Explainer

Attention

Creed

28 November 2023

8 min read

Stepping away from the incessant immediacy of how we live today

Despite the daily distractions of digital life, we really need to pay attention to attentiveness, argues Mark Scarlata.

Mark Scarlata

Mark is a lecturer and priest. He’s the author of several books and his latest, Wine, Soil and Salvation, explores the use of wine throughout the Old and New Testament.

A corrugated sheet iron wall graffited in large blue letters that say 'All we need is more likes.'

Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash.

On a train from Cambridge to London, I sat down next to a smartly dressed woman who had her phone and laptop out on the small folding table. Of course, normal etiquette for early morning commuters is to maintain silence as much as possible, though this seems to be less and less the case these days. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, exhaled and tried to clear my thoughts for the day ahead. All was well until the woman’s phone notification interrupted my meditations. The loud Microsoft tune blared throughout the carriage but especially in my ear. I thought she would frantically reach for her phone and apologetically switch it to silent or vibrate but she didn’t.

After five more successive notifications I put in my noise-cancelling headphones but even they couldn’t stop the distracting tune from reaching my ears. I tried to read but couldn’t and then thought I’d at least send some emails, but the notifications kept coming. It felt like her phone went off about fifty times over a fifty-minute train ride. I’m probably exaggerating but the effect was the same in that I was so distracted (and exasperated!) that I couldn’t get anything done.

There is something about even the smallest distractions that prevent us from finding our rhythm. Whether we’re trying to accomplish a task, playing a sport, gardening, reading, or whatever it is, distractions keep us from being able to focus our attention and the sum of our thoughts on what it is we are trying to do.

With so many distractions in our lives we are left with little chance of finding healthy rhythms and may even feel overwhelmed with a sense of exhaustion.

In an essay on education, French philosopher Simone Weil writes,

‘Quite apart from explicit religious belief, every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.’

Her point is that intellectual and spiritual growth comes from an ability to focus our attention and to contemplate the things which we can comprehend and those which we are yet to understand. Progress is not simply about how much work we put in, or how much effort we put in, but how much attention we pay to all that we set out to do.

The difficulty in this digital age, however, is that we can struggle to find any kind of uninterrupted time in daily life. The internet and our devices have so permeated our lives that they create a world besieged by distractions to the point where life becomes merely a series of interruptions. Countless notifications, emails, social media or messaging apps all reduce our ability to concentrate for any significant length of time. With so many distractions in our lives we are left with little chance of finding healthy rhythms and may even feel overwhelmed with a sense of exhaustion.

In her Seen & Unseen article on ‘bed-rotting’, Lianne Howard-Dace writes of the recent trend of taking a day of self-care by staying in bed. She raises the important issue of sabbath rest and the biblical discipline of taking one day a week to cease from our work in the world. She also raises questions of how we might go about incorporating that rest into our lives. The discipline of keeping sabbath should also incorporate the practice of attention and cultivating our ability to be present with God and with others. This was the original rhythm of sabbath that God established in creation and when he later gave Israel the sabbath.

To inhabit sabbath time is to break from our daily routines, to cease from our work in the world so that we might find both mental and physical refreshment.

There are two key moments in the Bible that first describe the rhythm of sabbath rest. The first is in the beginning of Genesis when God creates the heavens and the earth in six days. He ceases from all his work on the seventh day when he consecrates time and rests. The second is the Exodus when God delivers the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. He leads them through the Sinai Peninsula and establishes in them a new rhythm for life.

In the Exodus story we’re told that God is like a father caring for Israel his ‘firstborn son’ as the former slaves adjust to their newfound freedom. He provides them with manna, or heavenly bread, that sustains them in their forty years of wandering. The gift, however, is followed by a command that the people should gather manna for six days as they travel through the desert but on the seventh day they are to rest from all their work. The Lord will provide their bread for that day, but the people are to cease from all activity and rest.

