I
A few years ago, I went to a spiritual
director. I had been feeling vaguely, but chronically,
dissatisfied with my life and work to the point where it was
beginning to affect my general sense of wellbeing.
Especially frustrating was that there did not seem to be any
good reason for it. A mist of free-floating anxiety and
melancholy blanketed a full, rich and, in many ways,
privileged life. I chalked it up to mid-life. But a friend
told me how helpful spiritual direction had been for him.
I’d just finished reading the Starbridge series of novels by
Susan Howatch in which spiritual direction in the Anglican
tradition plays a prominent part and I thought, why not?
My friend’s spiritual director couldn’t
take me on, but he recommended someone else, who was well
enough known that I recognized the name. At our first
meeting, he gave me some background about himself, and then
asked me to tell him what was going on in my life. I made
note of some peculiar mannerisms. He looked at me intently,
nodding from time to time, but saying very little. At the
end of our fifty minutes, he lent me some books and we
arranged to meet again. The second, and then the third
session went pretty much the same. I would talk, he would
make big-time eye contact, nod empathetically, ask me
periodically how this all made me feel,
and stroke his chin like a Viennese analyst. At
first I thought his taciturnity pointed to great spiritual
depth. He was taking it all in, and would soon give me the
gift of his wisdom. But after about four sessions it dawned
on me – he said so little because he just didn’t know what
to say. I decided it wasn’t a good use of my time, so I
returned his books and didn’t make another appointment.
One thing my spiritual director did give
me, however. He introduced me to the concept of the “noon
day demon.” That was the name that he immediately attached
to my sense of boredom, lassitude, lethargy, coupled with a
restless dissatisfaction and yearning for change. When he
first used the phrase, I experienced an almost electrical
jolt of recognition. So that’s what’s
troubling me, I thought, “the noonday demon.”
II
I learned that this expression came from
the desert fathers and mothers of the early centuries of
Christianity, those men and women who went as prayer
warriors into the Egyptian wilderness to do battle with
Satan, armed only with solitude and prayer. They were also
the spiritual superstars of their day, much sought after for
wisdom and counsel. We still have today their collected
sayings and teachings, catchy, pithy, down-to-earth and
arresting in the concreteness of their insight. The noonday
demon, the desert fathers and mothers said, was the
“destruction that wastes at noonday” referred to in Psalm
90:6, sowing seeds of doubt and dissatisfaction and tempting
them to abandon their calling to prayer. This demon was also
given the name acedia,
from the Greek ̀ακηδία meaning literally “absence of care.”
It came to be regarded by some as a kind of auto-immune
disease of the soul, triggering a legion of other
temptations. It was the root cause of all sorts of inward
destruction if left untended. And that made immediate sense
out of my problem, a kind of low-grade and free-floating
discombobulation that colored everything else in my life,
including my ability to snap out of it.
Two writers wrote prominently of acedia, Evagrius
Ponticus and John Cassian. Evagrius was closely associated
with both Basil of Caesarea and his brother Gregory of
Nazianzus. In the year 383, at about the age of 38, he went
into the desert to live the life of a monk and remained
there until his death in 397. Evagrius taught about the
“eight bad thoughts” that wreak havoc if they are allowed to
gain a foothold in the soul – among them gluttony,
fornication, avarice, anger, sadness and acedia. We’re
dealing here with a very unmodern psychology. Sadness a “bad
thought”? Melancholy a root cause of sin? Yes, said Evagrius.
Emotions for the desert fathers were not involuntary
perturbations over which we have no control (“How can I help
how I feel?”)
but acts of the will. Or rather, they originate in the
attacks of the devil, but persist by an act of the will.
Their insight is rooted in the teaching of Jesus that there
is an unbroken line between murderous and adulterous
thoughts and the act of murder or adultery itself (Matthew
5) , a line we would prefer to deny so we can go on thinking
murderously or adulterously; but Jesus was clear that we are responsible
for our thoughts and feelings. “Sadness,” Evagrius wrote,
“is a dejection of the soul and is constituted from thoughts
of anger, for irascibility is a longing for revenge, and the
frustration of revenge produces sadness.”[1] The
sadness of which he spoke, which seems so benign, actually
originates in our frustration at not getting what we want.
And that is a very spiritual malady.
Acedia, on the other hand, is easily
mistaken for sadness and closely connected to it; but it is
a subtly different problem – “a relaxation of the soul.”
