Episode 3: Acedia & the Signs of the Times

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode three, Acedia and the Signs of the Times.So, if you’ve been following along these first two episodes, you’ll know that we’re here to talk about acedia. Acedia is, in brief, what used to be one of the seven deadly sins, but got lumped in with sloth and has kind of fallen out of favor of our modern spiritual discourse. In episode one, I talked a lot about how I knew that acedia was showing up in my life, but I didn’t quite know what the name [of it] was yet.And in episode two, I start to describe acedia using two [00:01:00] books, The Noonday Devil by Jean Charles Nault and another one called Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. You may have been tuning in so far and thought a lot about the episodes, I’m sure, and still be wondering what is acedia. I wanted to pause before we get to today’s topic and just say that if you aren’t sure what acedia is still, that is okay.It takes a while to wrap your head around it. And really, it’s goals and its symptoms and how it moves in the world is actually quite simple. But at least, for me, getting to naming it and understanding it was a little more complex. So, I just wanna tell you, if you’re [00:02:00] like, is she gonna keep talking about that acedia thing? Because I’m thoroughly lost. The answer is yes for now. I’m gonna keep talking about the acedia thing, and it’s totally okay if you’re lost.I was thinking this week a little bit about how to better describe acedia, just in my own words, and I thought a lot about something we discussed in episode two, which was how is acedia different from depression?I think depression is something that we all either have experienced or maybe we have experienced it by proxy as showing up in someone’s life whom we love. So I wanna talk a little bit about that difference there, because I think most people have a fair enough understanding of depression, and that can be a launching point to understand more [00:03:00] about acedia. The way that I would describe it is if you were to exist in the world, and you were to exist free of depression, let’s just say, normal mental health, depression has been treated.Maybe it’s not even an issue, maybe it never was, and yet you still feel something that is nagging at you or seems to bother you, but you can’t quite figure out why, because nothing seems apparently wrong. That even if you have the most sound, mental health at that point in your life or maybe your entire life, if you’re really lucky, you still feel this unsettledness in your spirit.And that’s where I think depression and [00:04:00] acedia can start to diverge is, as I explained in episode two, depression can be a very true clinical issue that has clinical therapies and medications designed to overcome it, thank God. But acedia creeps into the realm of spirituality, and it affects our spirit.While it might show up looking like what we’re familiar with as signs of depression, it really at its root comes from the depression of the spirit, if you will. I hope that helps you to delineate a little bit better, and it will begin to make more sense as we go along.The second thing I wanna talk about, and I did mention a little bit before, is the false spirit. So the false spirit is [00:05:00] what I will refer to as the devil. I think I might have explained that I’m not usually a person that goes around talking about the devil. So, the false spirit for me is a much more palatable version of how to talk about it. I like the phrase, the false spirit, which comes from St. Ignatius of Loyola because it literally describes what I think, evil or the devil is the spirit, which is good, obviously, but the false spirit, which is kind of the antithesis of the good spirit, right?So, I wanna talk about the false spirit a lot in the next two episodes, including today and to understand and try to make sense of what’s going on right now, which is completely overwhelming if you’ve been following along [00:06:00] in the world. We need to understand how evil is at work through a spiritual lens. The false spirit, in other words, the devil, is acting in the world. Even if you’re not okay with the phrase, the false spirit or the devil, you can just call it evil, whatever spiritual tradition you come from, there probably is some conception of evil.So how does the false spirit operate, especially today, and I’d like to give you two goals that it has. The first goal of the false spirit is to keep us from living our God given vocation. And when I say vocation, I don’t necessarily mean like becoming a nun or becoming a firefighter. I really just mean what is it [00:07:00] that you are meant to do in this world? You specifically, a beloved child of God. Some people might call that, you know, living your best self, living your best life, living into God’s calling for you. Living into your purpose.There’s a lot of ways to describe that, and God wants us to live in that space, to live in that authentic being that we were created to be. However, the false spirit being false wants to keep us from getting there as best that he can. Okay? He wants to deter us from what is good and what is ultimately the purpose and fulfillment of our lives.The second thing, the false spirit does is keep us from doing [00:08:00] the most good that we can in the world. And I say the most because I do think, especially