It's hard to imagine how many distractions they faced trying to set up and take down tents whilst moving family, flocks and possessions across the desert. Yet God wants to give these former slaves a new pattern, a new rhythm of life that will refresh them. The backbreaking labour in Egypt that never ceased is now replaced by a rhythm of work and rest.

God establishes one day for his people to pause, to reflect and to turn their attention away from their work in the world to the beauty of the world they inhabit. As they cease from their work, they are able to be present with one another and attentive to the God who delivered them to freedom.

Jewish rabbi and professor Abraham Joshua Heschel writes:

‘The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time. To turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.’

To inhabit sabbath time is to break from our daily routines, to cease from our work in the world so that we might find both mental and physical refreshment.

To turn towards the mystery of creation on the sabbath and to experience God’s rest also requires that we turn away from distraction. The Israelites put down their work in the wilderness and the distractions of travel so that they could rest with one another. Though they didn’t have smartphones buzzing and beeping with notifications, I’m sure it was still a challenge to stop, to rest, and to be attentive to God’s holiness in time.

The Israelites celebrated sabbath rest together. Their consecrated time was a communal time of joy and celebration. This new rhythm given by God strengthened bonds in families and communities and brought a corporate sense of rest. By setting aside the concerns of work and the distractions of life, the Israelites became attuned to God and attuned to one another. This pattern for life, however, is sadly missing for many in our digital world today which can be a very lonely place for many.

We struggle to find a rhythm in our own lives because we can no longer be attentive amidst the distractions of our world.

Harvard sociologist Sherry Turkle’s compelling book, Alone Together, documents some of the experiences of young people who are always connected through social media and yet feel an immense sense of loneliness. She reflects on how digital technologies and social media affect our social lives and our ability to engage with each other face-to-face.

‘We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream. Busy to the point of depletion, we make a new Faustian bargain. It goes something like this: if we are left alone when we make contact, we can handle being together.’

A quick glance at the Pew Research Center’s survey insights on the effects of internet technologies offers eye-opening testimonies to some of their negative impacts. From your average person to experts in the field of neuroscience, many bear witness to the detriments the internet is having on their ability to think, concentrate and relate to one another. We may have had similar experiences. We struggle to find a rhythm in our own lives because we can no longer be attentive amidst the distractions of our world.

Keeping the Sabbath in the digital age is no easy task. The very thought of turning off our phones or stepping away from our devices might cause deep anxiety in some. But as we look back to the manna story, we recall the lessons that Israel learned in the wilderness ‒ to experience rest means to put down our work, to cease, and to trust in God’s provision.

Technology itself is not the problem. Technology that is used to manipulate our behaviour and leads to addictive tendencies is a problem. The question for many of us is are we allowing technology to destroy healthy rhythms in our lives that create anxiety and stress rather than rest? Sabbath offers a different form of behaviour modification. It establishes a ritual and a pattern in our lives to help cultivate attentiveness, rest, communion with others and worship.

This is not to say that we need to abandon all technology and go back to the agrarian ways of our ancestors (though sometimes I think I could use such a change!). It does, however, mean that the path to rest in the contemporary world requires us to step back and examine how technologies are influencing our physical and mental well-being. Practicing the sabbath opens our lives up to the rhythm God has established for his whole creation where we can stop, cease, and offer our deepest attention through a weekly ritual of celebrating holy time. We can step away from the incessant immediacy of doing everything now and take time to rest.

God never forces the gift of sabbath on people. Instead, he invites us to experience a new rhythm of life, a rhythm of work and rest where we are refreshed as we grow into the fullness of our humanity.

Establishing sabbath rituals takes time and effort. It’s hard work to rest well, especially when we’re constantly being pulled away by digital distractions. Yet the sabbath is the perfect antidote to a culture of now that can so easily consume us and keep us from experiencing God’s rest and refreshment. Sabbath offers us the rhythm of creation, the rhythm of the land and the rhythm that leads to wholeness and life.

