Fully Alive: Acedia - from distraction to attention

Today we continue with our worship series Fully Alive, based on the book of the same title by Elizabeth Oldfield. We are each searching for meaning in our lives—searching for wisdom. And there’s millions of places for us to find it. In Fully Alive, Elizabeth Oldfield reminds us of the wisdom that our Christian faith tradition holds. Within Christianity, there are signposts that show us how to become the kind of human this world needs. In a world that is rife with division, pointing fingers, selfishness, and ecological destruction, we can be part of the solution—someone who is living “fully alive” and not wasting this one wild and wonderful life. Oldfield does this by using the framework of the seven deadly sins: how they show up in our lives and what it would look like to move towards more positive, life-giving virtues. It’s anything that causes disconnection between ourselves and others, us and the natural world, and us and God. It is something that needs to be met not with judgment, but with grace—both in ourselves and others. Because sin does not define us—our worst choices are not our identity. It’s simply part of the human experience—to have these pulls and temptations. It’s easy to see how these things show up in the world—how those people sin. But this series is meant to help us bring awareness to our own sins—to acknowledge how they show up in our own lives, and then think about how we want to move forward in the world with or without them. This week, we focus on the sin of acedia—what’s commonly known as sloth.