Christina Gebel: Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode six, Overcoming Acedia.

Welcome. So, you might be thinking, finally, we have gotten to the point where we are actually sun-setting our discussion about acedia and talking about how to actually overcome it, and this whole time, just to recap, we’ve been discussing how acedia shows up for us, how it shows up in the world, [00:01:00] and how it’s mainly driven by the false spirit and the false spirit wanting to get us off track from doing the most good in the world and from living out our true calling.

The way that we can push back against all the things that we’ve been talking about is by actually overcoming acedia. Before we begin. If you’re still a little bit fuzzy on what acedia is and you’ve been following along, just please know that’s okay, and it takes time, like I’ve said in previous episodes, to ingest all of this and wrap your mind around it.

Maybe you understand it a little bit on the personal level and maybe not as much on the society level. That’s all okay. And for that reason, because it can be a difficult topic to grasp, I have a [00:02:00] special treat for you, and that is as a bonus to the conclusion of the acedia series on Moderate Catholic. I will be including an adaptation of the Ignatian examine, and when I say Examen, E-X-A-M-E-N.

So, for those of you who are familiar, the Examen is a tool in Ignatian spirituality that many Jesuits do and encourage others to do every single day. It’s usually part of the Spiritual Exercises. It’s kind of like the culmination, if you will, of those Exercises. And it’s an inventory of your day where you look back to everything you did, people you saw what you read, watched, who you interacted with, and you pay special attention to how the Spirit is moving within you that day.

And this is very [00:03:00] Ignatian because Ignatius believes that we can seek God and all of the ordinary experiences of life. So, by reviewing our day as a part of our daily prayer, we can actually see where God is at work. So, notice that I use the phrase that the Examen helps us understand where the Spirit is moving throughout the day. In the Examen that I’m gonna include as a bonus to this series, it’s also gonna help us understand where the false spirit might be moving, and in that sense, how acedia has shown up throughout our day. So, stay tuned. This will be a great bonus for all of you, and hopefully something that you can play for yourself as you’re reflecting in daily prayer.

So, once you find the acedia in your life day to [00:04:00] day, you will likely want to overcome it, and that’s where the topic today comes in. So, I’m going to start the topic with a huge spoiler. If you overcome acedia, you will know that you’ve overcome it because there is a great gift awaiting you on the other side.

So that’s the spoiler, and I’m even gonna tell you what that gift is. But first we’re gonna point back to Evagrius, our desert monk, our main dude who describes the feeling of overcoming acedia as a quote, “state of peace and an ineffable joy ensues in the soul after the struggle.” When I read that, I was like, well, I would like a state of peace and ineffable joy, so obviously it’s very attractive.

I [00:05:00] did actually experience some of this once I simply named acedia. I talked about that in the earliest episodes - I believe episode two - where just knowing what was going on with me spiritually and being able to point to it was peace-giving for me. It brought me some relief. If just naming it can give you that positive emotion like it did for me, imagine what overcoming it could feel like.

Today we’re gonna talk about that and we’ll use the same two texts that I’ve been referring to all along The Noonday Devil by Jean Charles Nault and Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. And because we’re nearing the end of this acedia series, you might be thinking, if you’ve hung around this long, I’d really like to learn more about this acedia thing, as I mentioned [00:06:00] earlier, I would recommend starting with Kathleen Norris’s book, Acedia and Me the New York Times bestseller, because it is a lot more accessibly written. But if you want a good theological itch and you’re kind of used to scratching theological itches, then I would say The Noonday Devil is another great option.

Okay, so let’s dive in and start with where Jean Charles Nault takes us and the first remedy that he starts to talk about on page 85 is meditating on the Incarnation.

So Incarnation, again, is God becoming human in Jesus Christ. He references Saint Thomas Aquinas a lot and [00:07:00] in becoming human, he talks about God actually built a bridge between the abyss of the divine and human nature and God, in that sense, through Jesus acted as a bridge maker. And actually that’s what the word pontifex literally translates to: “the bridge maker.”