Sorrow agitates us, while its first cousin acedia sedates
us. It destroys concentration and simultaneously produces
lethargy and restlessness.
The demon of acedia, also called the
noonday demon, is the most oppressive of all demons. He
attacks the monk about the fourth hour [10 a.m.] and
besieges his soul until the eighth hour. First of all, he
makes it appear that the sun moves slowly, or not at all,
and that the day seems to be fifty hours long. Then he
compels the monk to look constantly towards the windows, to
jump out of his cell, to watch the sun to see how far it is
from the ninth hour … And further, he instils in him a
dislike for the place and for his state of life itself, for
manual labour, and also the idea that love has disappeared
from among the brothers, and that there is no one to console
him.[2]
What we tend to think of as something
rather harmless -- low blood sugar, lack of sleep, drudgery,
or need for a change of scenery -- was, to the desert monk,
a source of great spiritual danger because it distracted one
from the central task of one’s life – to watch and to pray.
Evagrius maintained that chronic boredom with one’s work can
lead to deeper problems, namely, boredom with one’s place
and one’s people, and a constant hankering after greener
grass.
The eye of the person afflicted with
acedia stares at the doors continuously, and his intellect
imagines people coming to visit …. When he reads, the one
afflicted with acedia yawns a lot and readily drifts off
into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning
his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again
goes back to reading for a while; leafing through the pages,
he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the
folios and calculates the number of gatherings. Later, he
closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep,
but not a very deep sleep, for hunger rouses his soul. [3]
While Evagrius described acedia’s
stultifying effects, John Cassian dealt more with the other
effect of the noon day demon, its power to make us anxious
and dissatisfied. Acedia, Cassian wrote, results in “a weary
and anxious heart.” “Once this has seized possession of a
wretched mind,” he writes, “it makes a person horrified at
where he is, disgusted with his cell, and also disdainful
and contemptuous of the brothers who live with him or at a
slight distance, as being careless and unspiritual. Likewise
it renders him slothful and immobile in the face of all the
work to be done within the walls of his dwelling.”[4] Acedia
is destructive because it gives rise to so many other issues
and conditions, which is what I perceived in myself. Could
it be that there was a connection between an inability to
concentrate, continually interrupting reading, prayer or
even conversation to check emails, make phone calls, or
simply get up and stretch and a critical spirit towards
people whom I thought “careless and unspiritual,” and a
sense that maybe I’d be happier somewhere else? Friends and
family often tease me because I compulsively check my watch.
I have always had trouble finishing books. Normally, I have
six or eight on the go at a time, and a new title is always
piquing my curiosity. And I tend to read in short,
fragmented spurts, turning my attention to something else
after reading only a few pages, which means that I do not
attend deeply enough to what I am reading that it registers
in my mind. Part of the reason for that is that I am
interested in so many things, but making an acquaintance
with the noonday demon has also made me wonder whether I’m
avoiding something. Now, it would be silly to over-pathologize
such practices as clock-watching or falling asleep while
reading, but it has made me reflect on my patterns of
behavior in a more holistic way. Acedia couples such
apparently contradictory tendencies as laziness and a
frantic jumping from one thing to another, which is why,
like many systemic maladies, it is so hard to diagnose. But,
recognition and naming is the first step towards healing.
Didn’t Jesus ask the Legion of demons his name in order to
gain power over him (Mark 5)?
III
When my spiritual director first told me
about the noonday demon it was a new discovery. I’ve been
surprised to learn since just how many people share an
interest in it. Ronald Rolheiser describes acedia as sadness
“when there’s seemingly no reason to be sad, “ and a
tendency to “unhealthily luxuriate in sadness so as to
rationalize making no further efforts to build up anything.”[5] R.
R. Reno attributes the modern cultivation of “critical
distance” as an intellectual virtue to the sin of acedia.
Acedia, then, is a real threat, a deadly
sin doing its deadly work in the present age. Its presence
can be detected rather clearly in two features of our
intellectual and moral culture. The first is the
intellectual spirit of dispassion and coolness that grows
out of the ideal of “critical distance.” This ideal often
contributes to the torpor
animi that
afflicts any who have entered into the habituating practices
of our universities.[6]
Acedia creates a kind of sterile
intellectual curiosity that dampens the desire for prayer
and disciplined spirituality, according to Reno.