Interview

Creed

Mental Health

Trauma

21 August 2025

17 min read

When the answers run out: Kate Bowler on faith, fragility, and the beauty of uncertainty

Kate Bowler in conversation with Graham Tomlin.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A woman sits and smiles in front of her bookcase.

This interview is an edited transcript of the Seen & Unseen Live event.

Graham

Kate Bowler is a four-time New York Times bestselling author. She's an award-winning podcast host and also an associate professor of American religious history at Duke University. She's the author of a number of books, including Blessed, a history of the American Prosperity Gospel. And they're wonderfully titled - The Preacher's Wife; The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities.

And you may know something of Kate's story, she was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the age of 35. And then out of that, wrote the New York Times, bestselling memoir. Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies That I've Loved, and her latest book, Have A Beautiful, Terrible Day. Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, And in Betweens. Kate hosts, the award-winning podcast Everything Happens.

We were just talking about students and teaching. What do you teach your students? You say American religious history? Is there a kind of theme? And how do you go about teaching your students? How does that work in your setting?

Kate
Sometimes they make me do the Puritans to Trump sort of lectures which I enjoy, but I think the heart of what I love is to talk about American religious myth making. What stories animate their accounts of how to live a good life. Most American stories end up being iterations of that and some pretty classic themes of righteous individualism, of wanting only good things because God is good, a sense that all things can be conquerable. So, it's got this intense agency to it.

I end up doing a history of American theodicies, explanations of evil. It mostly ends up being storytelling about whether people believe that they deserve the lives they got. It's a privilege to do it, especially at a divinity school. These are going to be people who are in the forefront of helping people interpret and explain their pain.

And I guess that's something about America, isn't it? Because America was born out of this hopeful sense of people leaving the terrible strictures of Europe, and going off to this free new land, and so on. So, I suppose it had sort of hopefulness and positivity built right into the beginning, didn't it?

It does. I also really just enjoy civic virtues, in general Canadian civic virtues. The Americans ones are, of course, the pursuit of happiness. Canadians have peace, order, and good governance as their primary civic virtues, which always makes me laugh. It's just so polite and so reasonable. But Americans are hoping fundamentally that they can become. The kinds of people that can conquer a fickle market, who can overcome any sort of structural evil, can be winners in a culture that doesn't ever really try to explain away inequality. It attempts to create the kind of people who can navigate it.

And you started out by studying the prosperity gospel, didn't you? And particularly within the United States. Is that right? The kind of idea that God wanted good things for you. You've been talking about that already, and when you did that study, what did you expect to find? And what did you find when you did that research?

Well, the very first time I bumped into the prosperity gospel I was in my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is right in the middle of Canada, and we have only one fast road, and they had put up a traffic light. So, I was in a terrible mood. Then I saw all these people pouring out from what I thought was a factory that was running on Sunday morning, and then I thought, oh, no, I believe these are churchgoers. Oh, no, that factory is a church, and it turns out that was Canada's largest megachurch that was run by a man named Leon Fontaine, who had just been given a motorcycle by his congregants, and then rode it around on stage, and I thought, no, that is for Americans. I was so insistent on the idea that a story of health, wealth, and happiness was exclusive to an American cultural narrative.

I think I was 18, maybe 20 when I first bumped into it, and then I spent my entire twenties wasting my youth interviewing televangelists in Canada and the United States, trying to understand why it was so deeply American, and also why it was so infinitely exportable and ultimately discovered that there was something very deeply humbling about studying a movement of infinite spiritual expectation. It taught me that we all want to be able to comb through our own biography, to know whether we have any evidence of God's love, special appreciation connection to us, but also that even when we think that we don't have a prosperity gospel in our own lives. We probably do.

