Denver Newsroom, May 19, 2020 / 02:00 am (CNA).- What should you be doing right now?
If the answer is “not reading this article,” you might want to keep going.
If you’re reading this article because you’re distracting yourself from something that needs to be done, you might be struggling with something called acedia.
On March 2, just before the coronavirus pandemic caused shutdowns around the world, Fr. Harrison Ayre, a priest in the Diocese of Victoria, British Columbia, started tweeting about his experience with the vice of acedia.
Acedia (pronounced ‘uh-see-dee-uh’ in English) comes from the Greek word akēdeia, meaning “lack of care.” It is closely akin to the sin of “sloth”, but it is more complex than mere laziness or boredom.
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, acedia is a kind of sadness about things that are spiritual goods, or a “disgust with activity.”
“My one-phrase definition is: the inability to choose the good,” Ayre said. “It’s an affliction of the soul that attacks desire – our desire for the good.”
It manifests itself specifically in listlessness, distraction, and wanting to avoid the task at hand, Ayre noted. Paradoxically, it could look either like sitting around and doing nothing, or busying oneself with anything and everything but the task at hand.
Ayre, who is one-half of the podcast “Clerically Speaking” and has an active Twitter following, became well-known for his tweets about combatting acedia in the past few weeks. So much so, that some of his friends have dubbed his timeline “Acedia Twitter.”
“It always was something that’s been on my heart because I would say it’s one of those things that I struggle with a lot, so it definitely comes from experience,” Ayre said.
“I tweeted something about a month ago and then…I had a couple people ask me in the DMs, ‘Can you give me some practical tips on overcoming this?’” Ayre said.
Ayre thought he would just do a thread on the topic, but because so many people were asking questions and looking for more information, he decided to keep going.
He now tweets daily tips for identifying and overcoming acedia, as well as regular check-ins with his followers, asking them how they are doing and what specific struggles with acedia they have noticed lately.
“It kind of has just taken off,” he said. “Not like ‘blown up,’ but I’d say it gets pretty reasonable engagement every day whenever I would tweet about it, so it’s obviously touching people’s hearts, which has been a good thing.”
The “noonday devil”
In a 2015 book on the subject, Fr. Jean-Charles Nault, O.S.B., called acedia the “noonday devil”, because the temptation has a tendency to strike in the middle of the day.
The phrase has been used to describe acedia for centuries.
“It’s when even your bodily tendency is to be a little bit tired and a little restless at the day,” Ayre said.
Nault likened the experience to restless monks staring out of their cells (rooms), longing for escape.
“You’re in the desert, it’s hot, you’re in your cell, and the sun’s beating into your cell, and it can be a great temptation to want to leave the duty of the moment. That’s why it’s called the noonday devil,” Ayre said.
But for people who aren’t monks, what does acedia look like?
“Let’s say you’re at work and you know that the task you need to do right now is answer those 10 emails in your inbox. That is the most important thing for you to do in this moment,” Ayre said.
“But instead, you’re like, ‘I’m going to go make those photocopies,’ or, ‘I’m going to go to the water cooler to get some water and see if anyone’s there,’ or, ‘I’m going to browse the internet for a bit,’ or, ‘I’m just going to sit here and not do anything for 10 minutes.’”
“You’re doing stuff or not doing stuff, but you’re doing all those things to avoid the task of the moment. Acedia attacks what I’d say is the giftedness of the moment.”
For parents, Ayre said acedia might manifest itself in a temptation to stay in bed when the children are up at 3 a.m.
“Acedia would say: I’m going to stay in bed. I don’t care if they’re throwing up. I’m staying in bed,” he said. Combatting that temptation would look like: “you (get up) because you love them and it’s a good thing to do for them and it’s a sacrifice for their good.”
“It’s about accepting whatever has been thrown to us at the moment and not wanting to avoid it,” Ayre said.
According to Nault, the battle against acedia is about accepting the full gift of one’s vocation in life.
