ATTENTION part 3: Attention Forms Attachment

PART 3: ATTENTION FORMS ATTACHMENT 

We tend to think of attachment as something that happens to us. We fall in love, we get hooked, we become dependent. But underneath most attachments is sustained attention. We look, we look again, we think about it when we are not looking, and slowly the object of our gaze moves from out there to in here. This is as true of a marriage as it is of a grudge we can’t let go, a substance, a scroll feed, or even a way we see ourself. When we attend to something long enough, we fall into step with it, whether it’s good company or not.

Paul the apostle speaks to this, teaching that by beholding the glory of the Lord, we are progressively transformed into his image, from one degree of glory to another. But the logic of that sentence isn’t exclusive. Just as beholding the Lord transforms us into his likeness, beholding anything else, long enough and closely enough, transforms us into its likeness too. Scripture has a specific, out of fashion word for wrongly directed attention: idolatry. Maybe for us, it’s not a dramatic bowing before a statue, but the quiet, repeated attending to something until it has shaped us more than God has (2 Cor.3:18).

It seems we are desiring creatures rather than merely thinking ones. Our desires are influenced by what we consciously think and believe, but they are more deeply shaped by the habitual things we give ourselves to through repeated practice, a kind of liturgy, that’s what alters the landscape of our lives. It happens as surely as a tractor creates ruts in the dirt track to the milking shed, because the farmer drives it, habitually, morning and evening, every single day. A phone can be a liturgy. As can a great church service. Both are in the business of focussing attention, forming devotion, even love, within us. The question isn’t whether we’ll be shaped by attention, but, what are we giving our attention to?

Discernment as an act of love. 

Discernment isn't only a spiritual gift God offers, it is actually something we all naturally practice, whether we realise it or not. It is the ordinary, daily work of deciding what deserves our gaze, because whatever gets our attention will, sooner or later, get us. To love well is to attend well. To attend well, however, requires a certain kind of humility, a willingness to admit that not everything we’re paying attention to is worthy of it. More than that, it requires some courage to choose to look away from some things, so we can look properly at others.

There’s something attachment research calls attunement. Secure attachment in a child is formed specifically through a caregiver's attunement: sustained, responsive attention to the child's cues, met consistently over time. If that attunement is missing or unreliable, something else forms in its place, patterns of relating that often carry into adulthood, and overflow into how we relate to God. This means our capacity to simply receive attention, trusting it, resting in it, believing it is really there, was probably shaped long before we ever got to choose anything. I’m grateful that the God who attends to us perfectly, is patient enough to take whatever time it takes to become for us, the true and trustworthy source of identity and security we most need, have always needed. 

Turning is a form of attention too. There is a word for what’s needed when we notice our gaze has drifted somewhere it shouldn’t have settled. The New Testament's word for repentance, metanoia, is usually translated "change of mind," but an older sense is closer to a change of perceiving, a redirection of the whole inner gaze. Repentance, properly understood, is attention turning. Turning away and turning towards. Noticing mid-drift what our attention has fallen in step with, and choosing, again, to look back toward the one we were made to behold.

But we need to settle for ourselves that this turning is not a once-off event that happens at a conversion and is then it’s done. It’s the small, constant work of a life being trained toward love: catching the gaze wandering, gently bringing it back, again and again, tomorrow and the day after. Every act of discernment, deciding this and not that, now and not later, here and not there, is an act of repentance. Every refusal to keep scrolling, keep looking, keep circling the old wound, driving in the same habitual resentment rut, it’s all turning.

Pause and Ponder:

What have I been turning towards lately? What have I been turning away from lately? What will I to turn towards today and tomorrow? What will I turn away from today and tomorrow?