Simone Weil's Soul Attention: Attention as Prayer, Supplication over Surrender by Eric Hepburn

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." The first service in a three-part Simone Weil series honoring Women's History Month centers Weil's teaching, from Gravity and Grace, that we cure our faults by attention and not by will — and that inner supplication is the only reasonable way.

The sermon was delivered on a hard morning: the Great World House holds both the memorial of Rev. Meg Barnhouse — a matriarch of Unitarian Universalism, honored with the story of how elephants come from neighboring bands to stand vigil at a matriarch's bones — and a silence for the people of Iran, Israel, and the United States, waking to the consequence of placing weapons of mass destruction in the hands of mortal men.

From there, the Unfolding in Word distinguishes supplication from surrender. Surrender pretends the injustice isn't happening and goes about its day. Supplication says: this is happening; I bear my slice of the culpability; and in acknowledging what is, without turning away, true agency is born. The message announces one such small act — singing songs of resistance on the Georgetown square that afternoon — a fool's hope, carried anyway.

The closing movement turns to the attention economy: the algorithm's hooks work only because attention is the most valuable resource you possess, and its stewardship is your primary act of stewardship in this life. Knee to knee, attention itself is an action — it holds space for healing. Where you grant your attention is where the important choices begin; reclaiming it makes you an agent of unpredictability. And when the call comes, you'll know to pick up.

https://youtu.be/qNFSrZ8Nl14

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The Pulpiteer Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for readability: transcription errors corrected, filler words reduced, punctuation repaired. Bracketed items are editorial.

[00:00:00] Eric Hepburn (host intro): Welcome to the twenty-fifth episode of the second season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode. Today's episode is called "Soul Attention," named after the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. This week, we begin with our Great World House segment, and then move into our Voice of Wisdom, delivered by Fran Holt.

The Great World House — Eric Hepburn

We now pause to honor the Great World House, of which we are a part — lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.

I've got two big things on my heart this morning, and it won't let me choose. So I'm doing both of them.

First: I attended the memorial service for Reverend Meg Barnhouse yesterday. She was my minister for eleven years, at First UU Austin. She was a modern-day matriarch of Unitarian Universalism. In his sermon at her memorial, Reverend Jake Morrill told of how elephants stand vigil after the death of a matriarch — how elephants come from all around, even from neighboring bands, to stand and touch the bones and body of the departed beloved with their trunks. It's kind of like that. It was very much like that.

Second: Iran. Can we hold a moment of silence, please? For the people of Iran. For the people of Israel. And yes, even for the people of the United States — who are, this morning, all waking up to the real consequence of mass-producing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and placing them in the hands of mortal men.

A Voice of Wisdom — read by Fran Holt

Let us enter a still place within, opening our hearts and minds to receive this Voice of Wisdom. After the words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence, preparing ourselves for the Word unfolding among us.

Today's Voice of Wisdom comes from Simone Weil:

"We have to try to cure our faults by attention, and not by will. — I'm going to repeat that: we have to try to cure our faults by attention, not by will. — The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration, or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them. Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem? Attention is something quite different.

"Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There is a lack of grace in the proud person. It is the result of a mistake.

"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto, in spite of itself."

The Sermon: Soul Attention — Eric Hepburn

I've said recently, from up here, that this is a safe enough place to show up on days when you don't feel strong. And today is one of those days for me. So I'm going to trust y'all to hold me.

Let's talk about Simone Weil a little bit. She was a Christian mystic, a philosopher. Like many young bright lights, she died too soon, under less-than-ideal circumstances — maybe I'll tell y'all a little about that. We're going to be exploring her life for this month. But here's what stuck with me — here's why she ended up at the top of my batting list for this month, besides the fact that she's another underappreciated woman in history. They aren't hard to find, by the way — underappreciated women in history. It's simply an act of looking. And part of that is that the internet, and the library, and things of that nature, are of such a quality now that the looking isn't maybe so hard as it used to be.

