A new mother is extraordinarily attentive to the sounds her baby is making or might make in the adjoining room. Her attentiveness is not simply a fact about her; it has become a part of her spiritual reality, a part of what she is now. She is spiritually bound to her baby, and the material of the binding is her attentiveness.

And what is true of her is true of everyone. Our reality – Our Being-in-the-world, to borrow from Heidegger – consists largely in the nature and direction of our attentiveness. And the objects of our attentiveness bind us, as the baby binds the mother.

For example, we have long been slaves, spiritually, to the mechanical clock, or more precisely, to the flat, arithmetical nature of time that the mechanical clock postulates. Regardless of what we are doing, we do it in attendance on the clock. Our attentiveness to the clock lies deeper in our spirit even than the things themselves that we are doing, since the things we do are almost all done with reference to it. Our spirits are bound to the time. That’s why becoming utterly engrossed in something has the phenomenology of liberation, of freedom, and why becoming suddenly aware once again of ‘the time’ has the feel of being reshackled.

Although it isn’t (yet) of the same magnitude as our enslavement to the clock, in recent decades – in a demonic caricature of attending to the words of Christ – we attend with paralyzing intensity to our phones and computers. When we are not listening to them, we are listening for them, listening for their call. Our attentiveness is focused on them and, again, that focus is our spiritual reality. Our reality is a binding orientation towards the words of the world, even if we are only listening for uplifting messages and good news.