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 Seven: What happened to Acedia?

Welcome back. So, this is episode seven. It is a bonus episode because we have, as I mentioned in the last episode, formally concluded our study of acedia, but there will be some bonus episodes because if you like me, [and] resonated with this topic, you might want to learn more. In wanting to learn more, you might be wondering whatever happened to acedia. You know, this is not a word that is part of our everyday vernacular, much like some of the other seven deadly sins [00:01:00] are, if you choose to talk about that, or you just might be wondering, why has it taking me till now to learn about acedia? Why did I never come across this until later in life?

And that was something that really piqued my interest because it took me a while to learn about Acedia. So, this episode is for those diehard acedia enthusiasts who have to know the quote ‘end of the story.’ And to do so, we will be going back to one of our primary texts, The Noonday Devil, by Jean Charles Nault, and around page 96, he starts to tell the story of how this all came to be.

So, the story starts with actually a Franciscan Friar William Ham Ockham, who lived around [00:02:00] 1300 to 1350 AD. If you know anything about Franciscan Friars, there are obviously a lot of very good people. Although I will say Friar Ockham was not the best person in the story we’re about to tell because he actually helped to influence the idea of acedia kind of falling out of favor, but I’m sure he was a great dude otherwise. So, we’re gonna cut him some slack.

So Franciscan Friar William Ockham sparked kind of a quote ‘revolution,’ if you will, because at the time, he was countering the theological understanding of freedom, which up until that point had primarily been articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas. So Ockham [00:03:00] proposed a new concept of freedom, which essentially differed from Aquinas’s concept of freedom, and he called this new freedom concept, quote, the “liberty of indifference.” End quote.

Jean Charles Nault describes this on page 96 as “human beings are totally indeterminate, totally indifferent with regard to good or evil’ end quote, and I said human beings, because again, a lot of these things just refer to ‘man,’ and I prefer to make it more gender neutral. So indeterminate, totally indifferent with regard to good or evil.

Actually, this is how we largely conceive of freedom today. We see freedom as the idea that you can [00:04:00] choose between two contrary things. You have that choice. However, at the time, this was a bit of a quote ‘revolution,’ to what was considered a classical understanding of freedom, and that view, that classical understanding Jean Charles Nault describes as quote, “Freedom is the ability that human beings have an ability belonging jointly to the intellect and will to perform virtuous actions, good actions, excellent actions, perfect actions when he or she wants, and as he or she wants. Humankind’s freedom is therefore the capacity to accomplish good acts easily, joyously and lastingly. This freedom is defined by the attraction [00:05:00] of the good.” Okay, so let’s unpack that a little bit.

In this more classical understanding of freedom, prior to Ockham, mostly delineated by Aquinas, the idea is that we have the freedom to do good. Okay, and we are attracted to doing that good innately as human beings. How is it that we have that innately? Well, we believe that we are human beings with a soul, and we’re not simply animals who kind of just act on impulse and their basic needs. Right?

But Ockham kind of deviated from all of this because he made freedom live in the moment prior [00:06:00] to our intellect and will. So, man or woman are no longer attracted to the good, as Aquinas had said. Instead, they kind of have a indifference to good and evil.

Okay, so total indifference and it’s that time period before the intellect and will kick in. Ockham, being a Franciscan friar, being a religious person, was still somewhat concerned with people doing good things. Okay? He wasn’t like a relativist, let’s just say. But he believed there had to be some sort of an external element or something extrinsic, which points human beings to the good, and he described that as the law, and it points to [00:07:00] what the good action might be.

Around that time, this was really kind of picking up steam and the idea that what is good is defined by obedience to the law. On page 97, Jean Charles Nault points out that eventually this leads to this concept of legalism, and legalism is quote, “The law alone is the criterion for good.”

So, because this is externally motivated, human beings no longer have what Aquinas called, quote “natural inclinations.” And those natural inclinations were dependent upon really the spiritual nature of humankind, so the soul, and he bases his teaching about natural law on the idea that we are [00:08:00] created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore to determine whether you know something is good, we can look inwardly to ourselves because we are created with God dwelling within us.

