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Acedia Gratitude

Helen Keller once said, “Everything has its wonders, even darkness, and silence.” As I sit with that thought, I am considering the wonder of acedia.

Acedia does offer time for contemplation if I choose to take it rather than ruminating about what I could or should be doing. It does become work to make acedia contemplation into something useful. When I bring in mindfulness and gratitude to acedia, I can be awakened to the happiness of an uncomplicated moment.

I am grateful for acedia because it helps me slow down to make decisions. The demon acedia’s voice is contrary. When I have a decision to make, acedia will speak many reasons why I don’t need to take action or complete a task. It does make me aware of my actions. Am I taking the right action for the right reason?

Sometimes though, acedia is too much of a stall. At some point, I will need to ask the demon to leave.

I am grateful for the rest acedia offers me. Time has become my most valued currency — as it is in the world, and it probably always was, we just didn’t realize it. Acedia allows time to stretch out in front of me. Perhaps a nap is wisely taken. Perhaps a trip down an internet rabbit hole helps me to discover a new piece of wisdom that I can store away. Perhaps a bath or a walk is needed. Acedia offers all of these self-care options.

I am grateful for acedia because I am able to pause my overwhelm. When I sit to watch the snippets that the evening news, and my email feed, and my social media stream offers, I am overwhelmed by all that there is to do to repair the world that we have broken: climate crisis, gun violence, inequality, pollution, poverty, and any one of a very long list of problems that vie for my attention. I want to do something. Acedia stops me from feeling that I need to do everything. By sitting, I can feel small and still see the world. I can see that, as Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee prophetized “The world is not a problem to be solved, it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self, and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.” I lean against a tree as I sit and eventually the demon acedia sleeps. I can stand and move one step closer to a hopeful future.

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The Semantics of Acedia

My friend and I sat on a cool patio after the climate march, sipping tea, and we discussed the predicament that too many issues bring to the climate crisis. I explained that I felt we were in the grips of acedia. She asked for an explanation.

When I am asked to explain what I am working on, I am always asked what acedia means. I repeat Kathleen Norris‘s definition: The word literally means not-caring or being unable to care, and ultimately, being unable to care that you don’t care.” The response to that is often, “oh, like apathy.” Not quite.

Then I try John Cassian’s description which includes disgust…disdain and contempt…lazy and sluggish…unreasonable confusion.” They try to pigeon -hole it to sloth. That’s not quite right either.

Acedia was first described in the fourth century by monks who created communities in the desert, and, in some cases, particularly at around the noon hours, failed to do the things required of their tradition. For the monks, there were eight bad thoughts, the worst and hardest to avoid, was acedia. Eventually, St. Thomas Aquinas evolved those thoughts into the seven deadly sins. Defining them this way allowed the church to include actions and thoughts. St. Thomas rolled acedia into sloth. The desert mothers and fathers expressed these “sins” as a mindset. They were thought temptations that took one off the holy path. Thoughts are distractions.

The descriptions of acedia from the fourth-century writings of Evagrius Ponticus shows that acedia is much more than sloth:

The demon of acedia—also called the noonday demon—is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all [emphasis added]. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun, to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour, to look now this way and now that, to see if perhaps one of the brethren appears from his cell. Then too he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labor. He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement. Should there be someone at this period who happens to offend him in some way or other, this, too, the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred. This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself. (p. 4)

Acedia becomes relevant to today when we expand the definition to include the fullness of the word:

Acedia is:
• intimately linked to the deepest roots of man’s affective and volitional life,
• a form of “spiritual laziness” manifest as a fundamental lack of the commitment required by a relationship of profound love,
• that, for acedia, participation in the divine nature of grace is possible, but unappealing,
• acedia is a manifestation of the breakdown in the individual and/or cultural structures, a disjunction between the cultural norm and the cultural structures for achieving these norms, and
• acedia is a pre-rational state, driving the behaviors of avoidance that manifest as fearfulness, laziness, and self-righteousness.
Finally, acedia is a choice. (pg. 64)

One could argue that it is all semantics. It might be. Where I stand, we still need to look for a way out.

Source: Dave MacQuarrie, MD PhD. Acedia: The Darkness Within: (and the darkness of Climate Change). AuthorHouse. Kindle Edition.

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Through Acedia

I was recently asked what it meant to be a good person in a world where definitions are updated, adjusted and deleted depending on the wind. It seems that the question of good and right is under siege right now as the world is shifting. Can you feel the wobble?

