Acedia and the Opposite Course

When I know that I should remain in my study, writing if I am able, and if not, being willing to be alone with God, doing nothing, I am easily tempted to leave and seek the company of other people. But if I am honest with myself, I will admit that my inability to be alone is no reason to abandon my solitude; the danger is that I will use others as an excuse to avoid confronting matters that require my full attention. Evagrius defines this temptation as lust, the desire to draw others to ourselves for selfish purposes, and he warns: "Give no confidence to such promptings; on the contrary, follow the opposite course." If I feel a strong urge for solitude, I need to ask: Is it because I wish to foster contemplation, or am I seeking an excuse to avoid other people, for whom I harbor a secret contempt? If it is the latter, then I must not remain in isolation but seek companionship. Only then will I come to better appreciate what Abba Theodore termed "the sweetness of the cell". I may still wish to be alone, he says, but not because I despise my neighbor.

Acedia is a devious temptation, and if the thought of going outside to see whether anyone else is about is not sufficient to distract us from our interior work, we may find ourselves convinced that it is not distraction we seek, but only the opportunity to help people. Perhaps the monk beset by what John Cassian calls "the foul mist" of acedia decides "that he should pay his respects to the brothers and visit the sick." The monk in this condition is in danger of using other people in order to feel good about himself, and may fantasize about performing the "great and pious work" of making more frequent visits to this or that holy man or woman who is more isolated than he, and who has little support from others. The last thing he should do, he decides, is to remain, "barren, and having made no progress, in his cell."

Cassian warns of the real peril that this monk will forget who he is, and "the reason for his profession, which is to practice silence, solitude, and meditation. If he succumbs to one diversion after another, he will lose the capacity to pray, and become more prone to despondency. Theologians have always regarded acedia as an especially serious, or "capital" sin because of its ability to engender and nourish other vices; it is a root out of which both despair and anger can grow. We are to be wary, Evagrius says, when "the irascible part of our soul is stirred up," and anger tempts us to keep others at a distance. Solitude may remove us from the immediate disturbance, he tells us, but it won't help us confront the cause of our irritation and sadness. That will happen only through the mediation of those "others" we are apt to scorn and detest. Then, tending the sick would be appropriate, a humbling act of charity that might free the soul from vainglory and illusions of holiness. Serving others in such a spirit could help us appreciate these words of Anthony the Great: "Our life and death is with our neighbor."

The monastic perspective can assist us specifically with regard to understanding the value of community. Imagine for a moment that the people you encounter at home, work, or school are the very people God has given you to pray with, eat with, and play with for the rest of your life. And you are supposed to thank God for this, every day, several times a day. This is what monastic people take on. And what they've learned from this particular asceticism, in attempting to live in peace with themselves and with others, may constitute their greatest gift to us. How radical to think that we can best know ourselves by embracing commitment, not rejecting it; by relating to others, not callously relegating them to the devilishly convenient category of "other." Monks know that taking on this challenge entails struggling with acedia, and that is one reason they have been so dedicated to discerning its presence within themselves and accurately naming it.

Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me

Such a long quotation, but I could not cut it anywhere. I am not called to the monastic life in the defined sense as given here, but I do feel called to the contemplative life, to be present within it, to a writing life (regardless of how many publishing credits I shall notch under my belt, I cannot shake the conviction, often returning, that I am called to this sort of life, whatever it means). The wisdom contained here in this book is profound. I heartily recommend it to everybody; I do not know quite how to come at talking about this slippery thing acedia, so easy to dismiss one minute and clobbering me about the ears the next, wended through my life in everything I do so that I can be full of the living water one hour and uncaring on the couch the next.

I do not quite see its tentacles reaching so far into my spiritual life these days as I do see it in my creative life. I have recognised it - or at least felt the hem of its garment and its fleeting shadow, if I could not put a name to it - earlier in regard to God, and I see that he has been teaching me how to chop away at it and cut down its legs to a certain extent. But in the writing life, I am just learning to name it here. It's like a weed-infested garden in which I always knew the amazing shrubs were here, hidden under. But oh, the commitment, over and again, to resisting that noonday demon and its delicious invitation to not care. Like a spiritual dose of morphine.

Of course, the best part of all, like a giant bottle of weed killer and a great delight and hope, like some sort of transparent sky honey, is recognising that this great noonday demon acedia is simply temptation, though it roars. How amazing to realise that the prison that has kept your hands silent for so long is one that disappears while you go about ignoring its presence, as if it wasn't there. Who needs to be a dragonslayer out in the real world? I have orcs in my head.

Every damn day.

Here is the discipline and wisdom of the left hand not letting the right hand know what it is doing and pressing on, one foot in front of the other, regardless of the hundreds of despondent couch sits on the way when you forget that the prison is not made out of cement but of paper ...

Olympics opening ceremony

... I didn't really watch it. It was on the TV the whole time. I looked up here and there to see fantasmagorical fireworks or cute little girls singing or men walking tightropes to light the flame. And yes it was amazing and looked wonderful etc etc but that kind of thing doesn't really do it for me. There's so much breast beating going on at these types of things that is irritating at times, but I guess big extravaganzas don't really do it for me. They're so try-hard.

