I figure this is as good a place to start as any.

There’s something about modern life that rubs the soul the wrong way. We’ve lost our connection to anything that our ancestors would recognize as meaningful.

Distraction is rampant.

The distraction ranges from mundane to malevolent. Apps display everything from flickering fragments of life all around the world, to images of depravity that can eat your soul.

Pulled in every direction, our attention is broken, our minds are in fragments. The reductionists took a scalpel to the world, and once their blade proved its power to reveal deep mechanical truth, it was handed out to anyone who wanted to give it a try.

The scientists’ scalpel ended up in the hands of psychologists and marketers. The former dissected the mind looking for disease, and announced their success when they found what the sages and desert monks had said for centuries: we’re full of brokenness, fractures in our mind, and if the sages were to be believed those fractures go all the way down into the heart and soul. Though no scientist would admit that anything so immaterial exists, so neither would the psychologists. With the mind wide open and human nature’s endless repository of neurosis on display, the psychologists rejoiced. What was never asked was how do you restore a mind, let alone a soul, to wholeness?

The latter gave us ads. The ad-men found that human nature was predictable. New wants could be implanted in the heart of man. Needs that no one had ever heard of became a matter of life and death, it seemed. They also found that the shorter the message the deeper the message went. So the message got shorter, and shorter again.

Fragments. That’s all we have of our attention.

We have a quantity of things to focus on, but nothing worth the focus.

The antidote is holiness. “Things are made holy by the kind attention we give them.”

We need holy attention; the kind of attention wise men call worship.

These days nothing is holy. Enchantment has left the world, taking with it color, wonder and awe.

We’re left looking through portals at pieces, shards, at the ashes of dreams. We grasp at the flickering light, isolated from a world that seems to have been bled of all meaning.

That light has made us blind.
Modern life has given us eyes of silicon.

Like the blind man we need the God of wonder to make us eyes of blood red clay, gritty and alive, and shove them in the tired cold black empty holes of our skull, and then to say: “Go wash in the pool of Siloam.”

Holy attention. Worship.