right now, there are a lot of good people out there, and they are doing otherwise seemingly good things, and maybe not outrightly bad things, although some people are doing outrightly bad things, but let’s just talk about a normal person, just kind of existing.They might not be doing bad, but they might not be doing the most good that they can do, even for myself, and I do consider myself someone who cares about doing good in the world. That is the growth point for me, always spiritually, am I doing the most good that I can do? Because if I kind of sit with [00:09:00] contentment and say, well, I’m doing good enough, I don’t really know if I’m going to reach the point that God wants me to be at, but also that the world needs, so again, the false spirit, two goals. One, keeping us from our God-given vocation or calling in life. And two, keeping us from doing the most good that we can in the world.The false spirit is really clever and really smart. I think back to the theology I had growing up which was like, the devil is bad and he tells you to do bad stuff. And if you do the bad stuff, it means you listen to him. As I’ve gotten older, I will say I have never truly abandoned that thinking.I realized, much to my shame, I still have a part of [00:10:00] me that thinks that the devil is like this little person that sits on your ear and says like, take the candy, do it. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that understanding of the devil or evil, or the false spirit served me well in childhood because that was kind of the extent of my moral thinking at the time, but I really have graduated instead to this idea that the devil is not necessarily the thing that’s sitting on your shoulder every day telling you to do the bad thing that’s in front of you. The devil is clever and smart and way more manipulative than at least I was told growing up.And one way that the false spirit shows up for me and my life is by actually. preying [00:11:00] on my good intentions and twisting it the devil knows that trying to get a good person off track is going to be really, really hard because that person has already, let’s say, made a commitment to goodness in their life. So the devil or the false spirit being clever thinks okay, well, how can I get that person to reneg on that? And one of the ways the false spirit does it is by using our inclinations, even sometimes our good inclinations and twisting and manipulating them towards evil or towards not doing enough good in the world or towards not going to the fullness of our God-given vocation.[00:12:00]So how does this all relate back to acedia? Acedia is one of the tools that the false spirit uses to keep us away from those two things. Living out our vocation, doing the most right in the world.And that’s what really was one of those things that clicked for me when I was doing spiritual direction, which I talked about in episode two. My intention has always been to listen to God, to do the most right in the world, to do what God is asking me to do. I’ve always tried to center my life around that.When I kept feeling these feelings of acedia, I was like, well, if I’m trying, trying, trying, why am I still feeling this unsettledness or this nagging or [00:13:00] this inertia or this restlessness? I keep at it every single day and I’m not trying to outrightly do something bad, so what is going on inside of me spiritually and naming acedia and realizing how it can affect people that are trying to work for the good it can really show up in that way.So, today what we’re gonna do is talk about acedia showing up in the world today, and I actually think that the false spirit is pounding us with acedia right now because there is so much evil going on and the false spirit knows that an order for that evil to survive, he’s gotta kind of mess with the goodness and the [00:14:00] good intentions of so many people out there. I think today is one of the most critical moments to talk about acedia because I think understanding it and being able to recognize it in society is what’s gonna actually help us to get out.I’m operating from a belief that we are right now in a time of great upheaval and very, very severe division. That is kind of the foundation that I’m going to talk about acedia in the modern context. It is feeling very, very overwhelming in every corner of the world, to be honest with you, and how pervasive these things are becoming, the false spirit in order to keep perpetrating evil in the world counts on this division.I [00:15:00] know we say it all the time, and it sounds super cliche, but think how much stronger we are when we’re together and we have all these people being alongside one another, towards a common goal or a common good. The devil knows that there’s strength in that and. If the devil wants to try to stop that or suppress it, sowing the seeds of division is a way to get at that strong force.The fact that we are experiencing so much evil and it’s so divisive, to me, are two really strong clues that the false spirit is waging some really good tactics to keep us away from the good. Another question that I think helps to confirm this is one that I’ve been seeing a lot [00:16:00] online in social media, but also in conversations that I’ve had with people about this, and many are just really scratching their head and asking the question, why are so many good people doing X, Y, and Z right now?Insert