by Nichole Rittgers
We live in a noisy world. We allow television to play in the background as we clean the house, we have Alexa queue our favorite songs as we wash the dishes, and the list goes on. There are rarely moments in our day when we experience anything close to silence.
We reach for our phones seconds after we reach consciousness after a night of sleep and we scroll through social media as we wait in line for coffee.
We are scared of silence.
In my experience, it seems as though we all struggle to be present with just one other person, so we can forget trying to be present with just ourselves. Conversations with peers, parents, colleagues, and others with leadership positions in my life are rarely uninterrupted by texts, phone calls, or other miscellaneous notifications. It is normal for someone to quickly answer a text in the middle of a face-to-face conversation. If we can not be completely present with someone else, how can we expect to be able to be silently present with ourselves, or more importantly, with God?
The Definition of Acedia
For the few of us who may be familiar with the vice of slothfulness, or rather its latin term, acedia, it is normal for us to imagine couch-potato Christians or lazy people in general if not the slow moving four-toed creature of the rainforest. However, at the core of acedia is a resistance to the joy that we naturally feel when we are in relationship with God. Aquinas goes as far to define it as a type of sorrow - an aversion of the will. On a more tangible level, the sin of acedia is a resistance to the Spirit's work of sanctification and to the demands of love. This can exhibit itself in our modern notions of laziness but it can also look like being too busy.
The expression of acedia swings between two extremes: the couch-potato Christians and the Christians consumed by work and crazy schedules. Those of us who find ourselves to be too busy to commit any noteworthy time to the spiritual disciplines or to love our neighbors, whose time is too stretched to find joy in communing with the Father or delight in serving the least of these, are just as guilty of the sin of acedia as our brothers or sisters whom we may dismiss as “lazy.”
The vices, including the vice of acedia, were born out of fourth century Egyptian monasticism. The early Eastern monks were ascetic hermits located outside of Alexandria. Portions of their experiences were recorded by the early Church Father, Evagrius. They lived solitary lives at an extreme level of self-discipline. Acedia was regarded as one of the most dangerous and oppressive of all of the vices as it seemed to be at the root of all the others. When being oppressed by acedia, the monk was commanded to not leave his cell under any circumstances as the nature of acedia was understood to cause him to run from his spiritual duties and find relief by plunging himself into other things to do outside of the cell. John Cassian was a Church Father who had been influenced by Evagrius. Cassian learned from the Eastern monastic traditions of Evagrius and then brought his experiences to the Western monastic tradition. The Western tradition differed from the Eastern one in that they lived in closer communities with each other. They still lived under extreme levels of discipline but they were not as secluded.
This change in habitat led to a shift in the expression of acedia and thus a shift in how one ought to battle it. For Cassian, his chief weapon against acedia was manual work. For these Western monks, the focus of their spiritual life, or their “spiritual center,” was outside their cells, as opposed to their Eastern brothers whose center was primarily inside their cell. In this case, acedia could cause them to neglect their duties and retreat inside their cells, thus rendering manual labor as the encouraged remedy to this temptation. Aquinas then broadened the understanding of acedia in going beyond the realm of physical fatigue and staticity. He aimed rather at an internal opposition to joy - the kind of joy one experiences when in relationship with God.
In summation, the Church Fathers seem to be in agreement that acedia makes us want to run away from our spiritual centers. For the Egyptian monks, that was their cells, and for the Western monks it was their work.
What Does Acedia Look Like Today?
As technology continued to advance throughout history, the idea was that machines would do all the heavy lifting and humans would have more time for leisure. Instead, what happened was that as machines saved us time and energy, we devoted that time and energy to doing more things - being more efficiently productive. For example, the invention of the microwave didn’t give us more time to lay around and read books or spend more time hiking, instead we use it when we are in another time crunch trying to reach deadlines and do not have time to cook a whole meal. What we have cultivated is a culture of busyness.
It is abnormal and almost distasteful to not be busy in our Western culture today. From college students to stay-at-home moms, we all have this seemingly inherent urge to be as productive and efficient as possible all the time. Our schedules are strictly ruled by the clock and they are filled to the brim. We strain ourselves to get all of our work done, to turn things in on time, to make all of our appointments, and to respond to all of our emails and we have allowed these things to take time and presence away from things like coffee with a friend, family dinner, the spiritual disciplines, and Sabbath rest.
It is a little odd and unsettling when your schedule isn’t crazy busy.
Then even in gaps of unscheduled time throughout our day, we pull out our phones so that in the rare moments in which we aren't actively doing anything, we fidget with our phones to keep ourselves stimulated and distracted.