You're talking there about the the kind of desire can control outcomes a little bit. It struck me that I think the very first reflection you got in your book, which is called Have A Beautiful, Terrible Day, which is whenever everything is out of control, is that the sort of big theme that you found with it - the desire to control? And I guess that's something you've experienced in your own life, that sense of not being able to control things?
And one of the books I've been reading recently is this one by Hartmut Rosa, called the The Uncontrollability of the World talks about how a world in which everything has been planned and controlled would be a dead world. It's the uncontrollable things that kind of make life kind of interesting, when snow falls and you can't control it, or a sports game that you can't predict the outcome of. Do you think there's something in that? That we try to resist?

I am committed to resisting. I mean, if I could arrange some sort of consumer feedback to our Lord and Saviour, I would suggest that I would be given more control over my circumstances. I guess it's been a question that is really at the heart of so much of my both academic and spiritual interest is, what do we do now, when we feel ourselves confronted by all the things we can't control. Typically, the things that we can't control can do two awful things. One, they seem to preach the story of a God who is cruel and and just doesn't care. That can't possibly care enough to want to confront the evil that overwhelms. Because suffering isn't just like cosmetic change. It's just an avalanche that that sweeps everything away. And then in the face of that we don't know how to say what my friend Tom Long, who is a wonderful preaching professor at Princeton, says. He likes to say there's always two preachers at a funeral. There's the body. But what can tell a story that is bigger than death? So, I think that's the first thing - that suffering, of all the things that are uncertain seems to tell us something about God that isn't true.

I think the other thing, and maybe this is just especially the marketing for women. But when I began to be an unlucky person, I began to feel the sting of a very distinct kind of shame. I felt that it was not just circumstances, that there was something about me, something about my failure, something about my unlovedness. One of the first thoughts I had when I got my diagnosis was, well, of course it's me.

And that is an awful lie that buries itself somewhere in our hearts. But I think uncertainty can have this effect - we end up holding the blade on the wrong side, and it just it always feels like uncertainty. We sort of plunge it right into our chest. So, I think I think uncertainty in general, it's every wave and we have to learn to navigate, but mostly it feels like an affront on our essential goodness.

And how did you learn to manage that uncontrollability? There's a tendency in many of us to try to control everything, and we want to have everything sorted and ordered. And then you kind of get to the point where you realize can't do that. Then the temptation is to be just overwhelmed by it, and to feel there's nothing I can do at all. How do you navigate that sense of being out of control?

One of the American cultural diseases, she can say lovingly, is, they are high on what I like to consider is ‘everything is possibleism’. And so then, in the face of uncertainty, or confusion, or despair, or undoing, then the great fear is that you swing right into ‘nothing is possibleism’ and a kind of despair and nihilism. And I'm very interested in every, especially religious tradition that that helps us cultivate an experience of limited agency like, how do you find that space, spiritually, emotionally, communally, of what is possible today? And I've really, I've really struggled with this over the various intellectual and sort of seasons of illness in my life. In Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day I wrote these little snack size reflections, because I was in a period of so much chronic pain that I really just didn't even have brain space for more than an hour and a half a day. So that became an exercise in trying to still allow myself the joy of creation. Because isn't it so wonderful when your brain goes somewhere, and pain is so boring. And I mean talking about pain is so boring, telling it to your friend for the 200th time, like we are all over it.

So, I just was trying to practice the experience of limited agency, even if for the other six hours I would have to lie in the bath and take pain meds. But I've realized over and over again that trying to find that soft space is a place where I can re-experience, humanity, love, and really just the weird, wild gifts that God gives us. Even when life falls apart.

If anyone's watching this and hasn't found a book yet, I really do recommend it. It's a wonderful thing. It's got lots of different kind of poems and meditations and prayers, and it's got titles for when things are falling apart, when you screwed up, when you're in pain, when life feels incomplete, things like that.

I'm a huge bummer, Graham. Thank you. I think it's so funny. I think it's because we grew up Mennonite, and we love our version of like Saily Bread, and like the tiny little booklets, and all of them were very sweet and very precious moments. And then in my version, it's like, when you're worried you want to eat your own arm, you hate your life so much. So, I do kind of prefer them for the rawer times.

