"If you learn to give sustained and intense attention to a problem in your school work, you will be better positioned to give such attention to your suffering neighbor, and to God in prayer. And because it does not come naturally to us to love God or our neighbor, the subjects we like least in school are the ones that can be most spiritually useful to us, because attentiveness to them will be hard-won and therefor emore useful when we turn to other things we would rather do. 'If we concentrate our attentions,' Weil says, 'on trying to solve a problem in geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to success than we were at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute in that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer' (Waiting on God, p. 106). It is vital that we practice such discipline, Weil argues, because 'warmth of heart' does not really count for much in prayer, though we would like to think it does. Sudden loving feelings for people will not sustain us for more than a few seconds before they fade, whereas 'quality of attention' sustains prayers for far longer."
Alan Jacobs, "On Charitable Teaching"
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