After beginning to prepare for this
article I discovered that Kathleen Norris, author of The
Cloister Walk and Amazing
Grace, has
just published a full length study entitledAcedia and Me. I
have always been drawn to Norris’s writing, especially her
autobiographical descriptions of her spiritual pilgrimage,
which led her from the bright lights of New York City to her
childhood home in South Dakota, and to Benedictine
monasteries. Her acquaintance with the monastic tradition
guided Norris to an understanding of acedia and a
recognition that this was a demon that often accompanied her
on her way. Not surprisingly, much of what she says in Acedia
and Me had
for me a ring of familiarity.
Norris points out that the word acedia
pretty much disappeared for about 500 years, from the 14th to
the 19th centuries.
Medieval theologians condensed Evagrius’s eight thoughts
into seven deadly sins, with acedia being subsumed under the
sin of sloth. But, based on a resurgence of writing about
it, acedia has made a comeback. Can we assume that words
emerge at times when we need them to describe an experienced
reality? If so, then the malady that the men and women of
old described with the word acedia has once again come to
dominate our inner life. That’s Norris’s conclusion: “much
of the restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment
phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today is the
ancient demon of acedia in modern dress.”[7] Acedia
bears many similarities to that ubiquitous scourge of the
modern soul, depression, with the difference that it is very
much a spiritual more than an emotional or psychic
phenomenon. According to Norris, depression (from which her
husband suffered terribly) can often be treated effectively
by counselling or medication, while acedia must be addressed
“by spiritual practice and the discipline of prayer.”[8]
Acedia was an especially monastic
affliction, striking those who had embraced the tedium of
spiritual struggle in one place for the duration of one’s
life. Monasticism, by definition, is a life of repetition,
routine and material deprivation, and it is not hard to
understand why, out of boredom, loneliness or fatigue, monks
and nuns would be particularly susceptible to the noon day
devil. But Kathleen Norris argues (and I think she’s right)
that it is not exclusive to cloistered communities but “can
strike anyone whose work requires self-motivation and
solitude, anyone who remains married ‘for better of for
worse,’ anyone who is determined to stay true to a
commitment that is sorely tested in everyday life.”[9] Thus,
in the ruins of Christendom, living in a culture whose
attitude towards faith oscillates between bemused
indifference and open hostility, it is not surprising that
acedia strikes those who have embarked on a life of service
to God, especially those who have undertaken the burden of
pastoral ministry. “Acedia,” Norris writes, “is a danger to
anyone whose work requires great concentration and
discipline, yet is considered by many to be of little
practical value.” She is thinking autobiographically of
herself as a writer here, but pastoral ministry must surely
be included in this definition. Don’t get me wrong, I do not
think that the life of a pastor is more difficult today than
it was in previous generations, as many try to argue. But
all research shows that a loss of social status and respect,
apathetic congregations, mounds of pointless administrivia
in the face of massive need, and being confronted daily with
the yawning gulf between the ideals of the Gospel and the
dreariness of one’s work has exacted a heavy emotional and
psychic toll on large numbers of clergy. Reacquaintance with
acedia and its wiles, however, is a reminder that the root
of the problem is spiritual. It will not be solved by
sabbaticals, by task force recommendations on clergy
compensation, by seminars on self-care techniques, or by
including Prozac among the medications covered by church
group insurance plans. It is, at root, a disease of the
spirit and must be addressed with appropriate remedies.