So on page 87, Jean Charles Nault goes on to talk about Aquinas’s reasoning, where he writes, quote, “The Incarnation comes to restore to man or women, or humankind the possibility once again of walking toward true beatitude. The Incarnation thus allows humanity to rediscover [00:08:00] our proper dignity.”

And I did make that a little bit more gender neutral, but the important piece here is by Jesus becoming human, we, unlike any other event in human history, are able to now have that bridge to the divine and therefore deeply understand our dignity.

Aquinas goes on to argue that the Incarnation allows us to love God even more. Aquinas writes quote, “Nothing, of course, so induces us to love one as the experience of His love for us, but God’s love for me could be demonstrated to humanity and no more effective way than this. He wills to [00:09:00] be united to humanity in person for it is proper to love, to unite the Lover with the beloved as far as possible.”

Okay, so Aquinas isn’t exactly known for simple sentences, but essentially what he’s saying here is there’s no more powerful gesture of love than to be united between the love and the Lover. If you truly love someone, you want to be as close or in union with them as you can. So, our responsibility in this is actually to receive this, okay?

And I don’t, I don’t mean that flippantly, to receive this, to really actually meditate on how much God loves us, that He became [00:10:00] human, in the human and divine nature of Jesus Christ. Then, went on to sacrifice greatly for all of us despite our sins and despite our imperfection. So, we receive this and we are called to participate in that love.

I think that John Charles Nault puts it really beautifully when he writes on page 88, “God does not save us without us.” So, this is a participatory love. This is not just simply we are these fallen creatures running around and, you know, we just need somebody to come down and swoop us up. This is not a passive salvation. This is us actively participating in the Salvation. That is meant for us.

And what do we have to [00:11:00] help us with that? Guess what? We have the Holy Spirit and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. If it’s been a minute since you’ve read about the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, or had Confirmation or had a child who’s going through Confirmation, you’ll remember that they’re things like wisdom to see things as God sees them. Prudence to choose what is most in conformity with the good.

So, the Holy Spirit and its gifts are not this thing that we need to just memorize for Confirmation class, but they’re actually like tools in our tool belt to participate in this divine love. And we can draw on them, pray for them, pray to be strengthened in them, in order to reach that achievement.

John Charles Nault writes on page 95, quote, “The encounter with [00:12:00] Christ becomes a friendship that delivers us from self-centeredness. The Holy Spirit makes Christ the contemporary of every person. And makes each of us another Christ” end quote. That last part I was like, Ooh, I don’t know if I’m worthy of being even in relation to the idea of another Christ, but I do love this choice of words in friendship. A friendship that delivers us from self-centeredness. Because what more does love do, and what more does a good friend who loves their friend do than to get out of their own head and be in communion and caring about the needs and wants and desires of their beloved [00:13:00] friend? Okay, so that is. Remedy number one, if you will, meditating on the Incarnation.

The other one is called joyful perseverance. It can also be referred to as standing fast. So Evagrius and the Desert Fathers traced all the remedies to acedia back to one concept. Okay, so let’s just distill it down to one, and they distilled it down to perseverance. In other words, we must focus our efforts. Because the false spirit’s trying to pull us in a million different directions, y’all. So we gotta focus. Jean Charles Nault writes that we must resist, [00:14:00] stand fast, persevere, and remain faithful. And he writes about the temptation that we’re up against.

In doing so, at the bottom of page 1 45, he writes, quote “Acedia is the temptation to withdraw from the narrowness of the present so as to take refuge in what is imaginary. It is the temptation to quit the battle so as to become a simple spectator of the controversy that is unfolding in the world.” End quote. Woo. Acedia never stops getting intense, y’all.

