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Whether it’s liturgy or speaking in tongues, or even “going through the motions”, perhaps these things are not as meaningless as they are sometimes accused of being.

A recent study that monitored the daily habits of couples in order to determine what produced good and stable marriages revealed that only one activity made a consistent difference, and that was the embracing of one’s spouse at the beginning and the end of each day. Most surprising to Paul Bosch, who wrote the an article about the study, was that “it didn’t seem to matter whether or not in that moment the partners were fully engaged or even sincere! Just a perfunctory peck on the cheek was enough to make a difference in the quality of the relationship.” Bosch comments, wisely, that this “should not surprise churchgoers. Whatever you do repeatedly has the power to shape you, has the power to make you over into a different person – even if you’re not totally ‘engaged’ in every minute.”

So there. So much for control, or ever consciousness. let’s hear it for insincere, hurried kisses, and prayers made with a yawn. I may be dwelling on the fact that my feet hurt, or nursing some petty slight. As for the words that I am dutifully saying – “Love you” or “Dear God” – I might as well be speaking in tongues, and maybe I am. And maybe that does not matter, for it is all working toward the good, despite myself and my most cherished intentions. Every day and every night, whether I “get it” or not, these “meaningless” words and actions signify more than I know. Repetition… helps us to be more honestly and fully human. It knows us better that we know ourselves.

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.187

I essentially agree with Norris’s conclusions about depression. She says that in the past 50 years especially we have seen it almost completely secularized and described only in terms of chemicals in the brain.

Robert Burton, writing in 1621, spoke not of assaults of the devil but of the “anatomy of melancholy.” Burton’s stated purpose in devising this “anatomy” was to reveal melancholy as “an ordinary disease,” for if it could be shown that to be causes by the physical “humours,” a natural remedy might be found. As an Anglican priest, Burton did not discount the religious element in the struggle against despair. His seven-point prescription for healing includes acknowledging that the source of our misery is sin, and that our help comes from a God we approach by the practice of repentance and prayer.

Still, his work had the effect of turning despair into sickness. This coincided nicely with the eclipse of theology and the rise of scientific methods as the best, if not only, way of understanding human behavior. The literary historian Reinhard Kuhn speaks of the late Renaissance as a period in which an ennui arose “whose germs had lain dormant in acedia, the monastic sickness,” and entered a long, slow process of secularization, becoming today’s “nameless melancholy.”

-Kathleen Noris, Acedia & Me, p.165

This wholly scientific explanation is not to be discounted. On the other hand, we have some demon chasers who insist the devil has a hand in nearly every case. I actually do NOT discount this either, at least not completely. What Norris is mostly trying to bring back into the equation of our understanding is personal sin.

This combination idea of depression, sloth, boredom, restlessness, apathy – it’s source can be found in some combination of these three and if we only fight ONE of these, are we unlikely to be very effective.

1. Sleep, exercise, and maybe psychotropic drugs

2. Repentance and spiritual disciplines

3. Prayer from others, deliverance or even exorcism

See how if you ONLY deal with one of these, you are probably missing something important?

Here are some good questions:

Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use?

Why has man entered on an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history?

Why is the good life which men have achieved in the twentieth century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, mass murders, can divert one from the sadness of ordinary mornings?

Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle, quoted by Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.314

Growing up, I never once heard particularly good answers to these questions.

The answers I always heard were, “Well, people have forgotten God.” or “Oh, things were bad 500, 1000, and 3000 years ago too. Nothing has changed that much.”

Both of these are in fact true, but they are dismissive.

It’s only recently that I discovered some folks, (oddly enough, both of them French), that have come up with some really serious and compelling answers to these questions.

Jacques Ellul says technology is to blame. It is amplifying our own sin and evil. (See his 1964 work The Technological Society)

Rene Girard says we are progressively unable to resolve our own conflicts due to the breakdown of the scapegoat mechanism – used for ages to hold society together but now beyond repair due to the complete undermining of it in AD 33. See any of his books, but with regards to wars, Battling to the End)

This is good. Look for the money quote, “eagerness to squander the precious time I have in running from the emotional demands that [writing/music/art] will make of me.”

