Hooked on Headlines - The Devil's Bid For Your Attention

The Devil doesn’t just tempt you to sin. He tempts you to be distracted. And that’s far more dangerous.

I’v been trying for years to convince Catholics (and other Christians) that they’re fixated and focused on all the wrong things. Catholic news, politics, social unrest—sometimes a thousand miles away where it could never be meaningful to their lives or spirituality. “What’s the pope doing? What’d he say? What are the cardinals talking about, thousands of miles away? What’d that bishop say/do in a diocese I don’t even live and worship in? Oh my goodness, oh my goodness!!”

Can I be blunt with you? It’s time to get over it, folks. Stop playing the devil’s game. Yes, the devil has a hand in it! Hey, you don’t have to take my word for it. This is catechesis from many saints and spirituality masters. Listen to them if you won’t listen to me.

What Saints Have Said

The Setup

Most Christians think temptation is about being drawn toward obvious evil. Lust. Pride. Anger. Something dramatic, and something that prompts an act of the will. But that assumption is too small.

Some temptations are temptations to a disposition—or temptations to inaction. The enemy doesn’t always ensnare us through temptation to sin; he often gets us by drawing us out, thinning us out, and wearing us out.

He fragments your focus, keeping you busy, agitated, and stimulated enough that you never go deep. He draws you (your attention) away from your interior castle where you are strong and fortified, drawing you way out into the intellectual wild where you’re all alone and vulnerable.

Augustine

Augustine viewed an excessive obsession with current events or worldly happenings as a form of curiosity—a vice that distracts from the pursuit of wisdom and holiness.

"You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you... You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness."

God speaks to the soul through an illumination of the intellect. He rarely speaks through signs outside of ourselves, because signs are meant to be read. If a soul is not conditioned and disposed to seeing, “reading” and correctly interpreting those signs, then the signs are useless. God doesn’t work that way.

So it’s bad discipline, and a fruitless venture to direct and guide our will by the prompting of unprofitable things that have our attention

“In addition to the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes… which belong to the old life, and not to the new, there is in the soul through the same eyes a certain vain and curious desire, veiled under the name of knowledge and science… This is that curiosity which is the lust of the eyes.”
— Both quotes from St. Augustine, Confessions

This “lust of the eyes” is a lack of discipline over your attention, and over your intellect. It prompts us to an inordinate and unrealistic drive to be hyper-aware of everything that doesn’t matter, leading us to anxiety (where Peace cannot reign in the heart) and even rage. How is any of that leading anybody to holiness?