whatever example you like, and that is a conundrum. It is very unnerving to try to figure out the answer to that question, and I’ll even take it one step further and say, for me, I’ve asked how can two good people, otherwise good people, generally good people, even people that are Christians or even Catholics, have such opposing views about X, Y, or Z?On the one hand there’s people that are saying, we’re doing X, Y, and Z in the name of God, and [00:17:00] there’s other people who believe in God saying that is directly against God. That’s like not at all what Jesus was talking about. Hopefully, I have your attention now because I have a suspicion that some of that might resonate with you and your experience of life right now.And instead of feeling really overwhelmed and discouraged by the contradictory nature of all of it, I’m hoping that explaining acedia to you will help you look at it, still see the same things, perhaps still draw the same conclusions, but understand that what is happening right now is a tactic of the false spirit, and it’s by design of the false spirit that we keep finding ourselves here. What I’m asking you to [00:18:00] do along with me in this podcast is to name that and to do what we need to do personally to spiritually know how to push against that.What I’m trying to provide to you in this podcast is a personal spiritual outlet toward it, I do believe that it is not truly acting alone to look at this spiritually. I do believe, when you’re on the right spiritual path towards goodness, it knows no boundaries in this world. It will emanate from you. It will infuse everything you do and it’ll touch everybody around you.So I wanna pause and talk a little bit about a phrase in Catholicism that’ll, set the stage for. How we frame this. In [00:19:00] Catholicism we have this phrase, called the signs of the times.I Googled a quick, what are the signs of the times in Catholicism, and the internet came up with a really good. Definition, the internet says signs of the times, a phrase popularized by the Second Vatican Council to describe events and trends in contemporary history that the church must try to interpret in light of the gospel, in other words, Jesus’ teaching. It is a theological method for the church to engage with the world by understanding cultural and social phenomena to discern how those phenomena relate to God’s plan this includes scrutinizing current events, social ideas, and cultural trends to [00:20:00] see where they align with or contradict the teachings of Christ. Okay, so TLDR or too long didn’t listen. TLDL, if that’s a thing, basically the signs of the times are looking out into the world and doing what a lot of us are trying to do right now, which is try to make sense of it in light of what we know to be good. And for Catholics and Christians, what we know to be the life ministry teaching example and legacy of Jesus Christ.In the Noonday Devil, Jean Charles Nault talks about [how] acedia is perhaps one of the most forgotten topics of modern morality. And on the other hand, it is perhaps the root cause of the greatest crisis in the church. I would [00:21:00] use also the world today. So, what we’ll do the rest of this episode is go through four signs that Acedia is showing up.So, the first sign is that a lot of people are drifting away from God or not having a closeness with God. I wanna say that this is without judgment from me certainly, a lot of folks might be struggling with the concept of God, maybe be open to it, but not willing to really dig in or just not even know what to make of it. Because especially when things are so evil in the world, we can really start to doubt who God is and how God shows up in our life. [00:22:00] So on page 18 in the Noonday Devil, I’d like to read a quote from Cardinal Schoenborn from 1996, and he says, “it seems to me that the deepest crisis in the church today is that we no longer dare to believe and what God can do for the good and those who love him. The spiritual masters traditionally call this torpor of mind and heart, or acedia.” I think this idea of we have lessened our belief in what God can do for us does resonate in the feelings of hopelessness that are really pervasive.The second quote is from Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Aquinas is a Doctor of the Church, [00:23:00] and we will talk a lot more about him when we get to how acedia and Aquinas intersected. But for now, I just wanna read a quote from him that I think, again, fits into this not having closeness with God. He says, “We possess everything, but we do not have God. We have power, but we have lost meaning. Our society, which is oozing with anxiety, is going to disappear.” Again, very powerful. Little bit foreboding, but obviously anxiety is quite rampant in our modern times, and I think he’s just basically saying that we’ve drifted away, right, from God, from true meaning. Even from truth as we believe it to be like actual truth, right? [00:24:00]So the second sign is a kind of sensationalization of everything, and I think this shows up in a lot of places, especially the media. But I’m gonna again read a quote from the Noonday Devil from then Joseph Ratzinger and in it he says, “We are beginning to understand afresh the saying about the quote, sorrow of the world. The forbidden joys lose their attraction the moment they’re no longer forbidden. They had and have to be radicalized. The