So, we have this temptation to withdraw and to take refuge and what is imaginary. And if you remember from last time, the Signs of the Times, one of the ways that [00:15:00] acedia tempts us to do this is by creating this unhealthy nostalgia for the past and that selective nostalgia that we come up with in our brains is, is really imaginary because it is a subset or a selective remembrance of what was actually in the past. And it also tempts us to quit the battle. And that’s what that nostalgia falsehood told us to do. It was like, hey, don’t worry about what’s going on in the present ‘cause the solution here is actually just a retreat to the past. Because that seemed to work so well and we need to recreate that. So, in that sense, we become, as Jean Charles Nault, writes a simple spectator of the controversy that is unfolding in the world.

So, we need to persevere and our call then is to remain in [00:16:00] our dwelling place. Remember how I talked about the dwelling place of the monks where these little austere cells out in the desert and they’re always tempted to flee and not pray and do something else but convince themselves that it was a good intention? But really the false spirit was twisting it. But dwelling place for us, particularly us that don’t live in monasteries is a bit broader.

And Angelini writes in the book the Noonday Devil quote “Our dwelling place is also the place that God assigned to our life and that we ourselves have recognized and chosen at the moments of greatest clarity in our life. In other words, our own vocation, our specific calling.” [00:17:00] End quote. That right there to me is like, boom, drop the mic. Okay. If we are called to persevere and remain in a place, it is to remain in conversation and commitment to the God-given purpose that we have been gifted.

It could be a vocation in the strictest sense, like the Church talks about vocation. It can be a calling that is put on our hearts. And what I love about this quote is that Angelini says that we ourselves have recognized and chosen at the moments of greatest clarity in our life. I love this because what is on the other side of overcoming acedia? Peace. And have you ever chosen something like maybe you thought you were gonna do one thing in life and you did this 180 and you [00:18:00] did another?

When I was in college, I really thought that I was gonna go on and get a PhD in theology at the age of 22. And thankfully I had a mentor who was like, yeah, I don’t know, maybe take some time off and think about that one. And I was devastated at first. And I think, my dad in particular, who is now deceased, he was really wanting me to go to graduate school. I don’t think he cared necessarily what it was for, but he was really looking forward to this plan. Right?

But when I made this decision to kind of pivot, and look into a year of service, faith-based service, I started to grow in peace. And I felt this idea of these moments of clarity, and I’m not saying that every call comes across in a clear way like that, but [00:19:00] it kind of built over time. And these little ways and these conversations like the one that actually stopped me in my tracks and pointed me there, I gained more and more clarity over time and more and more assurances that this really was a good thing for me to do. And that is basically Ignatian discernment in a nutshell. We start to get consolation that we’re on the right path.

So back to remaining in this dwelling place of our call, Jean Charles Nault writes on page 137 not to be wooed by “the unreachable utopia,” and he notes that utopia literally means “finding oneself nowhere.” So, not to be wooed by the imaginary past, [00:20:00] not to be wooed by this false idea of a utopia. Remember, we also talked about these attachments to life will be better when...No. We need to anchor ourself in what God is calling us to do. The quote, “abode of fidelity.”

So fidelity to this call, Balthasar writes, quoted in the Noonday Devil quote “is not somewhere else. On the contrary, it is precisely here where I find myself, at this moment, faith in a God who calls me by my name and who leads me himself if I do not refuse to entrust my life to Him.”

We can sometimes forget why we started listening to [00:21:00] the call that Jesus or God is giving to us. And another remedy that he talks about under this umbrella of perseverance is this kind of remembering, it’s almost like a holy remembering, if you will.

Jean Charles Nault writes, quote, “If the Christian is tempted to abandon his or her own place, the place of his or her specific calling, it is because he or she no longer remembers the quality of the motives that led him or her earlier to make this or that fundamental choice it is. In this sense, no doubt we can speak about Acedia as a sin against memory” end quote.

