Acedia & Me: One Final Word

          This is the fourth and final in a series of book reviews on Kathleen Norris’ new book Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life.  The other posts can be found here, here, and here.

           At various points within the book Norris pauses to survey the scene in which we find ourselves in modern life.  This includes the break-neck speed with which we accomplish very little -

Just look at us, with more money and less sleep than we know how to handle, except to go into debt, and take pills that get us up in the morning and others that let us rest at night.

 

          Norris tackles the self-absorbtion of the modern age, comparing it to the wisdom of much earlier followers of Christ – such as the desert fathers:

 

One great difference between these monks and today’s pop psychologists is that the monks’ process of discernment was likely to result in more self-knowledge, less self-consciousness.  In our day, this is often reversed.  People whose speech remains stuck in therapeutic jargon, for all the “work” they are doing on themselves, often remain stubbornly unreflective.

 

         The demon of acedia, Norris notes, puffs us up even as it casts us down.  We are left to resort to our last, best hope – which is the mercy of God in Jesus Christ.  This can be accessed through humility, as we accept who God has created us to be.  She doesn’t put it this way, but I would say a key part of this is accepting our “lot” in life and rejoicing that “the boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places.”

          Norris returns to the comparison of acedia and depression, admitting she has struggled with both and observing -

 

I find that depression generally has an identifiable and external cause that acedia lacks.  I can look at my life and see where the trouble is coming from.  But acedia arises out of nowhere, as it were, emerging from my inner depths without warning, and without any reason that I can determine.

 

          Norris notes she has “found that depression is amenable to treatment in ways that acedia is not.”

          It takes firm resolve and a strong faith that arises from some place beyond ourselves to do battle with the demon of acedia.  I’ll give the final word to Martin Luther, whom Norris quotes in a section called, “Despair and Possibility” -

 

You must be resolute, bid yourself defiance, and say to yourself wrathfully… ‘No matter how unwilling you are to live, you are going to live and like it!  This is what God wants… Begone, you thoughts of the devil!  To hell with dying and death!’ … Grit your teeth in the face of your thoughts, and for God’s sake be more obstinate, headstrong, and willful than the most stubborn peasant.