What remedies? “Vices are cured by their
contrary,” writes
R. R. Reno. “The more we feel the torpor of critical
distance, the more swiftly we must run toward the daily
office, toward regular study of Scripture, toward the bread
and the cup of the Eucharist. An intimacy with divine things
is the proper way toward a passion for divine truth. We
cannot enjoy that which we hold at a distance.”[10] The
ancient prescription for a diagnosis of acedia is something
that runs very much counter to contemporary sensibilities –
stability and repetition. Today, when something is “not
working for us,” the recommendation almost always has to do
with change – change of routine, change of diet, change of
job, change of relationships. Are you bored and aggravated
with your church? Find a new one that better “meets your
needs.” But monastic life was firmly rooted in stability and
repetition, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, year by
year, from the lifetime of one generation of participants to
the next. Norris calls it “tedium with a purpose,” the
steady rhythm of work and prayer, to rebel against which is
to break covenant with one’s community and vocation, and
with the God who has called one there. The response to
acedia, according to the tradition, is based on the very
counter-intuitive principle that, rather than fleeing that
which is causing us distress, there are times when the right
thing to do is to enter into it more deeply. So the way out
of restless boredom may well not be
a change of scenery or habit, but the disciplined embracing
of the routine in which one already finds oneself. I have
found this a very challenging idea for myself. I find myself
worrying that I might re-use the same hymn in worship twice
in three or four months. I check my sermons from the last
lectionary cycle three years ago to make sure I don’t
“repeat myself” (as if anyone would notice!) I began to pray
the daily office from the Northumbria Community in England,
and felt my anxiety level immediately rise when I realized
that the prayers are the same every
day! It has occurred to me, though, that perhaps this is
at the root of my problem, and the solution is to learn to
make friends with sameness.[11]
It would be a mistake to do what we often
do, which is to seize on acedia as the answer to every inner
struggle. One thing those old guys knew was the importance
of discernment. Acedia, like most spiritual diseases, defies
easy diagnosis. It wears many masks. I mentioned to my wife
a while ago that I felt continually restless, unable to
settle on anything, hyperactively jumping from one project
to another without ever completing anything and her comment
was that this did not look like my life at all – in the same
marriage for twenty-six years, twenty-seven uninterrupted
years of ministry, the last twelve in the same church;
completing a Ph.D. as a part time student in less time that
it took most of those studying full time. But acedia is
something that goes on inside, in the soul. It “set[s] in
motion the endless cycle of self-defeating thoughts,”[12] that
no matter what one is doing, it never really amounts to
anything of consequence. And this is a spiritual issue
because, according to the older physicians of the soul, it
amounts to “the rejection of a divine and entirely good
gift.”[13] Acedia
works by distorting one’s perceptions of oneself, one’s
situation and those with whom one lives and works, so that
by definition there is a disconnect between the “objective”
truth of one’s life and the place of the heart and the mind.
For this reason, discernment is critically important. Norris
points out the sophistication of “cardiognosis” –
knowledge of the heart – that is central to the spiritual
psychology of the desert fathers and mothers. It is a
knowledge that comes only through attentive listening,
observing and accumulation of wisdom. As much as “any modern
psychiatrist, [the desert monks] knew that awareness of
one’s underlying problem was key, but by itself it could not
affect healing. These monks had learned that it is at noon,
when it the sun is unbearably hot, and one’s energy is
drained, that all knowledge of the world is of little use.”[14]
A recommitment to prayer and spiritual
practice is vital, especially at those times when one feels
least motivated. This is something of which I wish I could
convince parishioners who stop coming to church in the midst
of a depression or a family crisis, that that is
precisely the time when one needs to be there. Such times of
spiritual crisis when God seems farthest away are,
paradoxically, the times when God is nearest, and when the
potential for healing is the greatest. “[M]onastic wisdom
insists that when we are most tempted to feel bored,
apathetic, and despondent over the meaninglessness of life,
we are on the verge of discovering our true self in relation
to God.”[15] This
depends, though, on learning to see acedia for what it is –
a malady of the spirit that cannot be corrected by giving
into it, by in effect attempting to construct one’s own
solution through activity, but by a greater openness and
deeper surrender to the presence of God. Again, this cuts
very much against the grain of contemporary psychology,
which regards happiness, fulfillment and inner health as
achievements of the self. The Christian tradition argues,
instead that these things are gifts of divine grace. The
monks to whom Kathleen Norris appeals were not the only ones
to have recognized this, but their reflections on the noon
day demon are an important contribution to a Christian
response to what ails so many of us.
Like many spiritual traditions, this one
reveals truth because it is not an esoteric gnosis available
only to adepts and elites, but a wisdom potentially open to
all. And, indeed, there is something obvious about
reflections on acedia which really amount to saying that the
grass is rarely greener on the other side. There is a pop
psychology resonance in the current saying that “Wherever I
go, there I am.” In other words, if we are dissatisfied with
ourselves, the true solution is rarely found in a change of
circumstance but more likely to be found within. It has
taken me a long time to realize that the struggles I have
with ministry cannot be fixed by changing churches. For the
monks, it was the fantasy that a change of place will solve
their problem. Norris argues that so much contemporary
“spirituality” lacks any sense of “place,” but sees the
spiritual life as disconnected from the specifics of one’s
location and salvation as liberation from what the late
Richard John Neuhaus called the “thus-and-soness” of life.
