"Acedia and me"

Meanwhile, I have started to read Kathleen Norris’s Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life. She discusses a lot of themes, all orbiting around acedia, which is an ailment (or a vice) that can be variously associated with depression, boredom, torpor, and sloth. What I find interesting, besides the many personal stories she tells, is that she treats acedia neither purely as a mental disease (to be addressed with anti-depressant medication) nor purely as a vice (to be addressed with either prayer or clean living), but as a devastating spiritual condition that contains elements of both. She seems to say that depression may be a disease over which we don’t have a lot of conscious control, but acedia differs from it in having a conscious element that can make the suffering better or worse, and for which we can be held accountable. If we can train ourselves to react to this-and-that kind of thought by deliberately choosing to think thus-and-so instead, we can keep the depression from getting worse, and from settling in for the long term. We can (at least sometimes) dissuade it from growing into acedia.

This is a book from which I think both Wife and I should be able to benefit. D said she found it boring. (There is a big irony there!). But then, as she was quick to add, part of her reaction may be just that her vices don’t tend in that direction. Not that she has no vices! Just that they tend not to be depressive in nature.