“The ‘noonday devil’ can be vanquished only by accepting the love of God and the sublimity of our vocation, which, in turn, gives rise to the joy of true Christian freedom,” he wrote.
Why acedia matters in the spiritual life
Why does something that might seem like mere distraction in mundane tasks matter so much in the spiritual life?
“I would call (acedia) the temptation of our age, because our age is very dependent on this idea of distraction – of moving my attention to something that is not what we need to do right now,” Ayre said.
And that matters for the spiritual life because “at the heart of every sin, and then every temptation, is to deny the good of a thing – its proper end,” Ayre noted.
“Gluttony comes with taking in a good, which is food, and overusing it, right? Or envy is seeing a good that has happened to someone else and then twisting it and wanting it to be your own,” he said.
“Every sin wants to twist the good, and acedia, it’s saying: ‘I don’t want to recognize the good of what I have right here, right now.’ It creates a sense of dissatisfaction of what’s been given me.”
And the present moment matters, Ayre said, because it’s where God can be found.
“Our work of the moment is the precise place that we find God…because God shows himself through things, that’s how God works. So, if we’re trying to say, ‘I’m going to distract myself, I’m going to check Instagram instead of working on my emails or my Word document or whatever’, what I’m saying is: ‘I don’t want to encounter God through my task, through the work of the moment.’”
Overcoming acedia
Combatting acedia isn’t about white-knuckling through distracted thoughts and forcing yourself back to the present moment. Ayre said that properly ordering one’s day, and giving things their proper place, can go a long way in combating acedia in one’s life.
“It’s not wrong to go on Instagram and Twitter. Obviously I don’t think that, that’d be really weird,” Ayre (@FrHarrison) said.
“But do I do that in a rightly ordered way? So, for example, I’ll do my office work for half an hour, and then I’m going to take a five minute break and check up on my texts and my WhatsApp and get those things done, and then I’m going to go back to my task.”
“Acedia really gets fought when you start to organize your day properly. It doesn’t mean we’re going to live strict monastic schedules,” he said. “But I always say: if you can find those three or four most important tasks of your day and order them properly, then everything else will fall into place around that. And you’ll stop going to your phone as much, because the reason we go to our phone is because we don’t actually see the gift of the moment.”
It’s also about making time for prayer and proper rest and leisure in the day too, Ayre said.
“Find stuff you really enjoy to do and actually give yourself permission to do it, because acedia makes us think that we can’t enjoy anything,” he said, such as reading a good book or watching a good movie or spending an hour playing an enjoyable video game.
“Acedia plagues us because sometimes we forget how to enjoy the good things of life. Choosing a good that we enjoy helps remind us of God’s goodness,” Ayre added in a May 9 tweet.
In another recent tweet, Ayre also compared overcoming acedia to a Seinfeld episode, in which George Costanza decides to be “opposite George” – he does the opposite of his normal tendencies, and is surprised to find his life improved.
“(George) meets some girls in a bar and he goes, ‘Hi, I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.’ And they loved him because he was so honest,” Ayre said.
“While beforehand, he wouldn’t have done that. He would probably come up with these weird stories about why he was staying at his parents place. And so he found that ‘opposite George’ was leading to a lot of success for him.”
Fighting acedia can be similar, he said. “Sometimes the best thing to do is to do the opposite. So if you find that you’re just slothful in general, and doing anything with remote physical activity is something difficult to do, the opposite thing to do would be to go for a walk,” he said.
When is it acedia, and when is it depression?
Acedia and depression seem to have some things in common, including a lack of desire to do one’s normal activities.
Ayre said he has been asked before about the difference between acedia and depression.
“I’m not a counselor or a clinical psychologist or something like that,” Ayre said, but “personally, I do think there sometimes can be a connection between the two… I think people ask this question because they see a real similarity between the two, and there may be even a connection at times.”
Ayre added that he has never experienced clinical depression himself, and encouraged anyone who was concerned that they might be going through something more than just acedia to talk to their priest and to a mental health professional.