My wise friend Fran Holt knew to say this line twice, although it's only written once: we have to try to cure our faults by attention, and not by will.

God. What does that mean, though? By attention, and not by will. "Inner supplication is the only reasonable way." But what are we supplicating ourselves to? What is this word — the word most of us would say has the synonym surrender?

Is there a meaningful difference between supplication and surrender? I would say that there is. Surrender, to me, always has the connotation of accepting something that, deep in your heart, you know you ought not accept — something that smells like injustice to you. You might surrender to the existence of an injustice, but there is a part of you that knows that doesn't make it right — and there's something with the smell of guilt or shame about it, about surrendering to something that itself is not right.

Supplication, I would argue, has a different connotation. Supplication is acknowledging the limited scope of one's own power in the face of what inarguably is. The world is bigger than each of us, and we are all implicated in it, and part of it. We are all part of this web that creates and recreates it every day. But as Simone rightly says — and as we all know through experience — us willing the world to be a different way doesn't work. Believe you me: if, sitting here on this stool today, I could will us to stop using weapons of mass destruction as a country against others, it would be done. I would have already willed it so.

Surrender would be: "there's nothing I can do about these injustices, so I'm going to pretend they're not happening and go about my day." That's what surrender would sound like on my lips. Supplication is something different. Supplication is: this is happening. This is happening — and I bear my slice of the culpability for it. It is, in fact, my tax dollars, my ingenuity, my life energy that have gone into making this place what it is, and I am not free from culpability in all that it does. There is no escape from the web of what is, and my existence within it, my culpability within it. And in that moment of acknowledging what is, without turning away, our true capacity for agency is born — our capacity to decide.

I am implicated. This is happening. It is happening for all the reasons we can see — from imperialist, colonialist mindsets, to resource exploitation, to the devaluation of certain kinds of people. All those patterns we perceive in history are real things that must be navigated. But they cannot be navigated as long as we are in denial about them. Navigation becomes possible after we open our eyes. And that's what supplication implies. Supplication says: I am at the mercy of the world as it unfolds. And yet I am here. I am here, and I get to make choices.

One choice I'm going to make later today — as small as it is, trivial as it is, almost insignificant as it is: me and about six other people from this church (you're welcome to join if you want) are going to go, at one o'clock this afternoon, and stand in the Georgetown town square, and sing songs of resistance. And maybe it's a weak gesture. But maybe — as I suggested last week — it never was more than a fool's hope, us finding the way toward a just world where we can all thrive together. Maybe it never was more than a fool's hope. But it's still the one I carry. And it's an errand one can only undertake with an adequate mood of supplication to what is. If you lie to yourself about the odds of the thing, that's just another form of delusion. If you lie to yourself about the powerlessness you're facing, that's just another form of delusion. The deck is stacked — don't misunderstand me. I'm not arguing that we're not existing in a coercive system, where there might be outsized repercussions for certain choices you make in your life, and where you did not create the ground conditions for those decisions.

I made a terrible joke with my wife a year ago that she still does not like. I deeply suspect that if I don't end up in a Salvadoran death camp in the next three years, it just means I didn't do enough. Now — that's only partly funny, right? Part of the reason it's funny is that it feels a little too close to home to really laugh about.

I told you last week: I'm not going to be the one who calls and says, "you know that time you feared — that time when it's time for you to stand up and make a hard choice? It's here." I'm not the switchboard operator on that telephone. But this thing that we call life, love, Gaia, God — this thing that gives us a shared sense that love in the center means something — it has such a switchboard. And it may call you. And my job, as I see it, is to attune your ear to the sound of the ringing, so that when it rings, you know to reach and pick it up. My job, if I understand it correctly, is to attune your ears to the sound of the voice of the divine, so that when you pick up that call, and it says the hard time is here, you can hear the wise counsel of that voice in your own ear and your own heart. Because the voice of the divine, and the energy of the divine working among us, is one of those things to which we are supplicant. And I don't care whether your view of that energy is mystical, metaphysical, or purely natural — because regardless of your beliefs about it, you can sit down in a room with another human being and experience it. You can experience its real manifestation, as something felt between us and among us that goes deeper than just us. One of my favorite UU sayings is that we don't have to think alike to love alike. We can get in a room — one on one, or in a small group, or in a big group like this — and we can feel the love. And unless we are living in our own form of denial, we have to acknowledge that it means something. The existence of the love itself means something.