There is a fringe theory that suggests that the magnetic poles around which the earth turns might to shift or wander up to thirty degrees causing potentially cataclysmic events. The earth generally makes that kind of change slowly. Imagine the speed of a retreating glacier during the last ice age. Humans change things quickly. Think of the retreating glaciers during this Anthropocene age. Still, let’s expand on this metaphor as the world seems to be wobbling right now between continuing or returning to energy-draining — in all ways: human and earth— practices and restorative, reverential practices.

I find this wobble quite destabilizing. I am so busy trying to keep my feet underneath me that I ignore most of what goes on around me, in spite of a desire to do something good. So, Acedia is my companion in this.

Acedia sits me “between two fears — the fear of what will happen, if we, as a society, continue the way we’re going and the fear of acknowledging how bad things are because of the despair that doing so brings up.” (Active Hope, pg. 65)

How did we get into this mess? That is looking down a slippery slope of rule-breaking on a vast global scale, the consequences of which we are only beginning to see.

Acedia tells me that is will continue to get worse and eventually I will die. So, what is the point? And that is not true (well, the dying part is true, eventually). It doesn’t always get worse. Eventually, we can get through: we finish the race; we recycle or reduce plastic; we clean our house. And we are better for it.

How do we get out of this mess is the question that acknowledges where we are and looks forward. When we look forward, we can see the path through. As Robert Frost reminds us in A Servant to Servants:

By good rights I ought not to have so much
Put on me but there seems no other way.
Len says one steady pull more ought to do it.
He says the best way out is always through.
And I agree to that, or in so far,
As that I can see no way out but through.

In the fourth century, the desert mothers and fathers instructed that perseverance was the only cure for acedia. Perseverance, day after day…go through.

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Deconstructing Acedia

Thinking back, I can’t recall where I first discovered acedia. Perhaps, it was the book in the library: Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, & A Writer’s Life. Or perhaps it was a Google search down a rabbit hole where I discovered “The Noonday Demon: Acedia, The Unnamed Evil Of Our Times.” Either way, acedia has been my constant companion since I discovered it. It allows me to name my frame. When I walk around in a daze, purposeless and morose, acedia is there. When I choose to read email instead of writing my presentation, acedia is there. When I buy one more book that promises to make me younger, thinner, or more desirable, without following the directions of any of them, acedia is there.

Acedia is an ancient word that contains ancient wisdom. Perhaps it is telling that modern society removed acedia from the dictionary at the same time that the western world decided that consumerism was the way to right all that was wrong with the world: buy more stuff to build more factories to employ more people to buy more stuff. The age of consumerism has brought us to the age of distraction and distraction is acedia.

Acedia was predominantly used to describe what the desert mothers and fathers — early Christian monastics — call the noonday demon. Evargius Ponticus described acedia in the 5th century in his treatise, The Eight Spirits of Wickedness:

The look of someone in prey to acedia frequently goes to the windows, and his soul dreams of visitors. When the door squeaks, he jumps. When he hears a voice, he looks out the window. He does not turn away until, overcome with drowsiness, he sits down. The acediac often yawns when he reads, and he gets tired easily. He rubs his eyes, he stretches out his arms, and he looks up from his book. He looks at the wall, then comes back to read a bit more. Flipping through the pages, he kills time looking at the end of the book. He counts the pages, calculates the number of fascilies, complains about the print and the design. Finally, closing up the book, he lays his head on top of it and falls asleep, but not into a deep slumber, because hunger stirs his soul once again, imposing upon him its own preoccupations.

Turn the clock ahead fifteen hundred years from that writing and Evagrius has a peek into my day at my desk because “it [the acedia demon] gives you ideas of leaving, the need to change your location and style of life, it depicts this other life as your salvation and persuades you that if you do not leave, you will be lost.” Acedia is an ancient temptress in modern dress.

The solution for the sufferers is perseverance. Do I have the perseverance — the ability to see this (the word placeholder for any meaningful action) through to the end? That is one of the many questions that fill my thoughts as I stare out the window with my presentation unfinished.

Quote Source: Nault, Jean-Charles. Acedia: The Enemy of Spiritual Joy. Communio 31 (Summer 2004) https://www.communio-icr.com/articles/view/acedia-enemy-of-spiritual-joy