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.