So that is the false spirit at [00:22:00] work, right? The false spirit is a mastermind of distraction. And some days when we have a hard time with our calling, what better way to persevere and stand fast than to try to tap back into those moments of clarity or those earliest whispers of what led us to go in this direction?

And we will have bad days, right? We might feel like, well, what the heck is this calling anyways? This is not what I signed up for, or it’s not what I thought I was going to do. And in the book he writes, quote, “The fact that I no longer feel anything today. In no way calls into question the commitment that I made yesterday.” End quote.

Even though we’re living in this call, it’s again, not this [00:23:00] utopia, right? It might even be the most challenging thing we’ve ever done, and we might wanna quit several times. But remember that the false spirit is trying to get us to quit. And St. Paul reiterates this in his letter in two Timothy chapter two, verse 13. Paul writes, “If we are faithless, He remains faithful for He cannot deny Himself.” So even when we’re wavering, even when we’re doubting, we trust in God who will stand by us through all of that, because He is also in us. God is also in us, and God’s not gonna deny us because God does not deny Oneself.

All right, so moving on to the next remedy. This [00:24:00] one might be a little hard for some of you, and the remedy is to remain in the Church. So, we just talked about remaining in our dwelling place, our calling, but there’s another place that we should stand fast and persevere in, and that is the Church. And y’all, man, that is a hard thing to do.

I can speak specifically from Catholicism. Not everybody listening might be Catholic, but it is real hard some days to remain in the Church. And for some of you out there who might be listening it might be bringing up a lot of legitimate harms that have been done while being in the Church or being in some organized religion, and I wanna validate that those are real and [00:25:00] serious harms and, and it takes a lot; it might seem insurmountable. But also, it can also feel like maybe a thousand paper cuts that’s bleeding us. You know, either way, I just, I think it’s hard to do this. And in our struggle, I think we need to not only look at the Church and what the Church has or hasn’t done well, but I also think we need to look at ourselves, right?

I can’t say for sure, but I would suspect that we ourselves have also messed up in some really big ways, and when I think about the Church messing up in really big ways, I think about it coming down to a person or a lot of people or a system of people that has really facilitated those harms.[00:26:00]

But I don’t think that necessarily takes us off the hook of also understanding what our part in it may have been. And Father Jim Martin, when he writes his book, Building a Bridge about the church being in conversation with LGBTQ Catholics, he doesn’t just write it from the, hey Catholic Church, here’s what you need to do, which I think a lot of us could write that part of the book quite easily. But he also says, hey, LGBTQ Catholics or those who had possibly, you know, maybe left the Church, here’s also what you need to do. And I think that was a little bold of him because we rarely go to that second place of what do some of the victims of these harms also need to think about.

So, I’m not trying to be necessarily prescriptive here, but Jean Charles Nault [00:27:00] does talk about this as a remedy to acedia. Looking at our own place in all of this with the Church, he writes on page 139, “If the Christian finds oneself too constrained in the church, is it not because ultimately he or she is too constrained in their own heart?”

And I think about that a lot. So maybe you will also think about that. Maybe you are like, no, I can’t even go there, but we’re just gonna put it out there. We’re gonna see how it lands. I like this quote that he includes in this section from Augustine, and maybe this might resonate a little bit more. Augustine says, quote, “Do not go looking for a liberation which will lead you far from the house of your Liberator.” Whoa. [00:28:00]

And I think that is what I try to find rest in whenever I’m really struggling with the Church is while I have a lot of criticisms for the Church as it is today, and how it’s acted throughout history, I also know that, for me at least, true liberation, true spiritual freedom has also been found there. While the house might not be totally in order, it is where my Liberator lives, and I mean that with like a capital L, right?

He also goes on to talk about just this forgiveness. This was actually in the homily this week at the church I go to, which was a Franciscan Friar giving the homily. And he talked about in it that you know, to sin is also to [00:29:00] know what it means to be redeemed, right? And to be given forgiveness helps us to understand our salvation and God’s mercy. I don’t think he was saying like, hey, go sin so you can understand this, but like in some ways, like, don’t beat yourself up too much, is what I took from it, because they is still learning and love in all of that. And maybe we need to forgive the Church somewhat in our lives, or forgive members in the Church who have done us wrong.

