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.
[…]
There is something else that is “only temporary and will expire after a certain amount of time”, this increasingly aggravating and cruel papacy.
We were told that TC was needed because the bishops of the world believed the TLM was causing problems in the church. Now we are told the same bishops are largely ignoring TC so the rescript was needed take away their rights. You expect this type of duplicity and skulduggery from politicians, not princes of the Church.
Not much “diversity” here: Four men who know what they are talking about (video: 59 min. 45 sec.)
The World Over February 23, 2023 | NEW RESTRICTIONS & BE AN ANGEL!
The article states:
“Pope Francis justified his initial restrictions [on the Latin Mass] by alleging that the celebration of the more ancient form of the Mass ‘is often characterized by a rejection not only of the liturgical reform, but of the Vatican Council II itself.’”
If this is actually the reason given for the crackdown on those attending Latin Masses, it’s extremely, incredibly, colossally stupid.
If the pope is upset that some people are critical of Vatican II, then, um, why not, say, try to better inform them of the council’s statements, concerns and actions?
How in heaven’s name does depriving them of the Latin Mass in any way alter their views of Vatican II?
I mean, come on. Seriously.
It’s like the Roman Curia is a brightly costumed comedy troupe specializing in slapstick.
The latin phrase ‘Traditionis Custodes’ has been newly translated – it now means “How to drive the faithful away from the celebration of the Mass that is approximately 18 centuries old”.
There is NO way ANY of this makes any sense.
It makes sense if one is as bitterly hostile to the TLM as Francis and his liturgical bureaucrats appear to be.
“It wasn’t the Holy Father taking the initiative,” Bishop Paprocki said, but rather an “initiative of Cardinal Roche.” This is another silly comment from a conservative bishop. Francis and Roche are of the same mind on this matter. Roche was chosen for his role precisely because the Pope knew he would enforce TC ruthlessly. As for Latin Mass Catholics being faithful, well, that is more of liability than an asset in Francis’ eyes.
Huh, this is apparently an emanation nor from either Roche or Francis but from Tony. Rather a presumptuous one at that.
There’s a cabal in Rome that hates Christ and hates those who follow Christ. How else can you explain the emanations of the Eternal City.
Unconscious atheism is synonymous with progressivism, essentially premised on the notion that we can improve upon the work of God. Presuming God to be an idiot child is to presume His nonexistence.
In the degraded language of the propaganda media in the secular world, Bergoglio’s tyrannical diktats would be accurately described as a “s**t show”. As Brineyman has posted above, they are indeed “extremely, incredibly, colossally stupid”. At what point does reality enter in so that a orthodox practicing Catholic finally asks himself: “How can the grotesque monster squating on the seat of St. Peter be anything other than an evil man, a horrible pope, and even perhaps an imposter and anti-pope?” Please, God, end this torturous charade now.
Liberalism seems to have taken over since Vat II. Maybe the Church should “circle back” to more of the old, conservative if not at least consistent, ways that worked, and saved souls – isn’t that why He came to earth in the first place?
Is it any wonder why some view Francis not as pope? He states he is not afraid of schism and by golly isn’t he the one pushing for it. JPII asked cardinals whether vcii did away or attempted to drum out the TLM and overwhelmingly the answer came back no! After +Benedict made it possible to advance the availability this one is tearing it down. Any wonder why the idea that he is not the pope is becoming more popular?
My wife and I attend the Novus Ordo English Mass at the Sacred Heart Church Bishop Paprocki mentions. Our experience is the same as what Bishop Paprocki said: we find those who attend the TLM very faithful and docile Catholic. In addition, many are young, married, and having children.
I would suggest that it is the generation of people in their eight or ninth decades that actually rejected what Vatican II said for a counterfeit version.
Absolutely. I have never seen as many young families at more ‘contemporary’ parishes as are routinely in attendance at more traditional parishes offering Tridentine Latin Masses, as well as parishes that offer Latin Novus Ordo, Anglican Rite, and English Novus Ordo (sometimes celebrated ad orientem) with incense, bells, etc.
Despite what some in the Vatican seem to think, the reality is this: The future of Catholicism is in traditionalism. Plain and simple. Everything else will literally die off because they have no foundation for the next generation – there are no parishioners between the ages of 14 and 40 at most contemporary parishes, and few families with small children.
