Acedia and Me

[pegkerr]

My mom, like many other moms, will occasionally send me things she thinks might interest me: recipes, articles, and once in awhile, a book. I'm only 58 pages into the latest offering, a book entitled A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life: Acedia & Me by Kathleen Norris (she also wrote The Cloister Walk), but Mom, you really hit the nail on the head. I think this one may be a life-changing book for me.

Here's a review, which gives you a synopsis of what the book's about:

The discovery of a long-lost word in the stacks of a monastery library is a fabulist's dream. It could solve a puzzle, undo a spell or transport the finder to a new realm.

Kathleen Norris strives for all three in Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, her latest exploration of divine grace and human purpose. Like her 1997 best-seller The Cloister Walk, the new book maps her spiritual journeys as a writer and a Benedictine oblate. The "marriage" in the subtitle, her union with fellow poet David Dwyer that ended with his 2003 death from pneumonia, takes Norris into terrain that will be new for her fans and appealing for novitiates.

Since her lonely adolescence in Honolulu, Norris has lived in perpetual ebbs and flows, from fervor to despondence, from creative burst to blockage, and then back again. "Monastic writers have always emphasized that maintaining a life of prayer means being willing to start over," she writes. "Just when I seem to have my life in balance – I am picking myself up out of the ashes."

But wherefore and why the recurring lows? Norris found an answer 20 years ago on a Benedictine bookshelf that held "The Praktikos" by the fourth-century Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus. Best known for his scholarly work on the early Church's list of eight bad thoughts or temptations, Evagrius wrote that "the demon of acedia – also called the noonday demon – is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all."

"Acedia" dates back 2,000 years to Latin (accidia) and Greek (akedia). It literally means "absence of caring" but runs deeper than contemporary apathy and describes a paralyzing soul-numbness. As Norris delved into its history, she found that acedia was dropped when the eight bad thoughts became the seven deadly sins. But the word burrowed into the collective psyche and surfaced in literature over the centuries, through Dante and Chaucer to Aldous Huxley, who wrote an essay on "Accidie," and even Ian Fleming, whose From Russia With Love notes, "Just as, in at least one religion, accidie is the first of cardinal sins, so boredom ... was the only vice Bond utterly condemned."

Acedia & Me is the author's attempt to restore not only an archaic word but the age-old notion of sin as culpability. She treads carefully around contemporary depression, stating that "while depression is an illness treatable by counseling and medication, acedia is a vice that is best countered by spiritual practice and the discipline of prayer." Depression is something that happens to you. Acedia is something you do to yourself, and your only way out of it is your own willpower. . . In a section on "Acedia and Vocation," Norris writes that this vice is an occupational hazard in fields involving protracted repetitive work where "the labor is long and the rewards are slow to appear." High-risk groups include monks, writers, athletes, scientists and married couples.

[More at link above] I find this concept (which I had never even heard of before, in all the years I have been trying to learn about depression and its relation to writers block) to be fascinating, perhaps liberating. What I have often experienced in my life seems to be exactly what Norris talks about in this book. It isn't just depression, it does spring from my inner thoughts, and it does affect, even destroy my writing, and yes, for me it has been very much a spiritual issue. How fascinating that the monks who first wrote about it identified it both as a demon (think of all I've written about the demons holding up the bitter glass) and a bad thought--I think of everything I've learned about cognitive therapy in my ongoing battle with depression.

I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

monks, writers, athletes, scientists and married couples.

Nnngh. I hit three out of five. That description certainly matches some of the things I am conscious of putting a lot of effort into staying clear of.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hit three out of the five, too, and just went back and bolded a few more words to underscore that.

[eal.livejournal.com]

I do love Norris's work. I'll be interested to see your ongoing thoughts on this one.

[weaselmom.livejournal.com]

Wow. I find that I have so many things to say about this that I can say nothing at all.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking lately about 'sins' as otherwise useful impulses gone out-of-balance and taken to extremes, (often as an abreaction to the attempt to deny their natural place altogether. ie: pride is a healthy self-respect that's lost its sense of perspective in relation to others; anger can be notice of a situation to be redressed - but taken beyond that is a terrible guide in how to go about it). I can see acedia as a case of objective detachment taken to extremes in this way.

Scientists and writers in particular require a degree of objectivity in their work. It's not that far a step from valuing scientific objecctivity to devaluing the merely subjective experiences that involve us in caring about the world. I'd expect it to be worse for scientists, since writers need to be able to identify with the subjective feelings of their characters. Maybe that's got something to do with the archetype of 'mad scientists.'

[magicwoman.livejournal.com]

Both books sound interesting...

[nmsunbear.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I'll have to look for that book.

[aome.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I know that Will has sometimes battled depression (as I have) - not serious, but enough to affect him. And for him, I would say it is very strongly tied to spirituality, which has been shaky for him of late. He wants to believe, but he sometimes has a hard time actually believing, and when those spiritual lows hit, depression goes with it.

On a completely unrelated note, while I'm here - my girls were talking about the way tae kwon do class ends, bowing toward the instructor and saying, "Tae kwon" (and also, in all but the white-belt classes, bowing to the highest-ranked student as well). They wanted to know what people said at the end of karate lessons so ... I thought I'd ask you?

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I bought this a few weeks ago and haven't started it yet. I grabbed it on the way to the checkout at the bookstore because I was familiar with the term and fear I may have fallen into it this past year plus I really got a lot out of her earlier works, both Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace. I see I'm going to have to move this up on my reading list. Church musicians can fall into the slump, too, especially when the church is undergoing changes and they're not all pleasant.

[schnoogle.livejournal.com]

If spiritual practice is the cure, why are monks so at risk?

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not very far into the book, but they are at risk, she says, because their work is very repetitive (the office of prayer being repeated several times a day, day after day), which prompts the thought, "Well, then, what is the point?"

[thenines.livejournal.com]

Unrelated to this post, I just found this article from the NY Times, and it made me think of you and the worries you've had over trying to fond personal space for each member of your family.

[satakieli.livejournal.com]

(Fascinating. I didn't realize it was still possible to be an oblate. Then again, I also didn't realize that it had ever been possible to become an oblate as an adult...)

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

One of the attorneys at my law firm is actually an oblate to a nearby Benedictine monastary.