Most mornings I stop by the Cathedral, push the door, kneel for a few minutes before the day takes me. And most mornings I do it with my headphones still in. Nothing playing, usually. Just in, ready for the podcast I'll start again on the walk out.
I didn't think to ask myself these for a long time. When did I last let a silence go unfilled? If nothing was playing, what were the headphones actually for? What was I keeping one ear back for?
Nothing dramatic happens when you pray this way. That's the problem. The prayer still counts. The knee still bends, the words still come. But part of you stays back. You're in the church and also, a little bit, still out in the day's traffic. Reachable. Half-turned toward the next thing. You can do this for years and never really notice what it costs.
Nothing Was Playing, But the Door Was Still Open
The common-sense view is that headphones are neutral. Efficient, even. You're just ready to press play. On that view, silence is only the absence of audio, a gap to fill the moment you're free.
But the headphones weren't nothing. They were a posture. A door to the office left open, propped with my foot, in the one place I'd come to shut it. Nothing was playing. But I'd arranged ahead of time to be interrupted, and the arranging was the thing.
We aren't good at unarranged attention anymore. The researcher Gloria Mark has spent years measuring how long people hold focus on a single screen before switching away. About two and a half minutes twenty years ago. Roughly forty-seven seconds now. Divided attention isn't something we slip into now and then. It's the default.
"Pray Always" Isn't a Command to Multitask
Paul tells the Thessalonians to "pray without ceasing." It's easy to read that as a productivity instruction. Pray while you commute, pray while you scroll, pray with one ear on the world. Keep the channel open the whole time.
That's not how the tradition takes it. Praying always is about where the heart is turned, not about doing two things at once.
Thomas Aquinas is oddly reassuring here. He actually asks whether prayer needs attention at all, and his answer is gentler than you'd think. He says there are three ways to pay attention: to the words, to what they mean, and to God himself. The last one matters most, and even a distracted or unschooled person can manage it. He also just admits that the mind wanders. A prayer doesn't lose its fruit because your thoughts drifted off, as long as you started out turned toward God.
So the wandering isn't the enemy. Here's the bit that got me. There's the distraction that turns up on its own: the sudden thought, the aching knee, the kid you remember halfway through a sentence. And there's the distraction you set up before you even begin. Aquinas forgives the first. It's just the ordinary weather of a praying mind. The headphones were the second kind. Which flips the question around. Is the problem the noise, or is it that I'd already made myself ready to take it?
The Morning I Left Them Out
One Tuesday I forgot them. Left them in the car, walked in bare-eared, knelt down.
I don't really understand what happened next. The prayer went deeper, and quicker, and closer than it had felt in that pew in months. And the odd thing is that nothing had been playing on the other mornings anyway. The audio was never the difference. Being ready for audio was.
There's a small study I keep coming back to. Researchers played people music at different tempos and put a two-minute silence in between the tracks. The silence turned out to be more calming than any of the music. Heart rate and blood pressure dropped below where they'd started. The rest came in the pause. Not in whatever got picked next. In the gap nobody filled.
The Whisper You Can't Hear Over a Podcast
When Elijah goes looking for God on the mountain, God isn't in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire. He comes in a sound so slight the old translations reach for a still, small voice.
The Catechism puts silence near the centre of the deepest kind of prayer, and it's blunt about our usual problem: distraction. A distraction, it says, shows us what we're attached to. That's the line that stuck with me in the car park. The open channel wasn't neutral. It was a small, honest admission of where my attention actually was. One foot in the office, before the office had even asked.
What This Looks Like on Tuesday
Not a rule. A posture. Take them out at the door, the earbuds and the phone they answer to. In a pocket, not in your ears, before you kneel. Let the walk in be quiet, even if the walk out isn't.
It won't feel holy. It'll feel like a small subtraction, and the first few times it might feel like nothing at all. That's fine. You're not running a technique that's supposed to force something. You're just shutting a door you'd got used to leaving open, and letting God have the ear you'd been keeping back.
I made a small canvas for the corner where I pray at home, a plain word to help me turn up with both ears. Check out our artwork to inspire your contemplations. It's a small thing. The silence is the bigger one.
So, two questions to take to your own door. What would you have to not hear, in order to hear him? And when did staying reachable turn into a decision you never actually made?
I still catch myself reaching for the earbuds at the door. I haven't got this figured out. But I take them out now, most mornings. The church is quieter than it used to be. Or maybe I am.
Harvey 🐑
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Sources & further reading
- 1 Thessalonians 5:17. "Pray without ceasing."
- 1 Kings 19:11-13. Elijah and the gentle whisper on the mountain.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church §§2559, 2717, 2729. Prayer as the raising of the mind and heart to God; silence in contemplative prayer; distraction as the habitual difficulty of prayer. (vatican.va)
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, q.83, a.13. Whether attention is a requisite of prayer. (New Advent)
- Bernardi et al., "Cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and respiratory changes induced by different types of music in musicians and non-musicians: the importance of silence," Heart (2006). A small study (n=24); the interspersed silence was the most relaxing condition.
- Gloria Mark, Attention Span (2023). On the measured decline in sustained attention on screens.
Posts on 99sheep.co are written by Harvey, a Catholic dad who designs apparel after bedtime. Every dollar of profit funds Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery and St. Joseph's Seminary in Xuan Loc Diocese, Vietnam.