Coming on to how Christian faith helps you navigate those, one thing that struck me as I was reading through it is there's a difference between, one of the common approaches to suffering you get in the modern world, which is the stoic idea that you just sort of grit your teeth, you can't control what's going to happen to you, but you can control your own emotions.

That's such crap, isn't it?

It’s pretty common, isn't it? You get that sort of sense of stoicism, these days there are stoic podcasts and books. What do you see is the difference between that and what Christian faith says to on how you navigate these really difficult periods of life?

I want to say specifically that what I truly believe is crap is the phrase, the argument, ‘you might not be able to control but you can control how you respond.’ I mean, anyone who's been unexpectedly stabbed with a needle knows that that is fundamentally not true. And the reason why I am so sensitive to it is, you know, as somebody who’s had a public cancer diagnosis, I see how quickly the cultural narrative is so intense, I've seen every single person who suffers is lined up to give that response, because what everybody wants to know is, well, just tell me that there's an escape hatch on the other side of it.

Modern stoicism is - and when I say modern it did not have a Renaissance until the 2010s, which is wild - in part a result of an incomplete theology of masculinity that has been available, and it has become a way to explain specifically to men that there's an almost natural impassivity that is theirs should they claim it, And that in the face of chaos, global and personal, that there's a higher path. Stoicism is always, of course, stripped of its original cosmology, refitted with self-help techniques. But what I really object to, which is at the core, is a story about control.

Emotional management is, of course, a therapeutic good. But, man, we're 50 years into the therapeutic paradigm. It makes me want to add the word dude at the end of that sentence. We are 50 years into the therapeutic paradigm, and we have not yet found a way to control our emotions, and that is because, as spiritual creatures we are always, we have this ache, we have this soul-cry that Augustine named so beautifully. We have a spiritual restlessness that no kind of emotional management strategy can overcome, and because it it is meant to be satisfied fundamentally by our love, our love of God, our love of others, and frankly, an unsolvability that tells us that we are an incomplete story. If we could be a complete story, I don't know if we really should be religious at all. Frankly, I really would. I would probably do other things with my time.

It does seem to be something about desire at the heart of this. The Stoic response is to just slightly repress your desires, keep your desires under control. It is offering a sort of sense of control. Or Christian faith is actually about redirecting your desires to something that is bigger than yourself and more powerful and beautiful than you are. And so whereas sort of stoicism seems to say, just control your desires, Christianity in some ways almost says let your desire for God grow as you go through this.

But I was wondering a little bit about prayer, and how prayer works for you in times of real struggle? I often seems to me that when you go through really difficult times, the time when you kind of feel you need to pray, is often the time it's hardest to do so. Do you find that? What role prayer plays for you in moments of uncontrollability, of the sufferings and struggles of life. What role does prayer play for you in that?

This stoicism to prayer thoroughfare is a perfect continuity of the argument. Stoicism, and I mean just living inside of the precarity of this world, reminds us again and again that life requires so much more courage than we thought. Maybe we were convinced along the way that prayer also doesn't require courage just to get to that place of spiritual honesty again, I mean especially if you feel like your prayer was supposed to follow a different template. Whether it was always supposed to very quickly move from brief needs, long descriptions, great thankfulness. That's the classic three-parter, but most often are our honesty requires us to be incomplete before God. I mean utterly, or angry or unknowing. Maybe this gets back to your certainty comments at the start about like, how do we manage such enormous uncertainty? Do we imagine prayer as a strategy for certainty? And if we're hoping it's that, we might be we might be unsatisfied. I just know that when I pray honestly that when I'm in a really terrible season, my prayers sound more like it's 2am. And I'm the sort of self who is buying things on Amazon and wishes I could call people and say things and cannot be trusted. Those prayers sound something like, help me! Help me! Save me, make them come back. Make this stop! Those are necessary, deep, guttural cries.

My 2pm prayers, I've got Trinitarian round-outs. I've got sophisticated nuanced theology. I'm quoting here and there.

