The last time someone gave me their complete attention, I almost didn’t know what to do with it. A friend put his phone face down on the table before I had even pulled out my chair at a local restaurant. Then he looked at me. For the next hour, I had the unfamiliar experience of being fully seen by someone making no effort to be anywhere else.
Two people at a table. A conversation without interruption. That used to be ordinary.
Somewhere between the first smartphone and the 100th notification, it became a small act of generosity. A restaurant in London has banned phones from its tables since 1994, calling them a barrier to conviviality.
Most conversations now include at least one glance at a screen, one sentence trailed off, one moment where the eyes across from you drift toward the rectangle on the table. We sit together and somewhere else at the same time.
For three weeks, we have been looking outward in The World Before You. We noticed What We Walk Past. We watched what changes when The Light We’re Given shifts. We examined The View from Here from a particular age and place. This week, we turn toward people. The topic is Attention as Love, and the claim is plain. The deepest generosity is to truly see someone.
Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She meant something deeper than focus or concentration.
She described the willingness to set your own noise aside long enough to receive another person as they actually are, without editing them into who you expect them to be.
The foot-washing scene in John 13 puts flesh on that idea. Jesus gets on the floor. He takes the feet of his disciples, one pair at a time, into his hands. Feet carry all the weight and receive none of the regard. They are what everyone overlooks. To wash someone’s feet is to attend to what nobody else will look at, and to do it gently, without rushing through the task. The most powerful person in the room chose to kneel.
You don’t need to wash anyone’s feet this week. Try something simpler. Give one person five minutes of undivided attention. Put the phone in another room. Look at them. Listen without rehearsing your reply. Five minutes — that’s all. They will remember it. So will you.
Watson, our golden retriever, turns 10 tomorrow, and he has been doing exactly this for a decade. Every day of those 10 years, he has looked at whoever walks through the door as though they were the only one in the world. He has never once planned what to say next.
This weekend, I will explore this practice further at the Unitarian Universalist Friendship Fellowship. You don’t need a sermon to begin, though. You just need five minutes and one person.
Next week is Palm Sunday, and we ask a harder question: What happens when a thousand people stand on the same road and see entirely different things? Same afternoon, different eyes.
Scott Tilley is the founder of CTS Ministries and an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. You’ll be able to find this column, Spirituality Today, every Sunday at floridatoday.com. Contact Tilley at stilley@cts.today.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Giving ‘undivided attention’ is powerful act of love | Spirituality Today
Reporting by Scott Tilley, Florida Today / Florida Today
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