I talked last week about how our willingness to show up and love things opens us to being hurt. Because that's what love is. Love is also the loss of the beloved — as I was deeply reminded at the memorial service yesterday. I was reminded that even in times when we've had a falling-out with someone — maybe we didn't leave on the best terms — there were still moments of deep connection that happened. And they meant more. Those moments of deep connection meant more than the little fights we had. The moments when we really saw each other, one to one, as human beings — as divine spirits inhabiting this amazing and mysterious thing called life — those moments of seeing one another, and being seen, mattered more than the rest of it.

We have to be supplicant to that truth, too. To the truth that we are more than our woundedness. More than our ability to cause harm to others. Our ability to heal and be healed is greater. I don't know if it lines up for you, but when I say those words, I hear the echo of Dr. King in my heart: the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. A supple branch bends in the wind. The supple tree doesn't break in the storm. It yields to what must be yielded to, in order to remain. It acknowledges the truth of the wind, and the rain, and the storm, and the soil conditions, and the rocks — all of it. They are its truth.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

There's one more important thing I want to share with you, and then we'll do some more singing together.

You all have heard a lot recently about the attention economy. This is the thing that is the information technology revolution, plus social media, plus the internet, plus the way it's all being used algorithmically. The ability of the algorithm to put the right thing right in front of your eyes — on Google, or YouTube, or wherever — so that you go, "oh, I am interested in that; let me—" and there's the invitation down the rabbit hole of doomscrolling. Sometimes it's not doom — sometimes it's joy-scrolling, or curiosity-scrolling — but it knows that you, as a human being, have several attention traps. It's scanning for them. And when it finds them, it sends you the hook — and it'll keep sending you the hook as long as you're willing to bite. Just like any good fisherman would.

But this attention-economy thing only works for one reason, and this is what I want you to leave here with today. It only works because attention is your most valuable resource. Period. Your attention is the most valuable resource you possess in your life. Full stop. And your primary act of stewardship in this life is the stewardship of your own attention — and of the energy of agency that flows with that attention into doing things in the world.

If any of you have sat knee to knee with somebody, in a moment when you needed it, and they gave you one hundred percent of their attention — you know that attention is so powerful, you don't even have to follow it with action. Attention itself is an action. Attention itself can hold a space — for healing, for being seen, for making that deep human connection that makes life worth living, and makes waking up, on a morning when war got started again, still livable, and breathable, and survivable.

So I ask you this. If attention is the foundation of who you are — if it is another way of saying consciousness — and it is the most valuable resource you have in your life: what are your stewardship practices? What do you do to steward the spending of this most valuable resource? Are you investing it in the places in your life that you want to grow? Or are you letting others catch you with their hooks, and drag your attention where they would like it to be? Because, as I suggested last week, that puts you on their puppet strings. You deciding where your attention goes makes you an agent of unpredictability. And I like that for you. I want that for you. I want you to become less predictable — even to yourself — than you think you are.

And this is the first step: recognizing that your attention belongs to you. It doesn't belong to anyone else to command. Of all the things in this life you can choose, the important choices all start there — with how, and where, and when you grant your attention to this life that shows up as a gift every morning when you wake up. To this life that shows up as a gift, every morning that you wake up. It's not an entitlement. And you are not at their beck and call.

But you are at the call of something else, asking for your supplication: the call of what is, and love, and life. They know your number. They want to know that, when the time comes, you're going to pick up the call.

Amen.

[00:27:01] Eric Hepburn (host outro): Until next time — thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give. The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted on Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew this week was Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Andrea McDaniel. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn. See you next time.