Acedia and the Royal Family

We live in a world of clutter: so many duties, so many things vying for our attention. The world of academia forms a nice metaphor for this larger scope of life: just between taking three graduate courses and teaching two classes, rarely is there ever time to devote my full time and attention to any single thing. To carry the metaphor further—for it has applicability outside the classroom—the best scenario would be my full and undivided attention toward one duty at one time. Yet that is often an impossibility and one task must be set down so that another, immediately pressing one, might be taken up. The result is mental fragmentation and tasks done to the minimal level of completion or forever left half finished. In a very similar manner, the affairs of ordinary life can press down upon us, our self-imposed deadlines and duties causing a sort of mental fragmentation, stealing from us precious peace of mind. There is not time for contemplation or focusing on any issues outside the immediately tangible. The simple fact is, if we are going to have time for such things, we are going to have to make time for them, partly by learning to say “no” to things of lesser importance so that we can “yes” to things of greater importance.

Recently I read a challenging article from First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Its central premise is that every age suffers from one of the seven deadly sins, and that the sin most commonly identified in our age is pride. Yet this sin, the essay concludes, has been misidentified: the real sin of our age is acedia, or sloth, sometimes called the noonday devil. Because of its Latin etymology (which we will gloss in a moment), acedia is frequently used to refer to depression, yet there is a deeper meaning of the word: one that perhaps gets at the root idea of depression. That is, acedia comes closer to the idea of the Latin depress-, which is the past participle stem of deprimere, meaning “to press down,” from premere, “to press.” No picture is more poignant than that of bathing a cat, a creature notoriously appalled by water: “to press down” a feline into a tub filled with water presents a telling picture, if an exaggeration of our intended point. Simply put, acedia involves any element that “presses us down,” our reactions ranging from excessively agitated—like our cat in the vat—to subdued and defeated, like a cat in a vat after several hours of futile struggle. Thus, R. R. Reno writes in Fighting the Noonday Devil that pride may not be the deadly sin that most afflicts our age—defiant men and women shaking an angry fist in the face of God—but rather that we suffer most from acedia, or spiritual torpor. We have either lost the closeness of intimacy with God and hence our sense of connection and enthusiasm for the things he values, or else we are indifferent or apathetic to spiritual considerations altogether, finding them irrelevant and unnecessary. Thus it is that Reno writes:

The causes of acedia are many, but the overall effect is a blunting of the knife edge of spirituality. The classic hymn “Take Time to be Holy” is nowhere more appropriate than in our own busy day; we spoke recently about “breathing in” and “breathing out”; we suggested that the life of faith starts inward in communion with God and then quite naturally extends outward. Thus, breathe in: “Take time to be holy, / speak oft with thy Lord; / abide in him always, / and feed on his word” and then breathe out: “Make friends of God’s children, / help those who are weak, / forgetting in nothing / his blessing to seek.” The same “breathe in / breathe out” motif can be extended to the entire hymn, of which we will here cite only the final stanza: “Take time to be holy, / be calm in thy soul, / each thought and each motive / beneath his control” (breathed in, and accordingly breathed out) “Thus led by his spirit / to fountains of love, / thou soon shalt be fitted / for service above.”

One of the many symptoms of acedia is a fragmented frame of mind that subtly “presses us down,” leaving us fraught with groundless anxiety and care. And one of the many ways in which this symptom manifests itself is in the act of decision making. Making decisions can be one of the most anxiety-inducing things we could do, particularly when it comes to life-changing events. We could safely say that the more we have riding on the question, the more anxiety is produced from making a firm decision. Did we decide rightly? Was our choice wise? Recently, in fact, the etymology of the word “decision” was brought to my attention: it comes from the Latin decidere, which basically means “to cut off.” Thus, when we choose to do this thing and not that thing, to marry this person and not that person, to turn right instead of turning left, we have effectively “cut off” other alternatives. Not only is there a sense of what we have decided for, but there is also a sense in what we have decided against as well.

