Merton strikes again...

"This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it."

- The Intimate Merton, p 129

Synthetic

Most of the day I spend chilled. Chilled by the many megawatts of energy it takes to push too-cold air through a vent installed amid the tastefully-beige ceiling panels. The massive and expensive system of vents, shafts and pipes that snakes around within my multi-story office building always succeeds in leaving us too cold or too hot, with too much of a draft or no oxygen at all. Conversation around the lunch room and in the elevator circles around this obsession.

“Too cold.” “Much too cold.” “Too stuffy.” “Too warm.”

It’s fascinating.

Add to the steady drop in temperature the comfort of padded cubicle walls that glow in a neutral shade of gold, the odd gleam of overhead fluorescent lights, the bizarre caffeine buzz of back-to-back cups of coffee (to ward off the chill), and the flickering hearth of my computer screen, and I begin to feel like I spend much of my weekdays in some alternate universe.

I speak of office-land. There are millions of us here. Inhabiting a synthetic environment. Piped air. Buzzing lights. Plastic and polyester walls. Water from machines. Coffee from machines. Tea – if you believe it – from machines (my mother would be apalled).

I’ve been craving a return to the “real” recently.

This craving has been expressed in some fairly predictable ways: a rant or two about consumerism (usually while I shop), a wistful desire to move to the middle of no where and re-learn how to farm, a sudden conviction that my true calling in life is to open a bakery, a following conviction that my true calling in life is to open a flower shop, a scouring of the net to find community veggie gardens in Vancouver, an urge to adopt many children (a la Brangelina) and bake them all bread. (Yes, my boyfriend is scared).

However, I think my disenchantment with an artificial environment is just a surface hint of a much deeper concern with my (and, I think, our) detachment from what I’m coming to think of as “alive life.” Life that is honest and genuine and anything but generic. Life that admits discomfort, joy, uncertainty, uniqueness, love, strangeness, creativity, grief. This goes far beyond the “I choose to eat organic, wear hemp, and ride a bike” stance (which is itself becoming yet another stereotypical identity to conform to and identify with). And that’s where my little blossoming romance with Julia Kristeva comes in.

But I’ll leave her for next time...

Theory and Life...

"For an heretical ethics...is perhaps no more than that which in life makes bonds, thoughts, and therefore the thought of death, bearable: herethics is undeath [a-mort]; love."

- Julia Kristeva

On Vocation

"Every day I say to myself, today I will begin."

St. Anthony of the Desert

Because I'm back at work...

A little Monty Python to go with your champagne. Happy New Year's everyone.

Merry Christmas, Friends

 "Eternity enters into time, and time, sanctified,
is caught up into eternity."
  - Thomas Merton

I hope you enjoy your moments this Christmas day.
Best wishes,

Veronica

Acedia: the absence of caring

I was at a book launch the other week, listening to Kathleen Norris speak on the lost meaning of Advent. She centered her talk around a long-forgotten word the desert fathers used: acedia. The word literally means "the absence of caring." Norris said the concept was originally one of the seven deadly sins, but became subsumed under the more one-dimensional word "sloth."

Acedia seems to articulate a very contemporary malady. And it is difficult to reduce to a simple "thou shalt not."

Fourth-century monks called it "the noon-day demon." It reared its ugly head in the physical and spiritual torpor brought on by long hot mid-day hours in the desert. An ancient writer explained that the noonday demon “stirs the monk also to long for different places in which he can find easily what is necessary for his life and can carry on a much less toilsome and more expedient profession." It's described as a heavy dullness of the soul that robs an individual of spiritual and physical energy. Though we think of sloth as immobility, acedia is more often related to a restlessness. It was the temptation of the monk to stop caring, to escape, to cease effort in the present and seek false solace elsewhere.

Descriptions of acedia sound a lot like post-modern descriptions of depression. Aquinas explained it as "an oppressive sorrow, which, to wit, so weighs upon man's mind, that he wants to do nothing." This is not simple laziness, Norris emphasized, but an oppression of the soul and the dimishment of life purpose. Harvard divinity professor Harvey Cox describes something similar when he describes sloth as a heaviness causing a "refusal to live up to one's essential humanity.”

For Norris, acedia is one of the current ills of Western culture. She described eloquently our collective loss of memory, of meditation, of spiritual effort. The author of an article in First Things on acedia agrees with her: "The care-free life, a life a-cedia, is our cultural ideal," R. Reno writes. While Norris rails against the sleepy comfort of commericialism, Reno attacks the "critical distance" we keep from study and faith in order to preserve rationality. He argues that we no longer engage in meaningful ways with worship and academic study, instead keeping the pursuit of truth and the joy of faith at arms' length.

The more I find about the concept, the more it seems to be elusive. It can manifest as a cultural passivity, a cold imbalanced rationalism or an individual's incapacitating despair. But it seems to put into words an invisible force of sorrow, meaninglessness and inertia in the world that we all have found ourselves struggling against at different times.

And the way out of acedia? Dante believed it was a violent, heartfelt rush to repentance and intimacy with God to awaken the soul. To rediscover the romance and power of truth. Evagrius, a fourth century writer, advocated stability and loyalty. Instead of giving way to restlessnes and rushing from the present, Evagrius believed the monk should "stand firm and patiently." Norris comes close to this with her admonition to "remember, wait and hope."

But the motivation to do so? If one waits, if one opens oneself to caring, to the possibility of caring, faith says that it must come, albeit painfully slowly sometimes. In my experience, it seems to come outside of myself.

Today, during the eucharist in a tiny church in my town, the priest looked into my eyes and said "beloved of God, the body of Christ broken for you."

Beloved. Christ broken. And I cared despite myself.