Acedia and Me

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.