It strikes me that in our busy way of life, the thing we often need is to take a deep breath: we need to “breathe in.” When we really pause and still our minds for a moment, then the peace and the sanctity of our faith has a chance to re-create us; in fact, the idea of recreation in its purest sense involves precisely this idea of “re-creation.” We have countless promises of the goodness of God and his faithfulness to his children; many of us can point to any number of little blessings that characterize our lives more often than not: we can point to countless times in which things worked out okay, even in spite of ourselves. Life-changing decisions are no different. Certainly it is wise to seek good counsel and to weigh the particulars before making any major decision. But there comes a point at which we must step off, so to speak, and embrace the decision that we have made along with its consequences. Even though that decision necessarily involves at once saying yes to something and no to something else, it does not have to plague us forever afterwards as we wonder if we have made the correct decision. The fact is, most choices are not black and white: there is typically a range of possible good choices, each with desirable outcomes and a few genuine losses as well. Loss is inevitable in the pursuit of gain: we must always give something up in order to gain something better. If we have made our decision in good faith, we can trust that God will honor it. If he truly is bigger than ourselves and our troubles, then he is quite capable of making even a poorer choice work together for the greater good of everyone involved, ourselves included.

Mistakes are one of the outcomes we fear when faced with difficult decisions. Even though making a mistake is typically awkward, there have been many times in which such blunders have led to an even greater understanding and awareness than would have been accomplished otherwise. The examples are many: a word misspoken can help clarify a point that would not have been treated otherwise; accidentally forgetting a gift for a loved one can actually demonstrate the depth of our love beyond what the gift by itself could have effected. There are countless instances in which mistakes have furnished the opportunities for learning, increasing understanding, clarity, and creating a bond between persons that would not otherwise have existed. Perhaps, then, what we should aim at in this life is not a life of perfection in terms of flawless execution of minute detail: instead, perhaps what we should aim at is a life of integrity. Such a life is perfect as God is perfect, because its overall aim and focus is that which is good. Yet a life of integrity is not necessarily perfect in the sense of being error-free, and there is no reason it should be. Errors furnish opportunities for learning and growth if we will but allow; we can seek and find creative ways to turn error into the greater good. Thus, it is not the avoidance of error that we should seek as an end unto itself, but rather the continual striving toward the life of integrity, learning to love the things God loves and to hate the things God hates. In that pursuit, even our errors are redeemed and redeemable.

Perhaps these considerations seem self-evident. Yet it is startling how quickly we can forget, particularly when we are run ragged, running to and fro, the level of stress and anxiety that we feel continuing to mount. During such times, what we really need is for someone to stop the flurrying pace long enough to break the trance and say, “Get a grip. You are making too much of your life at this moment, assigning undue importance to things that simply do not matter to the degree you are making them matter. There is promise and there is hope: things will work themselves out—you’ll see—and in the meantime, staying focused on what matters most and learning to let go of what does not is the key to mental health and sanity. Everyone will thank you: you will thank yourself and so will everyone else around you.” What we most often need is to break the spell, to snap to, to escape the tunnel vision of the immediate moment with a glimpse of the ever-present eternal.

Another symptom of acedia is that of spiritual complacency. We all enjoy stability and comfort and we tend to dislike elements that disrupt the status quo; even if we criticize the status quo, the criticism itself is often little but the creation of a new status quo, a new norm, a new standard that helps us secure an identity and sense of importance. Stability and comfort are good things; likewise challenging the status quo is often entirely appropriate, and we are not wrong to feel a sense of accomplishment and pleasure for standing up for social justice and the betterment of our world. The problem comes in when these things are made into the greatest good, seen as being ends unto themselves. Stability and comfort can interfere with genuine growth, and growth is rarely without its share of pain. Conversely, constantly battling the status quo does not always lead to improvement and can often be detrimental. There is a time for rootedness and there is a time for change and we are very liable to confuse the two.

Spiritual complacency not only contents itself with its current level of progress, it often seeks to justify the current level, prescribing it as a virtue and censoring those views that challenge it. Yet we have to ask ourselves if the end of the spiritual life is creaturely comfort or if instead it has an even greater good as its goal: is its aim to administer band-aids and kisses or is its aim nothing short of perfection, nothing short of ontological transformation, nothing short of perfect as God is perfect? Again, we need to be clear. We are not criticizing the legitimate comfort and strength we draw from our faith. What we are criticizing is the complacency that shuns any and all forms of painful growth as violating the ultimate aim and purpose of our faith. That is, creaturely comfort is not the ultimate end of faith and there are times we are called to walk through the fire. Being exposed to the flames is never pleasurable, but it is a purifying experience. It is the fire the burns away the dross from the gold and silver, refining and purifying. Our Lord is not only a God of love, but love is a consuming fire, content only when the greatest good—the summum bonum—of the beloved is achieved. The popular Christian author Max Lucado nails the idea dead on when he writes that “God loves us just as we are, but he refuses to leave us there.” That is why Reno insists on combatting sloth with spiritual discipline:

