'It draws on the chapel’s heritage as a place of sanctuary and reflection by encouraging visitors to explore attention not as rigid focus, but as a receptive and dynamic engagement with the world, inspired by the philosophy of Simone Weil.
Weil wrote: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Ellen McGrath Smith has noted that invoking “the spiritual writing of Simone Weil”, including that assertion, broadens the possibility for poetry, as it also does for art, as prayer, regardless of content, since all such acts are acts of “acute mindfulness”. David Miller finds an earlier source for such ideas in Nicolas Malebranche, who said that attention “is the natural prayer of the soul”.
Weil, he suggests, echoed this, consciously or not, in her similar assertion.'
Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.
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Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now.