pitch increasingly raised and nevertheless seem finally flat and stale because they are all finite while the hunger is for the infinite.” [00:25:00] Woo. That’s a sentence or two, that has a lot going on in it.I think what he’s saying here is that when we have this unparalleled, let’s say, access to everything and this idea of freedom that we have in our world today of being able to do or be or exist in whatever way we want to, this idea of something being off of limits for us is met with this way of upping the ante, if you will. So, it’s this idea that we’re chasing something that can truly never be caught and getting lost along the way. [00:26:00]For instance, something that was unthinkable in movies or unthinkable as an act of violence several decades ago is now something that we might see regularly on the television. I think about this a lot when I watch modern television, which I still watch, and I’m not saying, to just never watch TV again or whatever, but some of the things that happen in television and with these characters is like really deep and distressing and unsettling, and I don’t know that would’ve been so explicit so many decades ago.And you might think that I’m sounding like an old fogey, but I think there’s a point in there which is we keep amping it up because we have to be the next kind of shock and awe factor in the society that we’ve built. And [00:27:00] I think we do it with movies. I think it happens with violence. I think it happens with sex and explicitness, to give you another example. I’ve stopped looking at my phone when it says breaking because everything’s breaking news nowadays. And I literally just stopped and I’m just like, it’s probably not that breaking or that surprising, and it’ll probably change by the end of the day, so why even look at it? That’s what he’s talking about. We keep trying to raise the pitch, but we just fall flat and stale every time because the next new sensational aspect of it is right around the corner. And then that’s where we throw all of our attention. So again, that’s the second sign of the time.The third sign is a sad one, and that is thinking that it’s better not to [00:28:00] exist, and this shows up in a lot of suicide and depression, which our society is really struggling with right now. I was just reminded the other day by a priest who was giving the homily here that at a local university, nine students within the course of I think a year, had committed suicide. Troubling, troubling statistics of young adults and teenagers are happening with rates of suicide or attempts at suicide, and I don’t wanna talk about suicide specifically because that in and of itself requires its own due treatment, but I wanna focus on this idea of existence. And whether or not it’s worth it, right?So,in the Noonday Devil, they talk about acedia is a lack of love. [00:29:00] “The lack of the Great Love. It shatters the impulse of hope and threatens to lead to the rejection of life itself. It is a real flirtation with death.” So, acedia is then essentially the absence of love, the absence of hope. And when you have the absence of love and hope, one begins to question existence itself.There’s another quote that goes on to say, “acedia is at the source of despair. Of our contemporaries who think it would be better not to exist.” So, this feeling, which I think again, we can associate with like suicide, depression, euthanasia, and other big ones. And that has certainly picked up [00:30:00] steam. Those are the outright, huge manifestations of it, but I also think that it shows up in subtler ways, even if those things aren’t on our mind. Is it a burden to exist? Is it a burden to someone else to exist? What is really the point of being here? And that is a way that acedia can show up and it’s a very dark way. But I think, again, there’s more explicit and subtler ways that we experience it.The fourth sign that we’ll talk about, and this is the last one for this episode, and we’re gonna continue on in the next episode, is this feeling of instability. And if the first three didn’t quite make sense, I have a gut sense that this one will be more relatable.So, the fourth [00:31:00] sign is this attachment to instability. So, let’s remember where the framework of acedia really took hold. I talk about it in episode two, and that is out in the desert with these Christian monks who were living among each other, maybe in an intentional community like a monastery, living very austere lives, very simple lives, and their whole goal was to concentrate on spirituality and the interior life and pray, and certainly to do chores and cook and have all their basic needs so they lived in these little cells.Think about it as a very tiny room with not much in it. Maybe a bed, a table, a [00:32:00] chair, a candle, a Bible and monk-like paraphernalia. These monks were living a very countercultural life. That was the point, but it didn’t mean that they weren’t continually tempted to leave that life and be in society again. The monks experienced acedia by these feelings of restlessness and instability.Their calling was to stay in a very circumspect space and pray and grow in relationship with God. But they had temptations through acedia to reject all of that and do other things. I remember reading in one of the books about acedia they were always thinking about maybe I need to go into town, or maybe I have [00:33:00] this