Living with Intention and Attention, Amid the Tension
The season of Lent, which began last week, is a time of deep reflection and stock-taking. For forty days, we are invited to bring greater focus to our living and acting in this world, recognizing how small yet infinitely valuable we are. This requires attention and an intentional willingness to engage complex, multivalent truths and tensions about ourselves and our engagements and our communities.
Simone Weil, the French mystic, philosopher, and advocate for social justice, once said that “Attention, taken to the highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” She made a conscientious choice to train her attention on both her inner and outer life, and this continually moved her out of herself toward God and toward the human community that surrounded her. This drew her into particular contact with places of hardship, suffering, and injustice in our world, including ones in which her own society had contributed to that suffering. Iris Murdoch expanded on this notion, describing how, at its best, it provokes a kind of “unselfing,” the freeing of ourselves from our egos so that we might be in true communion with all that exists, and especially all who live and all who suffer.
More and more, I have come to appreciate that attention is our most precious resource. So many influences and forces compete for our time and our focus, from work and home responsibilities to traditional and social media, and we are never far from an electronic device that will beep or vibrate telling us that more is incoming. To give our attention unreservedly to one person, one thing, or one community is a radical act. Again to quote Weil, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” And to give our attention to those whose social position is marginalized, who seem to have little to practically or professionally offer us, is all the more countercultural today. Yet that is what we do in our Ignatian tradition, and we find that, paradoxically, it opens up possibilities for mutual recognition, reconciliation, and the transformation of our full, shared humanity and community.
In this month’s newsletter, we hear two stories of our Santa Clara students giving their attention to a single community in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, over the Winter Break. They plumb the depths of the uneasiness this can provoke, and also the joy, laughter, and hope to which it can give birth. Their words and video help all of us, during this season of Lent, to intentionally attend to that which is most important, living in the tension this brings with trust and hope.
For Camila Perez '27, the Winter Quarter Immersion to East Los Angeles was full of unexpected - and welcomed - tension. Throughout the immersion, many of the students wrestled with the tension between joy and grief, struggling to understand how laughter and connection could exist alongside such visible hardship. "We were encouraged to release the pressure to feel a certain way,” explained Camila, “and instead pay attention to what was actually present; the laughter, the discomfort, the guilt, and the uncertainty many of us carried."
Read Camila's full story here