Not that I am against this type of thing. I've been thinking over the last couple of weeks about my desire to continue walking somehow towards finding the same sort of freedom that Paul had - freedom in want and in plenty. Freedom from both of those things because it's not being an ascetic and it's not being wealthily comfortable that are the points - it's not a matter to me of some sort of self denial just simply for the sake of self denial (although self denial happens to be an enjoyable thing at times), and it's not a matter of flinging myself about in my comfort because I'm too scared to go out there and be without. It's not about fear on the one hand or self hatred on the other. It's about freedom to be content in whatever circumstance I find myself in simply because it's possible with enough lens cleaning.

And so I didn't feel all Judas-ey about how many millions of dollars this ceremony must have cost. Sometimes it's a good thing to spend millions of dollars, I s'pose. I don't think it's always evil, simply because there are people starving to death somewhere else in the world. And yet I guess I tend to think that often it is.

I suppose I was in a particular frame of mind too because I left work half an hour early this evening and went and bought myself a couple of tops. I'm not your standard chick, going shopping for the fun of it. I actually find shopping to be tedious and overwhelming. This was how I felt this evening after spending 50 bucks on a couple of tops - this is nothing to most people, but it feels like a lot to me. I don't like spending heaps of money on clothes. In fact, the last clothes I bought were from the op shop. I like giving abandoned things a home, even if it happens to be a skirt or a top, hehe :)

And so tonight, I bought my two tops then went into the conveniently located supermarket located right next door to Melbourne Central train station. Gee, food stuffs are geting rather expensive, are they not? Still, I am of the opinion that our food has been way too cheap, that it's only us people living on the Standard Industrialised Diet who think that food should come cheap. I might be cheap when it comes to buying clothes but I more than make up for it when it comes to buying good food and spending shitloads in the health food shop. (For example, I had run up a debt at the health food shop because Ed is a sweetheart and he knew I would pay him back. And I did, too, when I got my tax return the other day - all $482 worth of it).

So tonight in the strategically placed, convenient supermarket, as I stood in the aisle with several items I had never planned on buying (like shitake mushrooms, for example. Those bastards are expensive but I bought them to put in a recipe I am making to take to have lunch with Jane on Sunday, and so I am rationalising it away in that way :) Anyway, shitake mushrooms are so wonderfully good for you. I wouldn't call myself a foodie by any stretch, but the more well I get and the better I eat, the more I can see the direct link between how I think/feel and what's going in my gob. There really is some sort of clear-headedness and wellbeing that comes with eating well, that's for sure. But anyway, I digress slightly, and perhaps waffle (it is after all 2.29 am as I speak and I should have gone to bed at least two hours ago :)

So I left the supermarket having spend 30 bucks, along with the 50 bucks I've spent in the clothes shop. Some people routinely spend 80 bucks on not very much at all. I used to do it all the time in my earlier incarnation as the wife of an accountant but these days Susie's salary is reasonably skimpy. And I really don't mind, even though I would love two weeks' holiday away from capitalist hell and the tedium that is my job, but maybe I will just have to write something to fund it, huh? (Now there's an idea. As I mentioned to a friend the other night, maybe in this job I am actually wrting myself into a corner, literally, where the only way out of tedium is to earn a few bucks here and there writing stuff). And anyway, although I am living on far less money than I have been accustomed to, and barely enough to have any real kind of social life, I am completely utterly conscious of my rich status as compared to the rest of the world.

Painfully reminded of it as I stumbled onto platform 3 with my bags. There was a man looking into one of the rubbish bins. There was something terribly strange about him. I couldn't work out if he was blind, retarded, drunk, wasted or insane or what but there was a long stream of dribble hanging out of his mouth that I could see from 15 paces away and man, I seriously thought I was going to puke. And I walked my feet away from him because the sight of that drool hanging out of his mouth just make me want to puke. I feel sick just thinking about it. He reminded me of the small black dog that lives in my street and roams up and down. It too has a perpetual stream of slobber hanging out of its mouth but unlike this man, it gets several square meals a day.

My 80 bucks would have fed him for two weeks. The money spent on the Olympics opening ceremony could have fed all of us for the rest of our lives. But the first part was the worst. The Olympics opening ceremony didn't see this man picking around in the rubbish bin. I did. And I could have slipped him a fiver or 10 bucks, surely, even if i didn't want to do anything else, even if he made me feel like I wanted to throw up? Because sheesh, if our ugliness is the definer of whether we should receive love, then surely we are all cactus.

I don't know how to love with the love I've been given. I am developing the Buddhist mindset that says that we all have the seeds of love within us. None of us is unable to love, even though many of us don't know how to. I need to do some major watering. I think we all do, really.

(I have this weird idea that as the world gets darker and darker and zombier and zombier, that many other people are getting lighter and lighter and waking up and coming to terms and sorting their shit and I don't know what it all means, and it kinda scares me, but this blog post has already been a diarrhoeic spewing forth of about 17 posts at once, hasn't it :) I don't have enough brain that's not mush to launch into an 18th :)

Night