Overcoming Acedia

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. 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 “Key Performance Indicators” that serve as metrics for industrial success are not relevant to the spiritual life, especially when it comes to acedia. If we adopt the most readily-available markers of growth, we are more 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 by tempting us with the thought 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 remaining still. As he has it: “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 gladly use those good reasons to get us to leave a place that 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 assess them with someone outside of the situation. If that is the case, then I remove myself only as much as I need to reassess the situation under less immediate pressure. If my sense of wanting to leave is vague and undefined, however, it usually means I am struggling against acedia. Acedia, like anxiousness, traffics in generalities and vague senses. That is not to say that intuition is not a valuable source of insight. But genuine intuition gladly partners with examination and direction. False intuition scorns clarity and insists on being left to itself.

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 brethren that there is any sure anchor-hold by which to stand fast against the tides of acedia. We should be wary 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 likewise be wary about making frequent changes to our rule, and especially without consulting others. This, too, can play into the hands of acedia. Much more fatal to the vice is the practice of small regularity in prayer. The common rule of prayer practiced among faithful friends never loses relevance. To neglect this truth is one of the great errors of the recent popular interest in ancient and medieval spiritual writings. To a person, the spiritual mothers and fathers of the Church would insist on at least a decade of proficient common prayer before delving into clouds of knowing or dark nights of the soul. 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. Before any evident spiritual fruit emerges, though, our commitment to a small, common rule surrounded by time and space that we abstain from filling with activities (spiritual or secular) will reveal our hidden discontent, boredom, perplexity, and doubt. 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. Only then do 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 in the times when these kinds of anger and desire afflict us. The fruit of staying put is familiarity with the things that meet us in the discomfort of staying put. When we experience these strong emotions without following through on their suggestions, we get to witness two very important interior events. The first is 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 the case. What we casually call ‘thoughts’ come from many places–a half-heard comment, a distorted memory, shame from eating a second donut in the break room, etc.--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 measure of care and patience. The Lord does not issue commands like a petty tyrant. Temptations, by contrast, demand immediate compliance.

The second interior event is that when we resist 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 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 to a truthful vision for the limitations of this world to satisfy us–even the very good things. In the wake of that return, we grow familiar with a consistent longing for Whom true desire points us. As St. Augustine prayed: “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 forms us. We embrace the thousand deaths to ourselves, we resolve to inhabit our sense of waning potential. We learn to bear the healthy shame of our insufficiency. We begin to see those moments that tempt us to shy away as opportunities to grow. 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 what is local and near 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 out of all available times and places, 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. That 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 and become real. That atomic tantrum in our children becomes our time to shine as parents, and not the occasion for a half-hour of scrolling our phones.

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. 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 alone can help to make it just this side of possible for us to endure when we might otherwise 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 and sisters in God’s family. But then, to repent from acedia, we must be willing to receive that love when it is extended, as vexing as it can sometimes feel in the moment. By the giving and receiving of Christian love, the cults of workaholism, burnout, and the midlife crisis of acedia enter remission.

In closing, I am reminded of the great value of this labor to overcome acedia. In his under-appreciated book Talking Back, Evagrius (that doctor of souls) curates passages of Scriptures to meet all manner of intrusive thoughts that beset us as we try to stay put in love for God and neighbor. Against acedia, he arranges many verses to still the ruminations of the vice, but closes the chapter with two verses from the Epistle of St. James, which make a fitting end to our mini-series of posts:

My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

and

Blessed is the man who endures temptation; for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.