What Contemplatives Know About Attention That Activist Leaders Need to Hear

The divide between the contemplative and the activist has shaped Christian spirituality from its earliest centuries. The tradition has produced extraordinary representatives of both poles, and the recurring argument about which is the more faithful expression of the Christian life is largely a false dichotomy — the great Christian lives have almost always been marked by genuine integration of contemplation and action, with each sustaining and deepening the other. But the tendency in most activist-oriented ministry contexts is to allow the action to crowd out the contemplation until the contemplative capacity has atrophied — and with it, something essential to both the quality of the action and the health of the actor.

Simone Weil described attention as "the rarest and purest form of generosity." Her argument was that genuine attention to another person — the kind of full, unhurried, self-forgetful attention that allows the other to be fully present rather than being processed through the attending person's own preoccupations — is itself a form of love, perhaps its highest form. The contemplative tradition has cultivated attention as a discipline — through meditation, through the practice of the presence of God, through the intentional cultivation of the capacity to be fully present in a single moment without the scattered mental activity that ordinarily occupies the mind.

"Genuine attention to another person — full, unhurried, self-forgetful attention — is itself a form of love. Perhaps its highest form."

The Activist's Attention Deficit

The activist-oriented leader — the one for whom ministry is primarily a project to be accomplished, a mission to be advanced, a set of goals to be achieved — tends to have a specific kind of attention deficit: the chronic inability to be fully present in the moment, because the mental focus is always partly on the next step, the next meeting, the next initiative. This is often not experienced as a problem from the inside — it feels like productive engagement with the mission. But it is experienced as a problem by the people in the pastor's immediate presence, who sense the partial attention and draw their own conclusions about their worth in the pastor's priorities.

The pastoral conversation characterized by full, undivided, self-forgetful attention is qualitatively more effective than the same conversation conducted by a distracted mind. The sermon that emerges from the place of genuine contemplative depth reaches places the efficiently-prepared sermon cannot. Beginning a contemplative practice does not require a monastery or a radical lifestyle change. It requires a commitment, sustained through the ordinary resistance of a busy life, to regular periods of intentional stillness. Twenty minutes of centering prayer in the morning. The practice of lectio divina with a short Scripture passage. The deliberate slowing of the pace of a pastoral conversation — the willingness to be present without the internal rush toward resolution. Small practices. Significant cumulative effects.