Lisa Hershey Kutolowski
Sigh. I can’t do this anymore. It’s the end of a long day. Nothing special happened, and yet everything took so much effort. For the life of me I can’t stand up straight, as if I’m wearing an invisible chain around my neck. Our home feels small and cluttered. Outside, it feels cold and dreary.
The time for evening prayer is approaching. I look up from my phone (where I’ve been mindlessly scrolling through Instagram) and see Mark lighting the candle and pulling out the prayer benches. Ugh. Do we really need to pray every night? I feel so out of it, it’s not like prayer will do anything anyway.
I can’t think of a good excuse to skip prayer, so I sit down, slumping my shoulders. I can’t find a comfortable position and constantly shift my posture. I sing the hymn half-heartedly. After the readings (which feel exceedingly outdated and irrelevant), we sit in silent prayer for twenty minutes. In the silence, my mind wanders. I need a change of pace. Just a few days away.I notice my thoughts, but it feels like far too much energy to return my intention to the prayer. So, I don’t. Maybe I can rearrange the furniture to make our living space more functional… What am I doing with my life here anyway? I’m just living Mark’s dream. I really am meant to be serving the poor in a tangible way. Or fighting for social justice in the public square. I could be doing so much more for humanity…
Eventually my thoughts are interrupted by Mark chanting Kyrie Eleison, the cue to close our prayer with spoken gratitude. I can’t think of anything to say. We finish prayer and I crawl into bed as fast as I can.
“My soul slept from weariness.” – Psalm 119:28
Defining Acedia
Acedia is a word that has almost entirely fallen out of our modern lexicon. I only learned the word two years ago when I came across a book about acedia[1]at Mount Saviour Monastery in Elmira, NY. Despite the word’s lack of use, the spirit of acedia is alive and well. As I began to read about acedia, I quickly recognized how often acedia has manifested in my life. Sometimes in small ways, like the story above, but also in large ways, like whole months of college when I flirted with nihilism and struggled to see any meaning in life. It felt like the author, Brother Jean-Charles, was staring into my soul. I kept thinking, “How do they know that about me?” I was relieved to have language to articulate this familiar inner experience.
Awareness is often the first step toward freedom. For those of us on the spiritual journey, we will do well to dust off this ancient word and probe into its meaning and consequences on our spiritual lives and communities.
How, then, do we define acedia? Acedia comes from the Greek akedia, meaning “lack of care.” It is malaise, listlessness, sloth, boredom, melancholy, irritability, weariness, discouragement, disgust with everything, mediocrity. All these words hint at acedia, but none of them fully get at its character. While acedia can take on these various moods, at its core it’s an agitated weariness with the present reality that desperately seeks some kind of escape—sleep, daydreaming or fantasy, vacation, distraction. The spirit of acedia can be passive – a listless sleepiness, but it can also be active – like booking a vacation to take a break from reality.
In the spiritual life, acedia arises in response to our spiritual commitments and vocations. Weariness pervades precisely in the arenas of our life that had previously been a source of great joy. Prayer feels dry and cold, when before it was rich and alive. Scripture and spiritual reading used to be inspiring. The words now seem out-of-touch and even make me feel irritable. The same liturgy, worship services, and rituals that ignited my soul’s fire become boring and laborious. In vocational marriage or vowed monasticism, the wife, husband, nun, or monk wonders what they were thinking ten, fifteen, twenty years ago when they took these vows. What did I ever see in him? OrWhy did I ever think this is what I was meant to do with my life?The marriage or monastery begins to feel small and suffocating. The person afflicted with acedia spends a lot of time looking at the door and wondering what it would be like if they walked through it.
I use the word afflicted intentionally. The desert teaching refers to acedia as a ‘soul sickness.’ Once someone has fully succumbed to the illness of acedia, it is extremely difficult to recognize its influence. In this way, acedia is manipulative. It undermines the very commitments we made to help us grow in intimacy with God. When we consent to acedia and pull away from these commitments – in spirit or in flesh – our restlessness increases, return to the spiritual journey becomes more and more difficult, and we can quickly get lost in a frustrating maze of meaninglessness.
Manifestations of Acedia
Acedia manifests in various ways. The one thing they all have in common is the desire to escape– from place, from the present, from ourselves, and ultimately from God.
Instability or ‘Frenzy of Novelty’—Acedia impacts our relationship with where we are. Wherever we are, we’d rather be somewhere else. We find ourselves unable to be in one place for very long without getting restless. We crave a change of scenery and have difficult seeing anything positive about the place our body currently is. If we have the ability to physically leave, we do. If we can’t leave, we leave through daydreams.
This is true of place, as well as work, hobbies, relationships, and communities. In this ‘frenzy of novelty,’[2]our eyes tirelessly search the horizon for the next thing. This is a lateral movement through the world – skimming the surface of many places, ideas, and communities, never lingering anywhere long enough to sink, settle, or root.
The Noonday Devil, or Killing Time – Acedia also impacts our relationship with time – when we are. The desert elder, Evagrius, identified acedia as ‘the noonday devil.’[3]In the Egyptian desert in the height of summer, the noonday sun is directly overhead. At this time, there are no shadows growing or shrinking that suggest the movement of time. The sun seems to stand still in the sky. All is suspended. Not only does time seem to stop, but the heat is oppressive. There is nowhere to hide. There is no mystery or intrigue. The present moment becomes unbearable. Time creeps along. Waiting ignites irritability. Boredom reigns.