And this, most of all, is what makes me sad to see the attacks on traditional mass-goers – trying to drive the last best hope of Western Catholicism away from the faith is counter-productive.
It’s actually a bit comical to observe that “praise” and “folk” bands that supposedly appeal to “young people” are so increasingly gray, balding and bepaunched.
Yup.
Some varieties of liturgical “music ministry” can be like stepping into a 1970’s time warp.
🙂
And I don’t travel extensively but I’ve heard the exact same 70’s selections at Masses in the UK & Mexico. Maybe it’s a copyright thing & the same dreadful hymnals have a global monopoly?
It’s very disappointing to be in Mexico City at a beautiful little church that holds the relics of Blessed Miguel Pro & hear the choir singing a praise & worship selection to the tune of Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” There’s a time & place for everything I suppose but seriously…
Methinks the rejection of Humanae Vitae has much to do with the dwindling numbers of practicing Catholics, not Vatican II
Well, I think there’s more than one moving part, but secularization is an important piece of the puzzle.
Bp Paprocki is a wise and brave man, especially considering that his Metropolitan is Cupich. I wish there were more bishops like Paprocki here in the USA. Cdl Roche is neither wise nor brave, he is, actually an obsessive and cruel man. His intensity is way beyond a liturgical or theological disagreement. He governs with a vengence. One must wonder about the roots of Roche’s obsessive cruelty? Is there an addiction somewhere? Addiction often makes one impulsive, spiteful, and indifferent to the suffering of others. Sex addiction, especially, can make a person especially egocentric and cruel. Just wondering, what are Roche’s demons? Where does his obsession on crushing the traditionalists come from?
All I can feel and be is appalled. All I can do is pray and try to find a local Latin Mass to attend (none in my area! Being stamped out across the world, I suppose).
What a time to be alive, as they say over at The Bee. The Pope issued a document in Latin in order to restrict a Liturgy celebrated in Latin.
If we can’t lead people to the church based on Tradition, then changing to be more like the secular culture isn’t going to help. It’s like parents that try to be friends with their teenagers so they won’t be despised by them. It will only end in failure.
“Pope Francis justified his initial restrictions by alleging that the celebration of the more ancient form of the Mass “is often characterized by a rejection not only of the liturgical reform, but of the Vatican Council II itself.””, so quotes the article. If that is the case, then why do the the majority of those who attend the Novus Ordo Missae of St. Pope Paul VI support abortion (56%), contraception (95%) and gay marriage(54%)? I find it interesting that No Catholics attend the Mass of St. Pope Paul VI; but, ignore his teachings as laid out in Humanae Vitae. On the other hand, those who AVOID his mass, by vast majorities, SUPPORT his teachings. The argument against my observation is, of course, that Humanae Vitae is not official V2 teachings. To that point, I would counter that, by their own admission, V2 was a “pastoral counsel” and not a teaching counsel. It gave forth no new teachings. Perhaps, the Pope is being misunderstood or his ability to communicate clearly his objections to the TLM are being compromised by his language deficit, or by some other non-nefarious reason. I just don’t see how the argument for ridding the church of the Holy Mass of the Ages boils down to a rejection of “changes” (not updates; which, I think would matter) of the Counsel of Vatican II.
I’ll probably get roasted for saying this, but I think it’s becoming increasingly obvious that for us adherents of the TLM it’s come down to – wait him out.
You know you’re in trouble when the nominal premise is “news”.
PIENSO QUE TODOS LOS EXTREMOS SON MALOS, TABIÉN EN ESTA SITUACIÓN. CREO QUE LAS PARTES VARIABLES DE LA MISA DEBEN SIEMPRE SER LEIDAS EN EL IDIOMA DEL LUGAR DONDE SE CELEBRAN, PERO EL CANON DE LA MISA (CONSAGRACCIÓN Y ACCIÓN DE GRACIAS) DEBEN SER SIEMPRE CELEBRADAS EN LATIN EN CUJALQUIER DEL MUNDO QUE SE CELEBREN, POR RAZONES MÁS QUE OBVIAS QUE ESTAN AL ALCANCE DE TODOS ENTENDERLAS (SI SE QUIERE)