The Sacrament of Paying Attention

We all feel it: We scroll and scroll, and then we surface from our screens hollowed out, unsure of what we have just consumed or why. We sit across from people we love and find our minds elsewhere. We intend to read, to pray, to simply rest inside our own thoughts, and instead we reach, again, for a bright rectangle that promises everything yet delivers a kind of sleep.

Into this digital dusk, Cameron Bellm delivers something like first light. 

What if attention were measured not by quantity but by quality—by what it helps us understand about ourselves, by the bridges it builds to others, by the sacredness it ushers us into? This is the attention economy Bellm believes is still within reach.

In The Sacrament of Paying Attention, she explores what might be possible if we stop trying to merely survive the attention economy and begin, instead, to imagine attention itself differently. Not as a dwindling resource to be hoarded against the algorithm. Not as fuel for getting more done. But as something closer to a sacrament—an outward sign of an inward grace, a way of being with the world that opens onto wonder.

Bellm’s companions on this path are the great noticers: Mary Oliver in her marshes, Simone Weil bent toward the suffering of strangers, Etty Hillesum kneeling on bathroom matting in a darkening Amsterdam, Iris Murdoch insisting that love is the long, patient look at what is actually there. Through them, Bellm points us toward an older, richer economy—one of abundance, of gift, of communion.