Confessing Acedia
For anyone who has read my blog in the past, you know, of course, that I haven't been blogging for the past five or six months. Depending on the day, I will give you various reasons why not, but today, I've decided to come back online, tell the truth about my blogging, and get back to work.
The official reason for the stoppage was the work on my novel, which is now mostly complete (there are rewrites ahead), and truth is, having the blog off the table was helpful from a concentration point of view.
A less official reason, but one I confess to friends, is that sometimes I get depressed, and have a hard time crawling out from under the rock. I told one friend back in the spring that if I'm not blogging, you can take it as a sign of depression. And that is true to some extent. It's one of those mostly truthful things you can tell people that will keep them off the trail of the deepest realities.
But in the name of honesty, and trying to ferret out the deeper, more truthful reason, let me say this: acedia is a lie, and a killer.
Acedia is an old sin, an ancient bugaboo the church fathers spoke against, one of the seven deadly sins of St. Gregory. Some suggest acedia (see article) may well be the chief sin of our time, though it hides underneath various forms of shallow passion. Perhaps passion is so valued in our day as a counterbalance to the great strain of acedia. Acedia has a nickname, and like most nicknames it has something real to say about the named, but it is also not quite the truth.
Acedia's nickname is sloth.
We think sloth means laziness, and it can mean just that, but this, I think, is a more compelling and experientially accurate description:
Acedia is a word of Greek origin that means, literally, "without care." In the Latin tradition of the seven deadly sins, it comes down to us as tristitia or otiositas, sadness or idleness. But citing synonyms and translations will not do. For the monastic tradition, acedia or sloth is a complex spiritual state that defies simple definition. It describes a lassitude and despair that overwhelms spiritual striving. Sloth is not mere idleness or laziness; it involves a torpor animi, a dullness of the soul that can stem from restlessness just as easily as from indolence. Bernard of Clairvaux speaks of a sterilitas animae, a sterility, dryness, and barrenness of his soul that makes the sweet honey of Psalm-singing seem tasteless and turns vigils into empty trials. Medieval English writers often speak of acedia as wanhope, a waning of confidence in the efficacy and importance of prayer. For Dante, on the fourth ledge of purgatory, those afflicted by acedia are described as suffering from lento amore, a slow love that cannot motivate and uplift, leaving the soul stagnant, unable to move under the heavy burden of sin.
"Fighting the Noonday Devil", R.R. Reno, First Things, August/September 2003.
Other writers describe acedia as a simple giving up on the glory of God. Acedia is a lie that slips into us on no particular day, but rather, it insinuates itself over years of being beaten down, rejected, or perhaps most prevalent in our day and time, simply ignored. That is one of the great initial attractions of blogging and 'my-spacing,' the knowledge that somehow we will now be equal with those who have been published before, that we too, will be heard. But then the day comes when you realize few are listening, few are paying attention, and once again, you are left to wonder what good the flinging of words into cyberspace is doing you or anyone else.
The answer is, of course, is that all effort on God's behalf is His to use, that every word spoken on His behalf has the potential to change vast histories.
However, acedia means our hearts don't really believe that anymore, that somewhere in our hearts a caving in has taken place, and that while intellectually, you can still hold the line, in your soul, you can barely breathe.
Acedia must be called what it is, and turned away from. There is a comfort in lying down to die, but of course the drawback is...you die.
There are many temptations for the artist, and this perhaps has been my greatest struggle. The dark voice wants me to define myself as the proverbial square peg in a round hole, and my life has felt just like that most of my years. But in the end, I reject that as a lie, another form of the big lie, that we do not belong to God, that He doesn't care, that He may be a God of love, but would be better defined as a Creator impossible to please.
My faith is that God knows all this. This has hit me with great force recently. He knows. He knows my life, my every thought, my intimations of feeling, my hunches, my sins, all my cavings in. This moment, and this one, and this one, and all the ones to come. And I also know that I am not singular or special in any of my feelings. My feelings are common to men and women around the world. They are part of what it means to be alive in a broken humanity. The hope and faith is that the full realm of these inner hells are redeemable--every one--through the work of Christ.
He knows, and loves us--me--anyway.
So now, dear reader, wherever you may be having stumbled upon this bit of dramatic monologue, I declare simply that in my heart, I turn away from acedia, and go back to work, getting down the business I was born for, to point to the glory of God that of course is more sure than death and taxes have ever dreamed of being. Beauty is the caller, and I am going back to Her, to serve God by simply standing and pointing. Beauty is ever-present, ever the call from beyond that triggers that eternity in our hearts the Preacher wrote about all those thousands of years ago.
That eternity is our call, and our home, and where we are going, and where the love we need resides. All of life is a resonation of those hidden mysteries, mysteries of love and creation and hope and fire. God is in pursuit of His creation, He is in pursuit of human beings with whome to share His life. He invites us to share His life and glory, not because He is a petulant God who just can't get enough of praise, but because His love is so great as to want nothing but to open the halls of its goodness.
Yes, time is a problem. Evil is a problem. Death is everywhere on the planet, and there are evils and suffering that we can barely stomach to hear spoken.
They say we should be careful about what we put on these blogs, that they may come back to haunt us. I suppose if I was hoping to land a job in corporate America, I'd worry. But my job as a writer is to tell the truth, and from now on, when you come to these pages, that's what you'll get, as best I can, come hell or high water.
And though I know it's not right, there will be the occasional cliché.
Time to weigh in...time to care...
9:14:14 AM 