But this is gnosticism, not incarnational Christianity. The
desert monks were quite adamant that when one is assailed
with a temptation to roam, that is the very time to “not
leave that place…. For if you leave it then, no matter where
you go, you will find the same temptation waiting for you.”[16]
The destructive power of acedia, however,
is not fully experienced only in the moods and thoughts that
assail one inwardly, but, as with all Christian realities,
in one’s relationships. I have found this certainly to be
the case. The times when I am most out of sorts within
myself are the times when I am most impatient with my family
and most contemptuous of my church; when I am most prone to
a prideful and critical spirit, and give myself permission
to say things that are hurtful to others; when I am most
vulnerable to irrational anger and thoughts of revenge and
most indifferent to the sufferings of others. The Scriptures
picture the devil, the Adversary, as fundamentally a teller
of lies. Psychiatrist Scott Peck popularized this idea in
his well known book People
of the Lie. Satan
is the accuser, the one who destroys trust in God and hope
by convincing us that God
can do nothing for us and if we want to solve our problems
we need to do it ourselves; but that we are quite likely
beyond helping, so don’t get your hopes up. The paradox of
acedia is that the more absorbed we become in ourselves, the
more alienated we become and the more distorted and
corrupted our selves by virtue of being cut off from the
true sustenance of life. Acedia is “truth as the devil tells
it, the love of being free to be myself enslaving me in a
sterile narcissism. For acedia is not merely a personal
vice. Left unchecked, it can unravel the great commandment:
as I cease to practice my love of God, I am also less likely
to observe a proper love of neighbor or myself.”[17]
When I was preparing for ordination, I
was not always in a very good space. My first marriage was
breaking down and I did not know myself very well. At that
time in history, when the church still had money to pay for
these things, many of us had to undergo a battery of
psychological tests prior to ordination. I had always
thought of myself as a pretty together person, but my test
was like a pail of cold water in the face.
[Paul] is somewhat compulsive which may
express itself behaviourally in a hard-drivenness that may
come at the cost of really tuning into his inner world… He
tends to diminish himself, reflecting some feelings of
inadequacy and self-doubt… He is extremely tense and
fretful… There is little emotional responsiveness… [He] also
[shows] a high degree of anxiety roving toward the neurotic
end of the scale.
Anxious, fretful, but emotionally
disengaged; “neurosis” (which the psychologist defined as
the unproductive expenditure of psychic and emotional
energy) I now recognize as acedia. These tests showed that I
was squandering my gifts on obsessing over my own problems,
resulting in a much reduced capacity to care for others. And
I have found it to be true. The times when I have been most
concerned about my failures, my inadequacies and my
disappointments have been the times that I have been most
unavailable to others. Earlier in my ministry, when I would
be in a “down” period, my wife would always say, “Go and
visit Mrs. Kibler.” I would not want to go because when
acedia strikes, the last thing I want to do is go and visit
elderly parishioners. But
Mrs. Kibler, a lady in her late 80s, had a gift for joy and
encouragement and thirty minutes with her were enough to
lift the clouds and drive away the noon day demon.
IV
Is there value in revisiting ancient
sources of pastoral and spiritual psychology? What do the
desert monks have to teach us who live on the other side of
the Freudian divide and have access to mountains of
scientific research into the human psyche and effective
therapies? After all, when we go to the doctor he doesn’t
apply leeches or bleed us in order to restore our humoral
balance. Why would we return to ancient models of soul-care
to meet the challenges of a world that people of that time
could not even have imagined. In fact, it is a widely
accepted argument that depression and despair are the only
truly sane responses to a world that is in such a state as
ours. People are depressed because, as Walker Percy puts it,
“modern life is enough to depress anybody.”[18] Research
into clergy burn-out, which has reached almost epidemic
proportions, almost always focuses on the dysfunctionalities
of the institutional church, the factors that “make clergy
depressed.” None of the mandated responses seem to be able
to do anything to stem the tide. But maybe people long ago
knew things that we have forgotten, and there is value in
revisiting their insights. Kathleen Norris writes that the
desert monks were absolutely committed to “seeing things as
they are” and not assigning blame for the state of their own
souls to external causes.