“I’d say if there is almost a lack of desire to do anything in life, that’s probably a good sign that it’s deeper than acedia and that it perhaps needs medical attention,” Ayre said.
“With acedia, you’re often able to function, but maybe not function to the extent that you ought to,” Ayre said.
But depression’s symptoms will likely be more severe, he added.
If one is thinking “’I just, I can’t even get out of bed to go to work anymore.’ That’s not acedia anymore. That is a sense of, ‘I don’t have the tools necessary to get through day to day life.’”
Corona and acedia: How the “new normal” impacts distraction
When the coronavirus pandemic shut down most of the United States and the world, nearly everyone’s daily routine was dramatically upended.
Non-essential workers either worked from home or were laid off. Essential workers kept at it, albeit with either adjusted commutes or schedules or safety protocols in place. Almost all businesses including bars and restaurants and hair salons, were closed.
Busy people who normally had lots of places to go and things to do suddenly found themselves with something they hadn’t had in a while: time.
“I think for most of us, we probably fell into it in a pretty extreme way for about that first month,” Ayre said. “I think it was the fog of the moment. We didn’t know what to do with our lives. We didn’t know what to do with this time. The future is uncertain…and you just wander throughout the day and you do your things but you don’t have a real target of life. So I think in that sense it was bad.”
But people adjusting to working from home or going out far less have “time and space to get our lives in order,” he said.
“I’m hearing people say they’ve been attacking acedia now by picking up a chore every day. Whereas before, they didn’t have time to pick a chore every day. Or they’re cooking more because they’re not running to five different appointments at night, so they’re not just grabbing McDonald’s quickly as they’re running to the next thing.”
“They’re having time to do the things that are necessary in life; the busyness stopped. When we were so busy, we were not able to see what is essential,” he said. Ayre said he is hearing from families that they are realizing the slowness of life right now has actually been very good for their kids as well.
“I’ve heard from families saying, ‘I never realized I didn’t have to take the kids to three things every night.’ And they love it. They love the slowness. Their kids are playing on the front yards again, and the kids are happy.”
Ayre said he hopes that one lesson people are able to take away from the extra time they have been given during this pandemic is the need to contemplate God and what is most essential in their lives, which is in itself a big step in fighting acedia.
“I really hope and pray that we can learn our lesson from this, that we don’t need to be this busy. And then when you start to choose these essential things, acedia will rip itself from your life, because you’ll see – I’m doing what is essential. And a full life makes it easier to choose the good and see the good. It’s like that meme, right? ‘Nature is healing itself.’ In a way, it is.”
For those looking to dive deeper into acedia, Fr. Ayre recommended Nault’s book, as well as “Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire” by R.J. Snell, and “Acedia & Me” by Kathleen Norris.
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What right do these bishops have to deny conscience protections of the faithful? I’m willing to bet these are the same bishops who objected to the Eucharistic document as well as who give pro-abortion politicians a pass.
“Mandatory vaccination policies need appropriate accommodations for medical or religious reasons”(NHA). NCBC citing in agreement with its ethics the Nat Hosp Assoc on a median between the Common Good and individual conscience. Although that’s where there can be no universal rule because the conditions differ in various settings. Deliberation of those conditions can arrive at a just mean between excess and defect that may not be perfect, although correct when close to the mean. So there will always be instances of disagreement even dispute the final decision necessarily belonging to the institution rather than the individual and or unions representing staff. Maintaining order requires this. This is the issue now in State and municipal government where the individual depends on the expertise and grasp of justice of officials. How vital a requirement one that is frequently not met.
Justice exceptional from all the virtues is not subject to measure. Justice, the right, or the good incorporates all the virtues. Moral acts are either good or evil, just or unjust. While there are circumstances in which the Common Good may be measured for example when risk is variable and containable, such as in the general populace, there are those in which the risk may warrant a mandate for the CovidVax that is a matter of Justice, such as nursing homes, medical delivery centers.
