The Curse of Acedia
Despondency is rampant today, but the only way out is to push forward through it. Every inch is a victory.
A close friend asked me for my honest assessment of where America stands. He wanted to know, not only what I thought, but how I feel about the general condition of the environment in which we live.
I asked for a few days to think about it, because it isn’t an easy question to answer. The empirical stuff is easy enough to quantify, but how I feel about it is a bit more subjective, and as it turns out, complicated.
I tend to think in analogies, as any good rural Mississippian does, and I thought about his question, I tried to remember a situation in my life when I felt the way I do today. Strangely enough, I remembered on particular duck hunting trip, a late afternoon/sundown “roost shoot”, when I split off from my hunting buddies and headed deeper into the flooded fields to a spot where I had seen ducks funneling in the past afternoon. In the process, I absolutely buried my ATV in the soft, sticky Mississippi delta mud.
Even with four wheel drive, everything I did just buried it deeper – I couldn’t go forward or backward – and there was no tree close enough to secure my winch cable to get any leverage to get out.
I was about 6 or 7 miles from our camp, it was going to be totally dark in about half an hour, was already below freezing and falling quickly as the sun was setting - and it had started to sleet – and this was before cell phones were as popular as they are today and dressed in heavy winter clothing and chest waders, I wasn’t looking forward to a casual evening stroll in that get-up.
I was stuck. Alone - and nobody knew exactly where I was.
The best way I can describe to what I felt at that moment was despondency. A lack of hope, dead in the water (or mud), isolated, low of spirit and a bit apprehensive and depressed.
As I considered that situation, I remembered a paper I read back in 2010 about a neuroscientist who studied the ups and downs of the financial market. He reviewed the bull and bear cycles of the markets over a 100 year period and claimed to be able to identify 14 emotional stages an investor goes through as the roller coaster rolls on.
The paper made sense to me because when compared to the ups and downs of our greater societal and cultural sine wave, the markets seem to be a microcosm of society, at least in the range of emotions.
The scientist recognized that there comes a time in the market cycle when investors do not want to hear any story because they are tired of bad news. Investors have just had as much as they want of the bad news and nothing moves us. During such times, investors reach a stage of despondency, the lowest point in the down cycle, when investors give up all hope of recovery in the markets.
I think people experience the same feelings as society and culture move along, and when a downturn in mores, values, quality of life and governance is perceived, people reach a stage of despondency very much like the one investors experience.
As it turns out, there is a word for the idleness, sloth, apathy, restlessness and procrastination that comes with this condition. All of these are symptoms of what early Christian theologians called acedia (despondency), a spiritual sickness rooted in a lack of care or effort.
As I researched acedia, I found this description at the website of the Oblate School of Theology:
“Acedia is a spiritual malady with a fascinating history. First identified as the noon day demon encountered specifically in the monastic life, acedia was later defined as the root of the sin of sloth by John Cassian, Thomas of Aquinas and others. Our contemporaries seem unaware they are facing the age-old demon of acedia. Most often it is experienced by people who struggle with despair, not caring and the fear of commitment and for those who dedicate themselves to spiritual growth, pastoral ministry and preaching the Good News.
Early Church Mothers and Fathers considered acedia as a state of restlessness and an inability to pray or work. In his short treatise on the spiritual life, Praktikos, the fourth Century Christian ascetical monk Evagrius Ponticus, spoke of acedia as the most burdensome of all demon, which makes the sun appear to slow down or stop, so the day seems to be fifty hours long. The cenobitic monk continues: Then it forces the monk to keep looking out the window and rush from his cell…it assails him with hatred of his place, his way of life and the work of his hands; that love has departed from the brethren, and there is no one to console him. If anyone has recently caused the monk grief, the demon adds this as well to amplify his hatred of these things…raising up before his eyes a vision of how burdensome the ascetic life is. So, it employs, as they say, every possible means to move the monk to abandon his cell and give up the race.”
Isn’t that a great description of what many, including myself, feel today?
So, when you can’t rouse yourself to give a damn - how do we break out of it?
You work on the problem. When you solve it, you work on the next one, and the next one, and the next one.
Eventually, you get unstuck.
But you will get nowhere moping around, licking your wounds.
In essence, acedia is as much a spiritual problem as a practical one.
Stuck alone in that flooded river bottom, I began looking for solutions. A few yards away was a debris pile from when the water was higher and I found a piece of driftwood that was long enough and sharp enough I could use another chunk of tree as a sledge and drive it deep enough in the mud and at an acute enough angle, I could hook the winch cable to it. I got enough pull to yank the front of the ATV in the general direction of “out”, and kept working it inch by inch until, about an hour and a half after dark, I reached solid enough ground to drive it out and head back to camp.
I realize now that I never considered being completely marooned. I always expected to find a way to get out. As I did that night, we must see every inch of progress as a victory and build on them. The second inch matters as much as the first. A huge percentage of success is repetition and persistence.
Calvin Coolidge (my second favorite president) said:
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
No matter how hard it is, we will get out.
Let’s get that first inch.
The release of 41,000 hours of videotaped history from January 6 may turn out to be the wedge that frees America from the corruption of the Nuland/Rice/Obama/Soros administration. Evidence shows how Ashley Babbitt was prodded and pushed by FBI undercover agents, making her a sacrificial lamb. Her murder, just like the killings of those Ohio students by the National Guards, took the steam out of the protesters and was the crown jewel of Nancy Pelosi's scheme.
Maybe, like your four-wheeler, the Truth will finally get out.
Excellent.