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 process is often
reversed. People whose speech remains stuck in the
therapeutic jargon, for all the “work” they are doing on
themselves often remain stubbornly unreflective. Even if
they catalogue their neuroses with great facility, they seem
stuck with them.[19]
In his classic book, The
Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip
Rieff argued that several of Freud’s followers, including
Carl Jung, turned his into personality and the hidden
regions of the psyche into a modern religion. Rather than
being a means of helping people to get through the day and
achieve a degree of provisional contentment, as Freud had
intended, psychoanalysis was turned into an archetypal
description of reality and a universal cure for the human
long for salvation.[20] Rieff
would argue that the spiritual life has been co-opted into
this therapeutic mindset, this unremitting quest for inner
wholeness and peace. A return to traditions such as that of
the desert monks forces us to ask whether that quest itself
is problematic. The goal is not, as Freud held, to gain
knowledge of our repressed desires, but to submit to the
will of God.
Thomas Oden made this case in the 1980s
when he began advocating for a recovery of the “classic
traditions” of pastoral care. Oden was deeply schooled in
existentialist theology and psychotherapy but came to
realize how mired these approaches were in the underlying
values of modernity, which he defined as “autonomous
individualism, naturalistic reductionism, and narcissistic
hedonism.”[21] Much
of contemporary therapy is ineffective in bringing about
real healing because its assumptions are the same as those
of the surrounding culture. Oden found himself drawn
increasingly to the “classical Christian pastoral
tradition,” articulated especially by Gregory the Great in
his masterwork Pastoralia, which
Oden calls “the most influential book in the history of the
pastoral tradition.”[22] There
is something distinctive about Christian soul-care that has
been long forgotten and virtually replaced by modern
post-Freudian psychologies, much of it highly faddish and
commercialized. The main lesson of writers as diverse as
Oden and Kathleen Norris seems to me to be that we ought to
guard against falling into the primary conceit of modernity,
namely, that the rise of the modern sciences marks an
unbridgeable divide between superstition and enlightenment,
and that pre-modern wisdom has nothing to teach us. We can
turn the clock back and erase the insights and breakthroughs
of contemporary psychology. However, those old guys knew a
thing or two about the spirit and the soul from which we can
still receive immense benefit.
This is the larger point that I wish to
make. Acedia itself is not the universal explanation of all
things that trouble us. This was driven home to me when my
wife, whose inner make-up is very different from my own, was
working her way through Acedia
and Me, and said to me, “I’ve read seventy-five pages
and I’m not sure I even know what she’s describing. What is acedia
anyway?” I thought, “If you don’t know, honey, then this is not your
demon. If it were, you would know immediately.” I
am simply testifying to how my knowledge of the ways in
which I have shaken hands with the noon day devil have
illuminated my own personal struggles, and, I hope, freed me
to live with greater faith and joy. I also hope it will be
helpful to my readers.
[1] Evagrius
of Pontus, The
Greek Ascetic Corpus, Ronald
E. Sinkewicz, trans., (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 81.
[4] John
Cassian, Institutes,
Boniface Ramsey, trans., (New York: Newman Press), 219
[7] Kathleen
Norris, Acedia
and Me: A Marriage, A Monk and A Writer’s Life, (New
York: Riverhead Books) 3.
[10] Reno,
“Fighting the Noonday Devil.”
[11] The
counsel of stability seems an almost unattainable goal
in today’s world. Unless we drop out of society
completely, beating back the frenetic encroachments of
contemporary life is practically impossible. An even
greater tension is between stability and the images of
pilgrimage, movement and holy restlessness that have an
equally important place in Christian spirituality. A
desire to wrestle through this tension is one of the
roots of the so-called “new monasticism” movement which
seeks, in various ways, to discover what applicability
monastic practices might have to modern life. One of the
wisest and most sensible forms of this movement (which
can be very silly indeed) is the Northumbria Community
in northern England. The two fundamental values of
Northumbria are “availability and vulnerability,” which
can be embodied wherever one finds oneself. Stability is
to be cultivated, not in a monastic cell set apart from
the world, but “in the cell of the heart,” regardless of
the circumstantial change that swirls about and through
one’s life. See www.northumbriacommunity.org.
[12] Norris, Acedia
and Me, 21
[18] Walker
Percy, Lost
in the Cosmos, or, The Last Self-Help Book (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983) 75.
[19] Acedia
and Me, 134-135.
[20] Philip
Rieff, The
Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith After
Freud, (New
York: Harper & Row, 1968)
[21] Thomas
C. Oden, Care
of Souls in the Classic Tradition, (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1984), 24.