An addendum to my comment. Justice has no mean because an act of justice is either just or it is not. For example abortion, murder, forgiveness [from the heart], the first two always evil the second always good, whereas the virtues like prudence, fortitude do have a mean. A vaccine mandate is measured to the common good.
“Several bishops in California, and the Archdiocese of New York, have instructed priests not to provide religious exemption letters for those Catholics who object to the vaccine mandate.”
The Church used to be a haven from the tyranny of the State, but now has – in many places – become an instrument of the State in enforcing its tyranny in the name of God.
A government that can mandate that you submit to a vaccine for “the public good” can also mandate that you submit to an abortion or sterilization for “the public good.”
This is the first sign of a crack in the dam of ‘Catholics for abortion products on demand’ as they begin to consider that perhaps, just perhaps they are in colossal danger.
Lying that ‘The Church encourages people to receive vaccination for COVID-19, even though the currently available vaccines in the U.S. have a remote connection to abortion through the use of certain cell lines.’is bad.
But not having a justification WHY the church encourages these products has let the cat out if the bag…
It’s not about “remote cooperation” with past abortions and the cell lines developed and used in the research, development, production and/or testing of the currently available vaccines. It’s about approving this type of research going forward. If the bishops had demanded that Operation Warp Speed support at least one vaccine with no connection to these immoral practices, we would have had at least one (from Sorrento Therapeutics). Catholics could have, in good conscience, availed themselves of this morally produced vaccine. As it is, we are facing persecution on the basis of our religious beliefs as the Federal Government moves toward vaccine mandates. This could have been easily avoided.
Was it not pagan tribes that sacrificed the innocent to their “gods of common good” and the explorers brought the Christian TRUE GOD. Whwn we try to save our lives or money or careers by sarificing the innocent babies, we do far worse because we have had the opportunity to know HIM the author of LIFe, We should be having processions and public rosaries and have faith enough to move mountains. There is only one innocent body and blood I choose to take into my body and on my doorpost. What is wrong here?? The sick culture is taking us in.
What if the “infectious agent” is not Sars-COV-2 virus – which has never been isolated in a human – which is not used in the so-called “vaccines” (which don’t meet the definition)? What of the injection itself is the “infectious agent” because of the transfer (“shedding”) of its components – like spike proteins (Salk Inst. proved 4/21 they are the cause of the blood clotting and heart issues we now see) and graphene (toxin)? So who has the responsibility to protect others? … But we’re all in this together now. Now the only answer is charity. And speaking the truth. Even about the injections. In love.
On Page 149 # 1782, Taken from our Catholic Catechism: It States and I quote, Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. “He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience”. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience,especially in religious matters.~2106 No one not even the Pope or any Political leader can force anyone to act aginst their conscience, putting Aborted Fetal Tissue into ones body, Goes against the Conscience of Christians, we can’t do it even if their was some kind of good coming from it.page,441:#1789~ Some rules apply in every case: One May never do evil so that good will result from it;1756~ What greater evil is there in our World then the murder of the innocents in their Mother’s womb? My Conscience, can’t Allow me to derive some kind of benefit from the destruction of the Innocent, Period~ and my Catholic Faith backs this up entirely!
This is all part of The Coming Of The Kingdom on u-tube! our Church is in turmoil, our country is in turmoil and our world is in turmoil!!!! We as Catholics have to stand strong in our religion with prayers to Our Father, The Blessed Virgin, Jesus and The Holy Spirit to drive out the anti-Christ (satan) who is creating this havoc. We need to spread God’s word.
It has been scientifically and medically established that the so-called ‘vaccine'(s) for covid19 neither prevents infection nor spreading of the virus. It only mitigates (for most people) the severity of the infection. With this in mind, we should be charitable toward others who are misinformed. The most frustrating aspect is the lack of honest factual statements of the value as well as the limitations of this treatment – whose long term health effects are completely unknown at present. A little balanced information, a little charity, open minds and a lot of faithful prayer are more needed than contentious argument.