Liturgy in an Age of Distraction
October 1, 2024
An interview with Dr. E Byron Anderson
On Monday, October 7, 2:30 – 3:30 p.m. ET, Dr. E. Byron (Ron) Anderson—Garrett’s Ernest and Bernice Styberg Professor of Worship—will deliver the annual Kavanagh Lecture at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, “Hear, Listen, Attend: Liturgy in an Age of Distraction.” Below, find a conversation with Dr. Anderson about his topic for this address, edited for length and clarity.
Benjamin Perry (BP): I love this idea of how liturgical action can resist an age of distraction. Why did you choose this theme for your lecture?
Dr. Ron Anderson (RA): I’ve drawn together a few threads I’ve been working on throughout this year. One set of literature describes the way in which shared language develops. Another thread is how we learn to pay attention together as part of our psychological development. Young children, between the ages on nine months and a year, learn by interacting with their caregivers. It’s called joint attention because a parent and child will point to something, share in attention to it, and come to know something together[RA1] . It’s also how we begin to learn something about one another. And then the last thread I’ve picked up is work by the philosopher Albert Borgmann, who talks about focal practices and focal things. All of this came together, and the question of distraction provided the umbrella problem I wanted to address—how we become attuned, existing not just side by side but in shared emotional, intellectual, interpersonal connection.
BP: It seems like there’s an implicit thesis in your framing—that over 50, 20, 10 years, there has been a fracturing of our shared attention
RA: Well, one of the things that helped prompt this was an op-ed piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, focused on students’ increasing inability to read long texts, to pay attention for longer periods of time. The author [RA2] Steve Minz was noting how over the past 20 years specifically, our attention span has decreased from 150 seconds to 47 seconds. That’s a huge drop! Other literature then talks about how websites like Facebook are oriented toward just grabbing our attention—click, click, click, keep going, keep going. We may think this is convenient, but what we don’t understand is that it rewires our brains. It’s changing our neurological structure and ability to pay attention. It’s not just that we’re distracted, we are attending to other things, often multiple things. The literature also presses back against this because when we “multitask,” we’re just shifting our attention quickly between multiple things. This affects how we think, and our ability to share attention.
BP: There’s also been a rise in literature focused on the nature and experience of time. We’re living this paradox where—by “saving” so much time—people actually feel like it is slipping through their fingers, that the time they experience has been cheapened. Can you talk about how liturgical space invites people to consider time differently?
RA: It’s part of the same process, giving joint attention to things. This is especially true when we sing together. When we’re singing together, we are unaware of the time. It’s not that we step out of time, but it’s a defining characteristic of music: Music carries us. Music is time bound; it moves us temporally forward, but when we are creating music together we lose awareness of time’s passing. I think about Taizé songs and repetitive practice. The monks might spend 10 minutes on a single song because it draws us into contemplative space together as a community. Now we are sounding together. We are speaking together. We are breathing together. We are establishing a rhythm together and, in that moment, ritual draws us into that timeless space. Good liturgy, good ritual sparks engagement with one another, an experience that gives us the sense of being out of time, even as time is passing.
BP: When people have that embodied experience in one space, does that spill out and affect the rest of their lives?
RA: It starts to train us to pay attention. Instead of scrolling through something on my phone every 30 seconds, I am learning to give sustained attention with a community. Back to the neurological question: We can’t see this, but the that sustained attention is actually changing our brains, too.
BP: Moving from individual attention to what you describe as joint attention, it doesn’t seem coincidental that this age of distraction has coincided with a heightened political polarization and the fracturing of communal life. Those two things, at least in my mind, feel linked. How does the process of cultivating shared attention also cultivate relationship and connection?
RA: If I’m paying attention to something by myself, scrolling through Facebook or watching a news program by myself on my TV, I’m isolated. I may have a sense of connection because of beliefs or political commitments, but I’m just an individual in that experience. Joint attention is at its strongest when we’re physically together because we’re aware of the other person. There’s something that happens with an infant and parent: Joint attention can’t happen if the child just sees a parent doing something on a screen, physical relationship facilitates this growth. If we point to something, there’s a physical gesture. Or, as we’re talking, I’m leaning in toward you and you’re leaning in toward me.
BP: The Surgeon General has talked about an epidemic of loneliness. It feels like whether you’re talking about joint attention between a parent and child or collective belonging in a pew, there’s an affirmation of one’s connection to other people. How does liturgy help address this isolation crisis?
RA: It’s because we’re not just standing side by side. If we’re on an elevator we’re not giving joint attention, we’re just sharing space as we wait for the door to open. Or, in a museum, we might stand side by side with a stranger looking at a piece of art. But if we’re on a tour with a docent who says, “Now let’s look at this,” everything changes. Our attention is drawn together, and we begin to have a shared understanding. And liturgy is, fundamentally, something we do together. “Let us listen for the Word of God.” In the Orthodox liturgy, the deacon says, “Wisdom, let us attend.” Those words invite us into ways of being together. The overarching sense of communion is another image: How are we in communion with one another through this ritual event we call Christian worship? What does it mean to gather as a community? What does it mean to exchange the peace? Whatever form it takes in a congregation, what does it mean to come to the Lord’s table together? When I’m in a pew, I’m very conscious of hearing other voices. I can hear my wife beside me but also the child that’s sitting behind me, and the adults in front of me. There’s a sense that we are together, building this thing that is prayer. That is cultivating work.
BP: What do hope folks who attend the lecture will take away?
RA: I hope they’ll realize how these other conversations that aren’t explicitly connected to liturgy can help us think about liturgy. What does it mean to consider focal things? What does it mean to consider joint attention? And also, how do we resist distraction? Borgmann has a whole concept about device paradigms, the way devices direct our attention. Part of his critique is that we are essentially surrendering our own will. Now, others are determining where we give attention. It’s really interesting because Borgmann started writing this stuff in 1984 when the first Mac appeared, and we didn’t have the devices we have now. But this literature has only grown more important—the notion, “Yeah, it’s convenient. But convenient for who?” It’s convenient for those who are trying to sell us things. It’s convenient for a consumer culture. I want folks to ask: Are we even aware that someone else is making this decision for us?
Click here to watch Dr. Anderson’s lecture on the free livestream.