Our next remedy we’ll talk about is joy, so this one will be a little bit more uplifting, Jean Charles Knault writes that joy is quote, “The spiritual barometer that directs us concerning our spiritual life.”

The spiritual barometer. So, if you [00:30:00] are finding joy, not simply happiness, but true joy, that is a good sign. That is a good barometer that you’re going in the right direction. And he quotes on page 143 as saying, “Sadness is looking at oneself. Joy is looking at God.” I love that.

I have been a gratitude journaler since I was 16, and I saw the idea on Oprah, which a lot of brilliant things have come into my life from Oprah, and I’ve realized that my gratitude journaling is in some ways like a cousin of the Examen, because I keep looking for what happened that day and joy is something I’m trying to be more aware of, and if I have a really hard time [00:31:00] finding joy, like that kind of tells me something, too. And furthermore, we also find joy in each other. So, he quotes a passage from the book, The Meaning of Man, and it says, quote, “The communion of living persons with each other, that love is the unparalleled force. And a source of a joy that does not pass.” End quote.

So, talking about this communion with each other, being with each other, what does that sound like? Well, it sounds like the Eucharist or Mass, you know, it’s like we can find joy in being with each other. And that is why our communal feast, if you will, that we do every week is not in isolation. And [Pope] Francis also talks about Joy. Francis says, quote, “Do not be men [00:32:00] and women of sadness. A Christian can never be sad, never give way to discouragement. Please do not let yourselves be robbed of hope. Do not let hope be stolen.” End quote.

Francis is pretty vehement about the Christian’s call to hope and this idea that if we snuff that out entirely, we are missing out on some of the fundamental aspects of what it means to be a Christian in today’s world. So, I am trying to do this as best I can, and I think a lot about what can we as Christians do to remain hopeful and also the topic here, joyful.

I think for me, the learning in this area has come from my work in public health specifically. In [00:33:00] public health, we are always trying to rally people around certain causes for the better health and wellbeing of communities. And for a long time, I think the teaching and ethos in the public health world was to present people with a lot of really depressing data and to say, oh my gosh, this is so terrible. Look at these data, and then everybody would kind of hop to it and rally and do the right thing.

But as I’ve gone on in my public health career, and especially presenting these types of data to communities of color, which see these data, and I think feel despair in seeing these data, but also know people whose lives and stories are embedded within those data, that this idea of rallying people [00:34:00] around the problem has probably run its course, at least I feel like maybe it has in public health, or it should, and instead, what is equally powerful is to rally people around joy. And vision.

And when I think about that approach, I think about, for instance, a lot of the work that’s being done around independent birth centers. There’s one in Boston, there’s others that are coming up across the country and they are really trying to rally people around a joyful vision that’s very affirming of people’s dignity, and that is really powerful. And I might even go so far as to say more powerful than some of the statistics around maternal health that we see in our world today.

So, I think there’s a way [00:35:00] that we can seek this joy and it doesn’t have to be Pollyanna, doesn’t have to be dismissive of people’s real suffering and experiences. And we, as Christians, are particularly called to that. And it even happens in other world religions, too.

I remember reading a book about Gandhi and Gandhi’s wife, and they were on the ashram, and there was this kind of quote or command, if you will, about cleaning the latrines, and the ashram because the idea was that anybody that came to be at the ashram, had to contribute. And they had this saying, I don’t know if it was him or his wife, that to clean the latrines, do it with joy or not at all.

And that has stuck with me in the many years since I’ve read the book [00:36:00] because I think it’s what we’re talking about here, right? Like we have to find sources of joy in our everyday lives and the small things that we do every day. But certainly in this calling and in this work that we’re doing towards this calling.