Both are reflections of how much we're not even entirely known to ourselves, except that we find ourselves unfolded by our circumstances.

Pressing into how you deal with enduring pain. You talk very movingly about what it's like to go through really quite searing pain that just doesn't go away. And you have to kind of deal with it. Here in the UK we've been having a debate over the last few months about assisted dying. Which is a route out of pain for some people towards the end of life. Did you ever experience the temptation to that? Or has your experience helped you reflect upon that kind of route that our society is offering people at the moment? Can you end this by ending it all.

Canada's been having similar and terrible debates with terrible consequences. I think one of the great worries, especially with North American theologies of the self, is that the suffering, those who suffer are inherently less valuable because we are not the worker self. We're not the productive self. We're simply the the feeling and the limited and the precarious self.

What really worries me, especially with some of these exit interview for people who apply for euthanasia in Canada, is is quotes like ‘It's not that I don't want to die it’s that I can't afford to live’, because so many of the things that relieve pain are frankly so expensive and so off insurance. Any discussion about pain and assisted suicide are also just always, at least in North American context, conversations about who is valuable and whose pain is insurable.

I know that one of the major differences that I've had in my own life between a self that was in so much pain I could barely function to this version, is that I could pay for my own treatment. I feel overwhelming compassion for all those who feel like they will suffer without end because there are no social services to alleviate it.

I've been in a situation where I'm so desperate to live that I have not fundamentally experienced despair that has a telos to it. I've experienced despair at times in which I feel my own helplessness.

I had a lovely interview with Dr. Catherine Mannix. She developed a cognitive behavioural therapy therapeutic approach inside of palliative care in the NHS. And it was really it ended up being a way to talk about how do you experience control inside of that much suffering. Her books are about people who thought that they would want to die in that much pain. In these little case studies, I found her description to be so deeply Christian. What she was arguing was that even in the midst of deafening pain, that helping people find a small, soft place of narrow choice and meaning-making could reinfuse their lives with such purpose that otherwise our culture would erase. I just wish that everybody that inside of our conversation about when pain is too much, had a little bit more of that place of gentle possibility.

One of the phrases that that really struck me as I was reading your book is that ‘we are united by our fragility.’ The implications seem to be that that's actually what we have in common. The fact that we are fragile or incomplete, in your language from earlier on. It got me thinking about how that might change the way we think about each other and community and relationships, and maybe even church. What that difference would it make if we actually thought that was the centre of what we have in common, our fragility. Do you have any thoughts on that?

At heart, I'm an anti-culture warrior. In this time of increasing binaries our democratic structures or any kind are fragile, especially in the United States, the big tent umbrellas of denominationally or otherwise. I do think it is important for us to sort of spiritually land on what we think makes us all deeply the same. I know that when I started down this path there was a lot of humiliation because I was treated as disposable by the healthcare industry. I was truly humbled by it. In suffering you are laid low and there's a little key in that that I found that I've never wanted to give up. IT is that the second I knew I suffering, I could see it so much more easily in other people. And that I could know that a broken heart is an open heart. If you can keep that at the at the centre of of a story about our difference Ihave just found it easier, easier on Facebook, easier at family gatherings, just easier. We have a contingency that we're all grappling with, and we can't always see it on each other's faces. But if we know that we all are so worried that we're wearing a sweater and someone's going to pull a thread and then there we are, naked to the world. I think I know that it inculcates a deep feeling of humanity in me.

There’s something about approaching another person with that thought of I'm fragile and kind of so are you. Especially it's not that terrible if you see my fragility, and maybe I begin to look for the fragility and the other person, and that makes that person that much more approachable somehow, and a bit more human. This militates against the idea of going to everybody else and trying to give to give out this image of being complete, and I've got everything sorted, and I know all the answers. The kind of image we try to present of ourselves.

I think I think invulnerability is exhausting, and we could just cut ourselves some slack.

Find out more about Kate

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