non-dramatic way to put it: It tells them to kill, and to etch little phrases from memes on the bullet casings. Expect to see more of this.

Walking into church (and walking up to Christmas)

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We’re slowly working our way through (okay, we temporarily lost the book, but I’ll find it soon) The How-To Book of the Mass: Everything You Need to Know but No One Ever Taught You by Michael Dubruiel. 

And you know, he is absolutely right: No one ever taught me most of this stuff. It’s not just theology — what the Eucharist is, what the prayers mean, and so on. It’s very practical things like what to do when you’re distracted by other thoughts when you walk into the church. Which you probably are more often than not. What to do?

We may think, or even have been told, that it’s our job to sternly shunt these distracting thoughts away so we can focus on Jesus, who is the one we are there to see. But this is not the way, says Dubruiel.

He says:

“[t]here is a point in every Mass at which we can bring our desires to God. But because many of us do not see the connection, we miss it. There is also a time to hear what the Word of God has to say about our desires. It is not necessary to ignore these desire that weigh upon our hearts, but to bring them to God in the context of what God is saying to us during the Mass.”

He reminds us of the people in the Gospel who literally came face-to-face with Jesus, but wasted the opportunity, because they were focused on someone or something else.

It’s not a problem to have these concerns, Dubruiel says. The mistake is when we do not bring them to God, even though we are in the presence of God… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Road to Bethlehem; also known as The Difficult Journey (1890) by Fritz von Uhde via Wikipedia (Public Domain)

 

Dr. Mellifluus on distraction in prayer

Today, a few days before his feast day, is a great day for this story about St. Bernard of Clairvaux:

Bernard was riding his horse up into the Alps to give a retreat, and as he passed a farmer along the road he heard a loud grunt. He stopped to look down at the him, and the farmer remarked, “I envy you, with nothing to do but pray while I have to kill myself working in this rocky soil.”

Bernard said, “Well, praying can be even harder work that digging around those stones.”

“I doubt that very much,” the man said, “With that beautiful horse and the gorgeous saddle, what do you know of hardship?”

Up till then Bernard hadn’t given any attention to his mount. He said, ”It is a beautiful horse, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what, if you can say the Lord’s Prayer from beginning to end without taking your mind off it, I’ll give you this horse.”

“That’s so generous of you,” the man said; and he began praying, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be…do I get the saddle too?” 

(more here from Word on Fire) 

I knew the basic story, but not the context that the man considered prayer easy; and I didn’t realize it was St. Bernard who featured as the wise monk.  St. Bernard is the patron of our local church, but I know almost nothing about him (but I’m reading up! Here’s some great information from Amy Wellborn). The white plaster statue of him that used to be in the narthex includes a large bee near his feet — I guess because he is known as “Doctor Mellifluus,” or “honey-sweet doctor [of the Church]” because of his sweetly flowing eloquence.

Speaking of distraction from prayer, that narthex is where parents of small children often find themselves when they’re fulfilling their Sunday obligation in the most basic way: by being bodily inside the walls, even if they can’t catch more than a second or two of actual prayer time. Our parish is pretty kid-friendly, but the narthex makes a good rumpus room for the truly bonkers; and that is where St. Bernard stood, too.

One mother I saw kept her kid happy by carrying him up to the feet of the statue, finding the bee, making contact with her son’s little hand clasped in hers, and going, “BZZT!” Kid laughs, forgets to wreak havoc, everyone’s happy. Honey sweet, indeed.

We can draw a few things from this:

First, that saints don’t require us to know anything about them. They’re here to help, period. St. Bernard, who happens to be a great Biblical scholar and reformer, is perfectly content to also be Anonymous Plaster Bee Guy Who Entertains Buggy Kids. It’s a very good thing to do your homework and get to know the saints, but you can also just stretch out your hand and ask for help from all of God’s friends the saints, and they’ll oblige. I can think of numerous stories of people reaching out to saints, drawn in by some random appealing detail, and they turned out later to be a very willing patron. There’s a pretty good Thomas More story on this theme.

Second, if a quick “bzzt” of contact is all you can manage in your prayer life, then DO THAT. Don’t wait until you can get on your knees and say twenty decades without your mind wandering — because, as the story demonstrates, focused prayer is harder than it looks, even highly motivated people can’t seem to help but be distracted. It’s just the human condition. So the remedy is to keep making contact, keep coming back, keep regrouping, keep putting a check on that tendency we have, like restless kids in the pew, to lose focus and bug out.

We don’t have to be the most skillful bees; it’s God that will bring honey from the rock, if he so choses. But you do have to show up; and you do have to eventually acknowledge that it’s not about your efforts, at all. It’s about Jesus. “All food of the soul is dry”, he professed, “unless it is moistened with this oil; insipid, unless it is seasoned with this salt. What you write has no savour for me unless I have read Jesus in it.”

Third, I forget what three was for. Oh yes! St. Bernard, pray for us.

Bzzt!

 

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Image: honey bee, photo by Oregon State University via Flickr (Creative Commons)