One of the last and final remedies we’re gonna talk about, and certainly there are others, but these are just the ones we’re talking about here today in this episode, is one that I kind of added in there and it came from a very funny anecdote in the beginning of the Noonday Devil, and that was when Jean Charles Nault on page 33 was talking about how acedia can show up as an aversion to manual labor.

Okay, so maybe we’re going back to the latrines. I don’t know. But acedia can be an aversion to work, and that [00:37:00] might be one of the reasons why it eventually got lumped in with sloth, but Jean Charles Nault talks about, for the Desert Fathers, work was not always enjoyable because again, they led very austere lives. They had to grow, you know, whatever they needed, make whatever they needed. And when they needed income, like cold, hard cash, they would make or weave baskets, and they would go to sell them in Alexandria. He writes that if they did not need to sell the baskets that they had made, they would do as Penelope [from Greek mythology] did. They would unmake the baskets at night that they had made during the day.

And I just thought this was somewhat hilarious, but also kind of maddening because can you imagine weaving a basket and [00:38:00] then unweaving it only to probably weave it again later? Talk about spiritual discipline. Right? And this stuck with me and really got me kind of excited about the book itself.

I think why it resonated with me is because he was trying to make a point that in the monk’s lifestyle, their calling, their vocation, simple, repetitive work was done to leave the mind free to devote itself to the Lord. And I think in our current modern day context, we are always trying to do as few simple, repetitive task as possible. We have technology and appliances and all the things, the progress of the modern age to try to get us out of this, but they really saw a value in it. And I think [00:39:00] this applies to overcoming acedia, because when you feel stuck spiritually, and you don’t know where to go next, it might be a good time to tap into something creative, repetitive, minute.

Like for me, doing crafts, just like getting my brain out of my head for a little bit and focusing on creative development of a very small thing. Lately I’ve been painting ornaments, that quiets the noise in my brain and it leaves my mind free to explore. That’s kind of similar to how we always say the best ideas come up while we’re taking a shower. A shower is a simple, repetitive task that we do regularly, [00:40:00] but it frees us to actually sit and focus and remember focus is one of the things that we’re trying to do here as a remedy.

But I want to leave you and I want to leave this series about learning about acedia with perhaps one of the most powerful things that has come out of all of this for me, and that is the need to have an abandonment to God’s plan for me.

And in exchange, I hope, an abandonment to God’s plan for you. Jean Charles Nault writes on page 137, and Balthasar writes that everything that we’ve been talking about, quote “Is not somewhere else. On the contrary, it is here where I find myself at this moment, faith in a God who calls [00:41:00] me by name and who leads me himself. If I do not refuse to entrust my life to him.”

So, this is about a radical abandonment of oneself and in the positive sense, a radical trust of God’s love for us and also the call that He has for us in our respective lives. This is what helped me to move closer to overcoming acedia in my own life.

If you remember way back to the first episode, I was telling you that I was having this feeling, and then I met Becky, my spiritual director, and I started doing the spiritual exercises. And what I realized was that I was feeling this [00:42:00] unsettledness because I had not really truly opened myself up to what God could be calling me to do. And the big spoiler alert of all of this is what came outta that for me is God is actually calling me to do more of what I’m doing with you here and now, which is reflecting on faith in a really personal way.

And it made me realize that I missed the theology that I had studied in undergrad and talking about it and digging into it and hopefully making it a little bit more accessible to like the everyday person. ‘cause some of these topics can get quite heady. But in order to do that and get to that place of living into that call, which I still struggle and I’m trying to do in real life, I needed [00:43:00] to move away from some of the other things, some of the other autopilot things that I had been doing in my life, which were not, again, bad things, but we’re not me living into the fullness of what God wanted me to do, or at least God wanted me to do in this next chapter of my life. So Becky kind of helped me through the Exercises, helped me to really put words to what I’m putting words to right now.