A moment’s reflection will reveal that the people who have been most instrumental in shaping us and developing our characters, have not always seemed so friendly. Rather they have challenged us, telling us the truth when it would have been a lot more pleasant to hear a lie. I am reminded of an illustration from university life. I have a stack of papers waiting for me to grade; before writing this newsletter, I finished grading a paper from a student who has read a good many twentieth-century literary heroes. On the one hand, it is a badge of honor to him to liberally pepper his writing with vulgarity and profanity. Its aim is to stable his sense of self, to show us that he is a rebel and capable of standing against the grain. The sad fact, of course, is that it actually shows the opposite: here is a person who is caving in, going with the grain, attempting to “fit in” and “be popular.” But the crude aspects of his writing are not the central element that is evident, and, one may argue there is even a place for such things in literature, particularly when placed in the mouth of a character in whose expressions such words are fitting. But even here, my concept is that of a character seen to have some kind of emotional or moral deficit, whatever other redemptive qualities that might otherwise exist. In any case, confronting this student’s choice of language is not going to be effective, particularly as it is only a security blanket he uses to hide behind.

More to the point is the fact that this student strives very hard to emulate his literary heroes. That is obviously not a bad thing, but the end result has been a case of over writing. On the one hand, his prose often lacks clarity and precision, because he is trying too hard to be colorful; on the other, his prose often threatens to become pretentious, the fact that he is laboring so hard to be eloquent patently obvious. What he does have going for him, however, is raw passion and enthusiasm: he wants to write and his work is, as the expression goes, “nothing if not ambitious,” though it lacks direction and focus.

I use this student as an illustration for a reason. It would have been very easy for me to have looked the other way, slapping a grade on the paper, and letting the matter rest leaving the student to his delusions of grandeur. What he needed, however, was direction and focus. The raw material was there: the drive, the ambition, the desire and the passion to write, the desire to not only write but to write well—yes, even the willful desire for non-conformity expressed in the gratuitous use of off-color language. All of these elements are the beginnings of genius. So faced with a choice, I have to decide: do I let this student off the hook? Do I turn the other way? That would be the easy way out and is easy to rationalize: surely in time he will find his own wings anyway. But I realized that if I were going to take my duties seriously—and if I were going to be of any benefit to him—I needed to write some unpleasant things on his paper. Now certainly I did not need to break his spirit or to be unkind in a way that was uncharitable and uncalled for. But I did need to disabuse him, to challenge him, to light a fire under his backside.

It strikes me that the longer we pursue the spiritual life, the more that we realize God works with us in similar ways. He recognizes and cultivates those virtuous tendencies he sees in us—the desire to lead a meaningful life, to be seen as someone important because we offer true value to our fellows, even the desire to be a maverick and defy the influences of society, often a very wholesome yet difficult thing. Yet he also clearly sees and even pities our immaturity, our shortcomings, our lack of focus and direction. He never breaks our spirit, but he does discipline his children; being the loving Father, he not only knows what is best for his children but he will settle for nothing less. It seems to me, then, that we do God no favors by decrying those who speak to us uncomfortable words. Some uncomfortable words are unfounded, no doubt, but others are what save love from cheap sentimentality. And a lot of spirituality as we know it today is just that: mere sentimentality. It has no real depth to it and it is certainly not the kind of love that would get itself nailed to a tree for the sake of its beloved. I am very inclined to agree with Reno’s assessment: the great sin of our day is not so much spiritual pride but acedia: all those many thorns and thistles that choke out the good seed that fell on fallow soil. Our busyness stands in our way; our desire for comfort and security stands in our way. If we are to be sons and daughters of God, it is time that we saw our self-justifying tendencies for exactly what they are. That is not occasion to wallow in self-pity or to disparage ourselves, but simply the recognize that the first step to solving a problem is recognizing clearly that a problem exists. As long as we deny there is a problem, no remedy will ever present itself. But when we face the truth squarely, even though the truth is often ugly and has a sharp sting, it is at this point that true transformation begins. And that is the end goal: nothing short of a complete ontological transformation as we are transformed into sons and daughters of the king.

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