Overcoming Acedia
Revisiting the wisdom of stability
Let’s return to that seminal prayer by St. Anthony: “Lord, I want to be saved, but these thoughts will not leave me alone. What shall I do in my distress? How can I be saved?” I imagine that we have each asked that question in our struggle to be quiet, stable, attentive and prayerful today. We have perhaps felt where there are soft targets in our hearts and minds for the logismoi to invade. We have perhaps found prayer elusive. We might be asking ourselves along with St. Anthony: “how can I be saved?”
The good news is that there is a path through the intrusive presence of acedia, but to find it we have to suspend what we think it means to make progress in the spiritual life. Our work-addled culture cannot even hear that word ‘progress’ without identifying it with ‘productivity.’ Yet the KPIs that serve as metrics for industrial success are not relevant to the spiritual life, especially when it comes to acedia. If we adopt the usual markers of growth, we are as likely to fall more deeply into the vice than to resist and overcome it.
The first step to experiencing victory over acedia is to stay put and commit to an ordinary habit of prayer in community. Acedia, we will remember, is all about getting us to leave the arena we are in under the imagination or delusion that there is a better fight in a better arena and that will be the one we actually stick with. The theologian Jonathan Sands Wise coined a good phrase in describing this step when he said we need to move forward by standing still. As he writes: “we must somehow just keep going by staying still, striving to join in the fight for good and God’s kingdom by taking part in the mundane miracles of showering, doing dishes, and speaking in love to those around us every day.” We should note that staying put is not an unqualified piece of advice. Sometimes there are very good reasons to leave a place. The tricky thing is that acedia will use those good reasons to get us to leave a place we should continue to inhabit. My rule of thumb for this is that if I am inclined to check out from something, I ask if there are definable, specific dangers that merit withdrawal and then I check them with someone outside of the situation. If that is the case, then I remove myself only as much as I need to reassess under less immediate pressure. If my sense of wanting to leave is vague and undefined, it usually means I am struggling against acedia. This is as true, I will add, when I am trying to focus on Morning Prayer as it is when I am considering a major life decision.
Prayer is essential because it is only through the stability we are granted by the practice of our communion with the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, among the brothers that there is any sure anchorhold by which to stand fast against the tide of acedia. We should beware in our rule of prayer, however, and particularly if we are feeling the pull of acedia, about attempting spectacular or herculean spiritual feats. We should beware about making frequent changes to our rule, and especially without consulting others. This, too, can be to play into the hands of acedia. Much more deadly to the vice is the practice of small regularity in prayer. The common rule of prayer never loses relevance. We may at some point be truly called to a specific, unique spiritual task. But this will never come at the expense of the common life of the Body of Christ. There are no extraordinary Christians who are not always and already ordinary Christians. That commitment to a small, common rule surrounded by time and space that we abstain from filling with spiritual or secular things will provide room for discontent, boredom, perplexity, and doubt to creep out from their hiding places. This is where the battle begins.
When we stay put for a duration of time, the place and its people get the chance to catch up to our frenzied pace and to break through our inner slackness of heart. The first form that this takes is usually to trigger those root passions that aid and abet acedia: anger and desire. Once we are past the initial infatuation with a new project, home, church, relationship, etc., once we have the chance to experience the wave of all the things we like about it or them, then we get the chance to experience all that offends us, all that we wish was different, better, or more. The longer we stay in this uncomfortable experience, the more we get a clear picture of what we would change if we could, of the ways the situation does not cater to our perceived needs, of the ways that we feel out of control of things. Then we get to experience the allure of all those other places and people who would be better for us, and the agony of longing for the chance to go back and make a different decision than the one we made. We get to experience the confidence and then the certainty that we would do it perfectly if only we could do it over.
The second stage of the fight with acedia is to practice attentiveness to when these kinds of anger and desire afflict us. The fruit of staying put is familiarity with the things that meet us in that place. When we experience these strong emotions without following through on their suggestions, we realize two very important facts. First, we realize that we are not those emotions–that we are experiencing something that is not us. This may seem obvious, but it is often the temptation to think that every passing thought is a truth-telling, intrinsic voice that emerges from us with knowledge of us. This is not true. What we call thoughts come from many places, and it is never immediately clear what kind of thing we are dealing with. Better to wait a minute. The truth will never fret about that care and patience. The Lord does not issue commands like a petty tyrant. Temptations, by contrast, demand immediate compliance.
Second, when we stay put when we feel the impulse to move, only then do we begin to see what is on just the other side of that impulse. This is where acedia is unmasked and its influence is slowly distinguished from what is helpful and useful in the experience of anger and desire. We can start to tell where the parasite and host begin and end. Anger delivers its small, actual message of what we we dislike about the present moment, which is illuminating about how we wish to control the world around us. This becomes an opportunity to let go of the need to control things and to practice the capacity for wonder and even surprise that comes to those who are willing, even for a moment, to let things be other than how they would immediately have them. Desire then becomes healthy longing for things to be well. We are returned again to the truth in St. Augustine’s prayer: “O Lord, you have made us for yourself. And our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” Rest becomes at last possible because we have become capable again of presence, trust, and appreciation for what is here even as we look with hope to what is yet to come.
The final stage of our fight with acedia is to lean into precisely those places we want to lean out. This is how love is formed in us. We embrace the thousand deaths to ourselves, we resolve to inhabit our sense of waning potential. We begin to see those moments that tempt us to shy away as opportunities to grow in love. When we are formed through prayer and the interior fight with acedia, those intrusive presences in our communities, families, and workplaces become no less intrusive, but their intrusiveness loses its perceived ability to harm us. We start to appreciate the local again as the field of our participation in the whole Church’s work to redeem the time. The local becomes sacred because we begin to see it as the place and time that the Lord has placed us, and that if we cannot meet the Lord and receive salvation there, then we will not do so somewhere else. That vexing coworker now becomes our vexing coworker to love. The stupefying local politician becomes precisely whom we are called to honor for the Lord’s sake. That unthinking habit in our spouse becomes exactly where our marriage vows are ratified. That atomic tantrum in our children becomes our time to shine as fathers, and not the occasion for a half-hour bathroom visit.
We cannot expect this process to be easy or quick and we cannot expect to do it alone. It will involve perplexing twists and turns at times. We cannot expect that acedia will give up the fight very easily. But the living reminder of the love of our brethren and ultimately of God will prevail. It will not persuade us out of acedia’s temptations. We cannot out-argue acedia. But consolation that comes from the extension of God’s love from one Christian to another–that can help to make it just this side of possible for us to endure when we might concede. In staying put, we can allow others to finally catch up to us and to lend what Christ has empowered them to lend to us as brothers in God’s family. But then, to turn from acedia, we must be willing to receive that love when it is extended. Before the giving and receiving of Christian love, the cults of workaholism, burnout, and the midlife crisis of acedia are pushed away.
In closing, I am brought back and would like to bring us back with the words of a hymn that has illuminated my life since childhood–the lyrics of which have narrated my long struggle with acedia and which have, in desperate, dark nights, consoled my restless heart.
In Christ alone, my hope is found, He is my light, my strength, my song. This cornerstone, this solid ground, firm through the fiercest drought or storm. What heights of love, what depths of peace, when fears are stilled, when strivings cease. My comforter, my all in all: here in the love of Christ I stand.”