ACEDIA'S THE REASON WHY WE DON'T DESERVE A PRIEST (First published in 'NZ Catholic', April 30)

This Eastertide in our parish, following an Easter Vigil prepared with great care by our dear priest and attended by a congregation numbering about 20, some might say we’re licking our wounds. I’m thinking we don’t deserve a priest. And there’s a strange little word lurking in my consciousness.

Acedia. I didn’t really know what it meant or how to pronounce it (a-seed-ya), so I looked it up. There’s a lot of it about. For most of my life I had it myself. 

The door to acedia, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is opened  by presumption. If we think that at death’s door  we’ll be received as is, where is, unchanged and unrepentant, and given ‘glory without merit’, we’re presumptuous.  We’re often reminded that we can’t merit God’s love, but have we forgotten we must merit eternal life? God’s love is unconditional. Eternal life is not.

Coasting along presumptuously we fall prey to acedia, which the Catechism defines as ‘spiritual sloth … depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, carelessness of heart’. Pope Francis talks about ‘slumbering Christians’. In a secular sense, Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaks of ‘indifference … the failure of a listless public to make use of the freedom which is its birthright’. Considering baptism offers us ‘the fulness of God’ (Eph 3:19), doesn’t that sound like us?

In the Middle Ages, when they were up with the play on this, the faithful were told to ‘counter acedia with holy activity’. We might think that doing stuff which seems meritorious and we enjoy is ‘holy activity’, but is it what God wants? Our ‘stuff’ is often a diversion, which the philosopher Pascal says ‘prevents us from thinking about ourselves and leads us to destruction … We turn to pleasures’ (sports, Tv, the internet, even work) ‘to forget our miserable state but this is even more destructive because it leads us further from our Creator.’ For centuries spiritual writers have declared acedia’s ultimate expression to be suicide.

If that’s not enough to alert us, listen to St Paul (1 Cor 11:28). Acedia is caused by receiving the Eucharist unworthily or without recognising the Real Presence, which brings ‘condemnation’. Where Confession is disregarded, when non-Catholics are regularly given Communion, we shouldn’t be surprised at acedia bcoming so rampant as to affect almost entire congregations.

To acedia sufferers, the remedy  of regular attendance at Mass, prayer, fasting and almsgiving sounds boring. Hellishly boring. But acedia is fundamentally a lack of faith which we acquire precisely by these means, and especially by contemplative prayer.  I speak from personal experience.

Pascal knew why we resist contemplative prayer: ‘Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest … he feels his nullity, inadequacy, dependence, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depth of his soul boredom,  gloom, depression … despair.’

The paradox is, that’s where we meet God. In contemplation, instead of telling ourselves ‘Just do it’, we let Christ do it.

It’s that simple.