People often remark that they would write, or paint, or sculpt, if only they had the time. But this is pure fantasy: the artist does whatever is necessary to arrange her life so that she will have the time to make her art. Even as I fret over juggling responsibilities to my aging mother, my disabled sister, my friends, and my art, I have to admit that it is not obligation I fear, but my distressing eagerness to squander the precious time I do have in running from the emotional demands that writing will make of me.

I may gripe about the inescapable chore of revision, of laboring over what I have written until I get it right. But in my current state, revision is less my problem than a reluctance to allow the flow of words to come in the first place.

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.?

In her book on acedia, Norris explores it from all sides. Though she plenty of credit to modern approaches to depression, (such as treating it with psychotropic drugs), one the purposes of the book is to bring sin back into the discussion. Whodathunk? It’s been lurking all along.

I can readily accept what Thomas Merton said to a group of monastic novices, in relating John Cassian’s teachings to their lives as contemporary monks. While we are tempted to “think sadness is a mood, an emotion,” he told them, in truth it is “a passion which easily leads to sin.” Merton’s admonition that “the causes of our sadness are not to be sought…in other people, but in ourselves” is an essential for surviving in the rock tumbler of relationship, whether one is within a place of business, a monastery, or a marriage. “It takes real courage,” Merton insists, “to recognize that we ourselves are the cause of our own unhappiness.” The trick is to maintain a nuanced view as we attempt to discern what trouble we have caused and are responsible for, and what is truly beyond our control.

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.273

In Kathleen Norris’s latest memoir/essay collection, I discovered repeated attempts to bring the Psalms back to the forefront of Christian worship.

It’s very similar to what our local reformed congregation has been pushing for a while, though from a different angle. Every year I warm up to the idea more.

The psalms are available to me when I worship in any Christian church, but they are likely to be snippets chosen for their suitability as Sunday-morning praise. They tend to disappear in the service, a little dose of poetry to be rushed through and soon forgotten. One can attend church for years and never perceive the psalms as both a primary inheritance form Judaism and the core of Christian prayer.

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.276

The “noble power” of a free will partakes of something even greater than hope, and that is grace. The kingdom of God within us in not something we gain through training, wit, or skill. It comes to use as pure gift, and we are free now, as in Dante’s time, to nourish it, curb it,or ignore it. Given the power and resilience of this grace, it is a terrible irony that the despairing so often feel rejected by a distant and uncaring God. When we are convinced that we are beyond the reach of grace, acedia has done its work.

John Climacus speaks of it as “a voice claiming that God has no mercy and no love for [us].”

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.205

This is good for me to remember. I often wish to write a book, at least one before I grow old. But I always think there are so many other people who could do a better job than me, and in fact have already done a better job than anything I could piece together. Not only is their writing better, but the lives seem (from a distance) for in order as well. But there is only one kind of person who writes books, even spiritual ones: really screwed up people. That’s all of us. We are untwisted by God’s grace alone. Don’t buy the myth of “spiritual celebrity”.

Although I felt like a big nothing, I realized that the thoughtful letters I continued to receive from readers did mean something, and that my work could be considered fraudulent only if I bought into the myth of spiritual celebrity.

By that I mean the notion that people who write books on spirituality do so because they’ve got it all figured out, and have somehow “succeeded” at the spiritual life. Jesus reminds us, however, that it is not proficiency that heals us, but faith, and faith does not traffic with success or failure.

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.229

Sound familiar?

Such enjoyment would need a good foundation, and I hoped to build it on the significant transformations I had undergone on my life’s journey.

What does it mean to have learned how to love, rejecting the fleeting pleasures of infatuation for the deeper satisfactions of commitment?

Read that line again. How often do we ask THAT question nowadays, eh?

Or to have apprenticed myself to the discipline of writing, so that I now crave the desert journey of revision as much as the initial burst of creativity and flow of words?

Or to have undergone a religious conversion, replete with fervor and gladness in this early stages, and now marked by aridity and pain?

If I find myself starved for the merest hint of spiritual ardor, I know I have arrived in a place where many others have been.

The monks and mystics of my faith all teach that persevering in a spiritual discipline, especially when it seems futile, is the key to growth.

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.261

This quote was mentioned in Kathleen Norris’s Acedia & Me. It is also perhaps my creed for blogging, and quite possibly many other things as well.

There is no such thing as writer’s block for writers whose standards are low enough.”

-William Stafford