The symptoms of the disease are restlessness, drifting and indifference, a deep feeling of “disconnectedness” with everything.
The inevitable and recurring lockdowns keep us indoors. Our socialising has taken a swipe. Practically no physical meeting is possible. Churches are closed. No Masses. No pilgrimages. No picnics or excursions. We have a monk-like existence imposed upon us from the outside due to the pandemic.
We who are naturally prone to activity and work away from home, now being imprisoned within the four walls of a familiar home becomes intolerable. Though much life of the Spirit can happen in isolation and in silence, the opposite is also true. The sort of spiritual exhaustion which normally haunts monks, anchorites, religious and priests, now affects the majority of us.
The voice speaking inside us says that all this spiritual work is a sham, that God is not interested, and that if we were honest with ourselves, we would just give it up. The end question is “Is this spiritual enterprise worthwhile?”
Getting unused to going to church, and attending Masses online instead drives us into a spiritual lethargy of sorts. The sacrament of confession which would have reawakened self-examination and self-realisation, has taken a backseat and now become too much of an effort.
Reading anything has become a burden, especially the Word of God – something that only the highly disciplined lot do today. When all avenues of getting out of the house or apartment are closed, there is an inertia to do anything or involve ourselves in anything, let alone matters of the spirit.
Symptoms of Acedia
This “spiritual listlessness” the Greeks called akedia, and the Church father John Cassian (fifth century) called acedia. Acedia, or sloth/apathy, is usually associated with monastics, especially the desert monks and nuns. The New Catholic Encyclopaedia defines it, “The loneliness of the hermitage in the barren desert, a body worn out by fasting, and a mind fatigued by long prayers were conditions calculated to bring on the ennui and restlessness that was called acedia.”
The symptoms of the disease are restlessness, drifting and indifference, a deep feeling of “disconnectedness” with everything. But it is actually the shadow side of every commitment. In it the potentialities are negated by the yes that made one a Christian, a husband, a wife, a priest, a monk, a nun, a religious or a celibate person.
Acedia brings with it, therefore, the torture of second thoughts, daydreams of what might have been, and complaints about what is.
There are similarities with the experience of couples who have been married for a number of years. The all too common story of a long-established marriage where a spouse leaves home for somebody else often has overtones of acedia. The husband or wife becomes “disdainful” of their spouse who is seen as “careless and unspiritual”. So they must leave for somebody better. The acedia can be a very real trial for the couple, and to name it as such may be a helpful starting point to enable the relationship to grow beyond it.
This spiritual malaise has these inevitable symptoms: laziness, sleepiness, melancholy, nausea, sadness and lack of enthusiasm and motivation. Acedia is a sort of asphyxiation or suffocation of the spirit that leads us to suffer unhappiness that causes so much discontentment emotionally, socially and work-related.
In our restless search for meaning, we resort to celebrity magazines like Elle, Vogue, Man’s World, Femina, Verve, Vanity Fair and Bollywood productions of no consequence. These magazines cause no external harm but they destroy our interior world, take up our time and provide an escape route for evading the spiritual longing.
Remedy for Acedia
An eminent scholar of the Desert Fathers and Mothers says, “This (acedia) is a phenomenon common to all humanity; in fact, it is the price of being human.” If we are going to be happy, we will need to learn to face up to acedia rather than avoiding it.
The solution that the desert fathers suggest also is to contradict sloth head-on. This is a hard teaching, but a universal one: if we give way to sloth in order to ease its pressure on us, if we allow ourselves to behave according to the feelings of inner spiritual deadness, it will only get worse.
This is experiential wisdom coming to us directly from those great ammas and abbas of the Egyptian desert who lived their whole lives out in that harsh solitude. It is advice confirmed in the experience of thousands of spiritual practitioners since then. If we leave our spiritual practice to find someone to chat with in order to ease the burden of sloth, or if we indulge in fantasies about all the good works we could be doing elsewhere, or if we indulge in obsessive, negative thoughts about the community we are in, our families, or our particular life situations – if we idealise states of life other than our own, or if we give in to physical torpor – these will only get worse, and drive us into deeper irritation and laziness, and cause us to be busybodies. Eventually we will lose our zeal and commitment to the contemplative journey.
Cassian says, “Experience proves that an onslaught of acedia must not be avoided by flight but overcome through resistance.” In one of the teachings of the Desert Fathers, the instruction given to a disciple is “to sit in your cell and the cell would teach you.” At all costs one must not give way to the desire to leave the cell. The temptation to recoil into the self must be answered by a determined push outward. Because the temptation to indifference, to disconnectedness will appear to be an easy solution to the kind of vacuum one experiences in acedia. This is the time one to be rooted in God.
Abbot Christopher Jamison says, Spiritual reading and prayer help us to recognise our demons while also helping us to contain them. As we spend time persevering in prayer and meditation, we become aware of the interior movements of the whole self, body, mind and soul. Our culture implies that indulging in more food, more things and more sex, combined with personal aggression and vanity, are the way to happiness. This is the message hitting us day by day. The good news is that most people in their heart of hearts know this message is a lie, but many lack the means to live out an alternative.
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