Whereas instability tempts us to leave space, here acedia tempts us to leave the present. Of course, we can never leave the present moment, but we certainly have all sorts of ways to feellike we are leaving. We distract ourselves. We amuse ourselves. We sleep. We worry about the future. We anticipate the future. We regret the past. We get lost in nostalgia. We kill time.
Jean-Charles Nault makes this insightful contribution:
“Usually, when confronting the suspension of time and the void of boredom, the most classic strategy is to try to ‘kill time’, as we say. No doubt it is not insignificant that this idiomatic expression uses the verb ‘to kill’, which relates boredom to hatred. Now time is not killed; on the contrary it is necessary to wedit, in other words, to cling to the present moment and to live it in all its spiritual intensity.”[4]
Pusillanimity, or Rejecting Our Greatness – Acedia lies to us. And perhaps its greatest lie is convincing us that we are anything less than the image and likeness of God. Acedia tempts us to flee from this greatness. The radical witness of Christ’s incarnation is that humans’ true destiny is to share fully in the divine nature – to be with God and in God. Pusillanimity is the rejection of this vocation. It is the inability to believe that we are meant for such greatness, abundance, freedom, and joy. We feel unworthy of God’s love. We stay small and quiet, mistaking this for humility. We stop striving for true spiritual freedom. We refuse to “accept the infinite so as to ‘be content’ with what is within our reach.’”[5]
Absurdity, Nonsense, & Nihilism- As acedia leads us to flee ourselves and God, we begin to lose all sense of meaning. This is the logical progression of flight as we literally have ‘no-sense.’ We are not present enough to our place and time to really see, listen, hear, feel, and taste. We are utterly disconnected.
Once we reject being where and when we are, the temptation arises to reject being altogether. Now instead of staying small – as in the case of pusillanimity – we wonder what the point of existence is at all. What’s the advantage of being over not being? What does it matter? Thisis not the suicidal thoughts associated with dejection, which are characterized by disparaging the value of my being. No, it is even more insidious. The nihilism of acedia challenges the value of allbeing. Nothing matters. This nihilism can clearly lead to despair, but it can just as easily lead to hedonism. “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.” In either case, the soul has given up on the spiritual journey, on seeking union with God.
Staying True to Our Dwelling Place
What are we to do when faced with acedia in our spiritual lives? When the voices of acedia urge us to flee ourselves, God, and our spiritual search, we are exhorted to remain. The monastics of the 4th –6thcentury desert literally had a room, their cell, where they kept this vigil of prayer and steadfastness. What is our cell, or dwelling place? Where must we remain (or return)?
Our Bodies & Our Senses– When we are tempted to flee into fantasy or distraction, we are invited to be present to our bodies in their particular place and particular moment. We remember we are creatures. We acknowledge the goodness of this creatureliness. We notice what we see, smell, feel, taste, and hear. It may be unpleasant, but we resist the urge to flee into our thoughts that take us “outside of time, outside of our state of life, and finally outside of our condition as creatures.”[6]
Our Vocation—Our dwelling place is also our vocation, or special calling. In addition to monastic and marriage vows, our dwelling place is also the commitments we made to certain spiritual practices and communities in times of clear vision and discernment. Acedia tempts us to question the validity or usefulness of these commitments. However, these are the very practices that will see us faithfully through the confusing valley of acedia. When afflicted with acedia we must ‘stay the course’ with the commitments we have already promised to fulfill.
Our Desire—In the throes of acedia, the desire that initiated one’s first step into the spiritual life feels dim, even nonexistent. However, our desire to be in union with God, our beloved, is present in all of us even when we are not conscious of it. Indeed, our hearts are bent toward God even before we are conscious of ourselves! Remaining in our bodies, our vocations, and our commitments help us remain in our desire, even when that desire feels absent.
“In His immeasurable love, the Word of God, Jesus Christ, became what we are in order to make us what He is.” – St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-200)
Ultimately, these little dwelling places – our bodies, our vocations, our commitments, and our desire are simply guides leading us to our true dwelling place – within the very heart of God.
When acedia threatens to rob us of joy, meaning, hope, and presence with God and with our very self, we look to the Incarnation – to God becoming human. Within this dwelling place where we “share in the divine nature,”[7]we return to ourselves and our souls at last find their rest.
Through stability, persistence, and faith in God, we can come to abide in ourselves and in God and gain freedom from the affliction of acedia. Yet even still, we are not free of temptations to turn towards self. The final two thoughts, vainglory and pride, are spirits that seek to turn even our successes on the spiritual journey into obstacles to full surrender to God. Next week we turn to the first of these, the spirit of vainglory.
This post is part of the ongoing series:
Purifying the Heart: What the Desert Teachers Can Teach Us About Healing Ourselves And Our World
Through the season of Lent, we are posting a series of reflections based on the teachings of the desert fathers and mothers. Each week we are highlighting one of the ‘eight thoughts’ of the desert system of inner transformation. In this series, we’re drawing on a deep well of ancient wisdom from an era and culture very different from our own, so it requires some translating. Read the introduction here.