Prayer Consists of Attention: On Reading as a Spiritual Practice

I first read Simone Weil’s 1950 book Waiting for God six years ago. It was a cloudy Monday in March, and I was sitting on the porch of a 100-year-old Victorian home—former officer’s quarters for a decommissioned military outpost off the coast of Washington state—where I could see the grey water of the Puget Sound and grey sky beyond the shoreline. I’d spent the last several years wondering how I might inhabit my life and my faith in a more contemplative way—and on that day, on that porch, Weil proposed a definition of prayer that resonated with me more than any evangelical prescription.

“Prayer consists of attention,” Weil writes in Waiting for God. “It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of prayer.” A prayer, then, could be any moment of mindfulness, reverence, concentration. It could be whatever I wanted it to be.

Most people probably picture the act of prayer as a person talking to‘s George Bailey from —alone, desperate, seeking divine intervention. In the film’s climactic prayer scene, Bailey, on the brink of bankruptcy and possible imprisonment, sits in a bar by himself, tears in his eyes. His clasps his hands together to beseech a God he’s not even sure is listening: “Dear Father in heaven,” he says despairingly, “I’m not a praying man but if you’re up there and you can hear me, show me the way. I’m at the end of my rope. Show me the way, God.”