Simone Weil and the Sacred Art of Attention
Seminal Texts of the Phygital Fellows
The Phygital Fellows landed in Boston for our Learning Journey after already spending a year together. By then, we had begun growing into a real community. I was in a particularly difficult season, so the reunion was especially sweet.
Likely because I hadn’t paid much attention to the information sent to us beforehand, I wasn’t expecting the evening activities.
That evening we met Dr. Filipe Maia, who introduced us to Simone Weil’s 1942 essay, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God. Not only did Dr. Maia illuminate this remarkable eighty-year-old text, but he brought it directly into conversation with the challenges of our own day. In an economy built on competing for our attention, what has our attention? What deserves our attention? And where is God amid all the voices asking us to look, click, consume, and react?
Weil’s essay is ostensibly written to students and teachers, but its audience is really anyone seeking to live a faithful life. Her surprising claim is that the purpose of education is not primarily the accumulation of knowledge but the formation of attention. Every difficult assignment, every frustrating problem, every slow act of learning trains us to become people capable of patiently attending to what is true.
For Weil, attention is the substance of prayer. It is not striving harder or thinking faster. It is learning to suspend our need for immediate answers long enough to receive what is real. Rather than forcing our way toward truth, we learn to wait for it. That same attention, she argues, also becomes the foundation of compassion. Only those who have learned to truly attend are capable of seeing another person as they really are.
In many ways, this may be one of the defining spiritual challenges of the digital age. We live in a world expertly designed to fragment our attention, reward distraction, and keep us moving from one stimulus to the next. The question is no longer simply whether we are paying attention, but who—or what—is shaping the way we pay attention.
That question has become central to the work of several Phygital Fellows.
Abigail Browka, whose app Everyday Sanctuary explores how our phones might become places of spiritual formation rather than distraction, tells the story of sitting down with a free moment ahead of her. Without thinking, she reached for her phone—not to search for a restaurant or check the weather, but to discover what she wanted to do. Reflecting on that moment, she writes in a recent blog,
“Somewhere along the way, my phone became the place I go to hear myself. To access something that should be available without a screen—my own desire, my own knowing.
…There’s a difference between a tool that supports your inner life and a tool that replaces it.”
Rather than concluding that technology is the problem, Abigail offers a different invitation. Before turning to our devices, what if we first turned inward? She ends with a remarkably simple practice: put the phone down, listen to your body, take a breath, and pray.
In: Listen.
Out: Here.
It is difficult to imagine a more contemporary expression of Weil’s invitation to attention.
Mike Whang of Oikon Studies has likewise found Weil’s vision to be foundational for his work creating weekly digital liturgies. Reflecting on attention, he writes:
“Paying attention is literally the definition of prayer to me. I am writing prayers. What I am trying to accomplish with my work is to help people be more attentive with their lives. Prayer is learning to be more attentive to God’s activity in the world and in our inner lives.
Being attentive is the heart of a life with God. With my liturgy I am trying to create that attentiveness with myself and anyone praying. Prayer, at its heart—in silence or words—leads to a greater consciousness of compassion, ministry, and the cry for justice. The purpose of liturgy is to cultivate greater attentiveness in our lives.”
Near the end of her essay, Weil writes:
“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”
She continues by arguing that even the smallest acts of patient learning can become sacramental because they train us to receive truth rather than grasp for it.
That idea has stayed with me.
As I look across the work of the Phygital Fellows, I keep seeing the same conviction expressed in remarkably different ways. We are not trying to create more digital content for people to consume. We are asking how digital spaces might become places that form us differently. How might an app cultivate listening? How might a liturgy create space for stillness? How might a digital gathering teach us to notice one another more deeply? How might technology itself become a practice of attention rather than distraction?
Perhaps that is why Weil’s eighty-year-old essay felt so contemporary.
Long before smartphones and social media, she understood that our lives are ultimately shaped by what we learn to attend to. The work of the Phygital Fellows is not simply about bringing faith into digital spaces. It is about recovering attention as a spiritual practice, believing that wherever genuine attention is cultivated, there is room for God to meet us there.