Even when we aren’t busy, we make ourselves busy.
At the cost of all of this, rates of mental illness are soaring and consistent joyfulness is a novelty.
Another way in which acedia shows up in the modern American church is through American consumerism. American consumerism preaches to us on a mass level that the world revolves around us - our wants and needs. It has conditioned us to believe that we should have whatever we feel we want and we should have it within one to two business days. By participating in this consumerism, we are not only piling up more stuff, but we do so with no regard for how it affects our neighbors and the rest of creation. As we consume at the amounts that we do, we dump our toxic trash wherever is most convenient for us, polluting the environment and complicating the lives of our neighbors experiencing poverty, turning our backs on the needs of those around us.
What Do We Do?
Well, here are my two cents worth of advice:
I would like to suggest that we also ought to pursue a centrality in our lives around time spent in the presence of the Lord. When it feels impossible to make time to practice silence and solitude and to commune with the Father, those are probably the most important times to do so. It is one of those things where we have to dig in and get it done.
On a practical level, one suggestion is to practice more controlled use of our phones. Perhaps instead of reaching for our phones the second we wake up in the morning, we spend the first waking moments of our day in prayer or meditation. Similarly, instead of scrolling ourselves to sleep, we consider the ways in which the Lord has led and provided for us throughout our day as we lay in our beds.
Another idea is that we refrain from whipping out our devices as we wait in line or in face-to-face conversations with others, allowing ourselves to simply exist for a moment in a quiet presence.
For those of us plagued by the busy side of acedia, we still need to be prioritizing the needs of others. As we get submerged in the craziness of life, it is all too natural for us to turn inward and seek after our own comforts only. I will use a basketball analogy from my own experience to further flesh this out.
College varsity basketball practices are often high pressure and high intensity environments. As practice gets going and coaches and teammates start yelling and sprinting ensues, our natural instincts are to turn inward, put our heads down, and just do what you need to do to get through it. The thing is that this does very little toward the success of the team. Simply getting through is not enough, and to be a great team, there needs to be an outward focus. The correct way to approach practices is to care more about your teammates and what they need in those intense moments than how you are going to get through them. Perhaps this looks like opening your mouth and encouraging a teammate beside you as you run a sprint, or maybe it looks like sitting lower in a defensive stance even though your legs are burning and you feel as though you can not sit any lower. I think approaching life with this outward focus is one way in which we can do battle against acedia.
Maybe for us this looks like going out of your way to encourage a colleague, carving time out of our busy schedule to sit with a friend mourning a loss, or giving up time to serve the church or volunteer at a local non-profit. For the Body of Christ to more fully be the hands and feet of Christ, we need to be willing to do our part and this starts with an outward mindset.
Sabbath
Taking one whole day off of work to rest is an incredibly countercultural concept here in the West. American culture screams at us from our first experiences in the school systems, to our places of employment that we need to be as efficient and productive as we can so that we can get the best grades or as much money as we can. Sabbath rest turns the race of the American Dream on its head in the way that it suggests that we actually should not run ourselves into the ground. In the words of John Mark Comer, “Sabbath is… an insurgency and insurrection against the “isms” of the western world - globalism, capitalism, materialism, all of which sound nice but quickly make slaves of the rich and the poor.”
Sabbath is incredibly hard to do in the face of things like capitalism and globalism, but it is eternally rewarding and an effective way to battle the influence of acedia in our lives.
Liturgy
One of the reasons why acedia is one of the enemy’s greatest weapons against us is because it is embedded into our culture and into our daily rhythms. One way in which we can address its influence on our daily routines is through liturgy. It is a tool we can use that will help us to slow down and think about what we are doing before we just react to our feelings. It gives us a broader perspective by guiding us out of our internalized mindset that focuses only on our wants and needs, and it lifts our eyes to see not only those around us but the will and the work of God. The repetition of prayerful and daily liturgies act as speed bumps in our lives, forcing us to slow down. It can help us resist giving into the yearnings of our restless boredom and it provides a space for us in which we can take a breath in the midst of our crazy schedules.
The history of acedia as it is traced from Evagerius, to Cassian, and to Aquinas, shows us that though the expression of acedia can be laziness, the definition cannot be reduced to being synonymous with it. Acedia is also expressed in our culture of busyness, distraction, and consumerism. The way in which the sin of acedia is baked into our Western culture is detrimental. It eats away at our mental, physical, and spiritual health while continuing to fly under the radar. I hope these suggestions have been helpful and serve as a blessing to you all.
Nichole Rittgers is a Ministry Resident at Faithful Presence and is starting a Master of Divinity at Asbury Theological Seminary this fall.