unfinished chore outside and instead of sitting here praying today, I need to go do that. Or wouldn’t it be better if I was like a teacher in the town, like, what purpose is it that I’m serving just sitting here by myself praying. So these were like real temptations, and it made them want to flee their God-given purpose and their vocation.Okay. To go back to that, so it might seem a little unrelatable to us because we certainly aren’t living in the same circumstances that they [were], but I think it shows up really convincingly another way that it’s described in the Noonday Devil is the perpetual need for change. This instability is manifested, first of all by “a constant need to [00:34:00] move to change one’s locality, work situation, institution, occupation, spouse and friends.”So that’s where I think we can relate is that the sign of the time that we’re experiencing right now is this idea of constantly being attached to change and movement, which can show up as restlessness, and it might mean moving cities, changing jobs, changing our situation, changing our friends. It says in the quote, changing our spouse. I hope not. That doesn’t sound good, but this idea that we will be better off if we were to do X, Y, Z. Okay? And there’s a quote in there from a 12th century author, Galand de Reigny [00:35:00] . And that author says, quote, “For everything that last horrifies me.”So, it’s this aversion to lasting, staying put going, the distance, completing the thing. We really struggle with that nowadays. The book goes on to say we are witnessing, therefore, “a frenzy of novelty and ipso facto, a horror of anything lasting, of everything that stays in one place. Both are the signs of general dissatisfaction. As soon as someone has obtained what he desires, he wants something else. Just as children do.”So, it’s almost like this childlike fidgetiness, if you will, going from one thing to another because you’re [00:36:00] constantly some level of dissatisfied with the thing present before you.I think switching jobs and careers is one of the ways that it really shows up. We don’t have those long-lasting careers anymore that perhaps our parents’ generation may have had. There’s a lot of things we don’t like about our current job, so we apply to a different job thinking that will finally be better. But it might be in some ways, but then not in other ways. Then there’s like the throwaway culture, the fast fashion, the dollar aisle at Target. Guilty as charged. And also, I think channel surfing and doom scrolling are a version of this. Like we’re always just looking for the next video. Everything’s three seconds long to keep our attention. Just like this restlessness and instability are everywhere. The book [00:37:00] goes on to say, “One could say that acedia is the temptation to reject passing beyond and to stick with passing through, thus losing sight of the dynamic of desire, which is the dynamic of love.”I really like the first part of that quote, this temptation to reject passing beyond, so maybe staying in that place, feeling all those feelings of wanting to flee and change and escape, but instead staying the course and passing beyond that, whereas we tend to value passing through something.If I am sitting here and I reach my boiling point, I can pass through and change and experience something else. Even if it’s not like a career, we don’t have as [00:38:00] many major life projects anymore, maybe even outside of our work. Even if we’re [not] discontent with our jobs, we’re frenetically running around doing all the other things and all the other hours of the day we have this attachment to being stressed and busy and we don’t have as many hobbyists, things that people sink themselves deep into. And instead we’re just constantly trying to do a little bit of everything. Definitely guilty of that.We also don’t have as many commitments to things that require our own gift of self and sacrifice, and I think a lot of people trying to do good still do try to do that, but I think what they’re talking about here is not just like instances of gift and sacrifice, but in it for the long haul type thing.There’s a quote in the book from [00:39:00] someone whose first initial is C. and then last name Flipo, and it has a French title, which I won’t even dare to pronounce. But it says, “The end of the will coincides with the era of pure indifference, with the disappearance of the major goals and great enterprises for which life deserves to be sacrificed.” I like this juxtaposition of the phrase: the era of pure indifference because what do you have when you tend to stay away from going deep? Oftentimes what remains is indifference.I think another way to give another example to bring it back down is like this idea of fear of missing out. An example I can use from my own life is this kind of craze around traveling. And I love to travel, so [00:40:00] those of you who know me are gonna be like, Christina, this is so hypocritical ‘cause you travel all the time. And I’m like, yes I do. And here are some things I’ve learned about that. Traveling I think is good, right, at its base foundation. Experiencing different places, different cultures, different ways of being, has really opened my eyes up to how to do more good in the world and how to be in the world in a good way, and also the beauty of the diversity of what God has created in every human being and every topography