I don’t even think I could have put words to it while I was doing the Exercises, and she talked about the Sucipe prayer. And that prayer is very well known. It is a part of Ignatian spirituality. It is a part of the Spiritual Exercises, and it comes more at the end of the Exercises because I think one needs to go through a lot of those steps in order to really [00:44:00] understand the power of this prayer. And when Becky talked about the prayer to me, of course, my first reaction was, oh yeah, Becky, I know about that prayer. I went to a Jesuit school, prayed it, been there, done that. I get it. And Becky was like, no, this is a really powerful prayer, and if you want to say this prayer, you need to be ready for what might change about your life after saying it, and truly meaning what you’re saying.

And that really caused me to sit up a little straighter. I’m not gonna lie. And I was like, oh, not that the prayer was like dangerous, but it was in some ways it was a threat to the dissatisfaction, the uneasiness, the distraction, the autopilot [00:45:00] that I had put my energy and given into for so long, and if I really, truly wanted to get out of that, if I really wanted to overcome acedia and get to a place where I lived, into my God-given calling, yes, I could say the words that I wanna do that, but what does it mean to get to the other side of that, the courage that is needed, the perseverance that is needed, the challenges that I would encounter, and that might mean my life looking a lot differently. It might mean pivoting. Remember how we talked about acedia as a midlife crisis? Kind of a close companion, right? And the fear that comes into changing one’s life, especially after working so hard and diligently in one direction and other people depending on you, and all the doubts and fears that go into that. But [00:46:00] this prayer is essential to all these remedies that we’ve talked about. It is the prayer for perseverance.

Going back to what the monks say this all comes down to, and the retreatant who’s doing the Spiritual Exercises, it says from www.ignatianspirituality.com, has opened oneself to the reality of who God is and what God’s purpose is for humanity and what God has done for him or her in a particularly intense way. The website goes on to say the Sucipe prayer “is a radical prayer of total self-giving. It is not a formula for easy decision making that we can adopt one morning after a lifetime of making decisions based on other, more prosaic or even selfish reasoning. It’s the fruit of [00:47:00] self-reflection and of openness to God’s love.”

Wow. So I had known this prayer, seen this prayer. I’ve even told people in the past, it’s my favorite prayer, but I don’t think until I’d really gone through the Exercises and leaned into acedia, I don’t think I really saw it as powerful as it really is. And what that would ask of me if I were to genuinely and authentically request this from God.

So, I’m going to pray the prayer here with you, and I wanna say, when I started praying it after the Exercises, I was kind of praying it with one eye open because I was like I definitely want to pray this prayer, but now I’m a little worried about what happens if I [00:48:00] do.

And I remember a quick story from when I went to confession one day with a priest and I remember saying like, I don’t even know if I’m really sorry about what I just said. And you know, he kinda laughed because, probably he’s heard that before. And he said, pray to want to feel sorry about it, and that was like a balm for me because I wasn’t quite there yet spiritually to feel repentant about whatever it was I was talking about. But praying to want to feel that way seemed like a manageable step.

So even if this prayer is not one that you’re ready to fully put your gusto into, I want you to just pray to want to [00:49:00] truly mean the words that are in it. So with that, I will recite the Sucipe prayer here:

“Take Lord and receive. All my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All that I have and pose us thou has given all to me to the, oh Lord, I return it all is thine dispose of it wholly according to thy will. Give me thy love and thy grace for this is sufficient for me.”

What a better way to end this series of learning about acedia and to radically give ourselves [00:50:00] over to want to be in relationship with God and his call for us in the best possible way.

So, thank you for learning about it with me. We do have a few other topics and bonuses coming up after this, but this is really the conclusion of learning about acedia and my hope for you is that whatever we discussed here, whatever you lingered on or thought about will be the seeds that will grow into courageous, beautiful new things that God is asking you to do in your own life.

[00:51:00]

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