I’m leading my faith community through a teaching series concerning the connection between emotional health with spiritual health. Part of the series are daily soul-training exercises, posted on our Facebook page and on our blog,  designed to reconnect ourselves to the roots of contemplation as taught by the Desert Fathers. In posting these soul-training exercises to the web, I have allowed for a potentially insidious thing to happen: the same devices most of us use to navigate our lives – computers, iPads and smartphones – can actually be a distraction to the very contemplation I am advocating. Follow me.

Author and business guru Tony Schwartz writes often about the electronic distractions we face daily as we try and work. With just a keystroke or two we have access to Google, YouTube, Facebook, blogs and books, not to mention TV shows, newspapers, magazines and Twitter. The same can be said of our attempts to be contemplative.

Social critic Linda Stone has coined the phrase continuous partial attention to describe the divided way we attempt to focus. Her basic point is that we keep one thing at the top level of our focus while at the same time scanning the periphery in case something more exciting or engaging emerges. In her words, “staying singly focused on a task in this digital era is like trying to resist eating while sitting in a bakery as cookies, pies, cakes and tarts emerge fresh and fragrant from the oven.”

Finding that quiet place, as free of distraction as possible, has always been my secret weapon for contemplation. I had never really considered how the very technology I use to assist my contemplation might actually be detracting from it. What do you think?