and land on the planet, so I’m not saying, don’t travel because you’re seized by instability, so you gotta stay put. I think instead what it is an attachment to that.So, I’ll give you an example. A lot of people might travel for enrichment purposes, but then I also [00:41:00] think there’s people out there who travel because they feel like they’re gonna miss out or not see something or not experience something it’s like they’re constantly trying to escape their normal life by leaving it and going away. And I think that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about acedia, right? It’s the modern, a person who’s sitting in front of their computer and they’re at work and they hate work, and they’re like, let me plan my next trip to be away from work in my life. And again, guilty as charged, right?It’s this attachment to the idea that I will be happier and better off if I’m not in my current situation. I wanna also pause here and just say, it’s not that I am trying to say, or that acedia is trying to say, you know what, you should probably just chill there and be like real miserable. Okay? That’s not [00:42:00] necessarily it either. What it’s trying to say is that it’s our attachment to leaving and changing, that can be the source of the problem.So, I’ll give the example in my own life of my parents who both worked 40 years at their job, which again, we know just doesn’t even exist anymore, but they didn’t really particularly care for the work that they were doing. They loved the people at the work and the customers but if you were to say, hey, do you absolutely love being a customer service rep, or do you absolutely love grinding tools? I don’t know what they would really say.I actually think like in our parents’ generation till now, it was like, oh, now my kids can have the opportunity to have the “It” career that I didn’t [00:43:00] have. And at least for my parents, they didn’t really travel a whole lot, and my desire to travel was almost like a rejection of that. Just to be like if you’re not gonna travel, or we didn’t travel as a family, I’m gonna go everywhere and anywhere I can be, but what I’ve realized, I think, as I’ve gotten older, is, yes, I’m glad I went and saw and did all the things that they dreamed about doing in retirement.But the biggest thing that has struck me about my parents lives day to day is that they really were content. And that is what has almost stopped me in my tracks a little bit because. They led such different lives than what I lead today. They worked nine to five. Again, not at the most “it” of all jobs. They traveled maybe once during the summer, we never went [00:44:00] abroad. No national parks. No Disney World, not doing any of that. But I can honestly say, like, I had a very content childhood, and my parents were very content with their lives and very much in love with each other.And so, when I think of my life today and this fourth sign of instability, do I think I need to stay in a job for 40 years? Not necessarily. I don’t think I’ve discerned that that’s what I feel called to do. I don’t even know what that job would be. But do I need to learn the lesson of where I am right now might not be the bee’s knees for me, but I have a choice. Do I stay the course? And learn and sit [00:45:00] with the 75% satisfaction, let’s say, or do I constantly flee and jump from thing to thing, chasing that other 25%, but in essence really spinning my wheels. And that’s what I think Aedi is trying to say is. We have this temptation to flee, to escape, to change, to undo, to hop around. And it’s not motivated by bad reasons, but it’s chasing a false destination nation.Maybe what we need to do is look deeply inward and stay the course and try to figure out where that source of dissatisfaction is coming from. Part of it might truly be the situation we’re in, and part of it honestly might be within [00:46:00] ourselves. That’s what I think is really powerful. I think the proof of this for me is that my parents really didn’t and couldn’t because of their educational attainment, they couldn’t, hop around from job to job or. Like they had good study work, and they were just very happy to exist, and by virtue of them being happy, I was also happy growing up. I certainly give thanks to them for setting the example of how to be content in one’s own life, in one’s own shoes.So just to recap, today we focused on the Signs of the Times. We went through four of them, and the signs of the times are ways that acedia is showing [00:47:00] up and our concept of the signs of the times and Catholicism is to look at what’s showing up and interpret it in light of the gospel and the teachings of Jesus Christ. So, I choose to do that with the lens of acedia. I think it helps us to make sense a little bit of why we’re seeing what we’re seeing, and also why we’re feeling what we’re feeling, and finally why we feel tempted to do the things we do.Because this is all coming at us so strongly right now, I think naming it as the false spirit at work gives it a persona and makes it less overwhelming because we can point to it and name it and therefore fight it and overcome it.So, in the next episode we’ll talk a little bit more about this and eventually we are getting to what we need to do personally [00:48:00] to realize the acedia and overcome it in our own path. This is a public episode. 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