Jean Charles Nault explains Aquinas on page 98, “Human beings are free not despite their natural inclinations, but on the contrary because of them.” Okay, so again, let’s unpack it. Some people might say, well, you know, if this is innately within me and was put there by my Creator, am I actually free because I didn’t choose to be created this way? Or some people might say, oh, well, if this is how I was created, am I in some ways predestined to think a certain way, you know? [00:09:00] So those are all good questions, to ponder. Folks today might feel like that restricts consent or freedom of choice.

And Ockham kind of agrees with it, that if humankind was made naturally oriented towards the good, then that means that humankind is no longer essentially free. Going back to Aquinas, one has to ask the question, okay, if we’re naturally inclined this way, what about sin? And Aquinas would say, people sin, not because they’re attracted to evil, but because evil appears to them as good. And in that way, sin is very deceptive.

If you’ve been following along in this first season, you’ll know that that is one of the primary strategies [00:10:00] of the False Spirit. The False Spirit might know that we are attracted to good, naturally inclined to good, or just simply want to be good. So evil can’t always look like an outright evil. It has to have some trickery in it, and it can be deceiving, right?

At this point in reading about it, I’ll be honest with y’all, I was like, I kind of get it, but I’m not sure what Aquinas means because he’s so like Aquinas-y. So, there’s an example in The Noonday Devil on page 99, that kind of started to make sense for me and actually is perfectly timed because I just went to the symphony with a very good friend and we saw Carmina Burana.

So, the violin, right? Envision in your head [00:11:00] a master violinist. Somebody who is an aficionado, who does the 10,000 hours of practice thing and continues to hone their craft, until they’re this expert of their skill. So Aquinas would look at that and say, okay, as the violinist goes, through his or her life, they are always trying to be better, and being better means playing the right notes at the right moments in the right harmonies or whatever is being asked of the musician. But in playing the right notes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re no longer free. Actually, they are free to do the most good thing, which is to play the right notes and play beautiful masterpieces.

So, Jean [00:12:00] Charles Nault writes, is the possibility of playing wrong notes what makes the violinist free? Or from another perspective, does the fact that the violinist no longer plays wrong notes really impair their freedom? Or on the contrary, is it not the pinnacle of freedom to be capable of no longer playing wrong notes? That really stayed with me. Is freedom, like Ockham would say, the ability to play a good note or a bad note? Is that where we wanna start the concept of freedom? Or is it really that because we are these divinely created beings who are inclined to the good, and I would say also beauty, is true freedom, really, to move closer to the good and to beauty as created human [00:13:00] beings with the divine within us? Something to think about.

So back to Ockham. As I mentioned earlier, Ockham feels we need this extrinsic thing to point us towards the good because he’s still, you know, he’s still concerned about doing good, but he just sees it a little differently.

So, he feels that we need the law. Okay, what law, Ockham? Well, Ockham says God’s law. So, Jean Charles Nault explains this on page 100, quote, “Human beings act in terms of a law that is no longer inscribed within them, but is totally external and foreign to them. A law that is totally arbitrary, which humankind can carry out only by God’s decree.”

So, notice the kind of spatiality of how he explains that this law [00:14:00] is no longer the law that you could say is written on our heart. It is this external thing. And yes, it could be God’s law, it could also be civil law. You know, it could be anything external to us. And at first, it might seem like nothing changes, right? Because if it really is God’s law, let’s say the 10 Commandments, and the Ten Commandments are good, right? So really are we just like pulling apart hairs at this point?

But, Aquinas and Jean Charles Nault go on to say, no, this is really a big change because it changes the reason why we do things. We do things not because there’s an intrinsic goodness there, but because God says so or someone says so. Right? And the issue with this [00:15:00] is that a number of things can go wrong. One, God’s authority could be called into question. So, let’s say it really is this external God’s law. Well, what if people start doubting God or undermining God or disbelieving in God? The whole thing falls apart.

Then what they have to turn to is human-made law, which we know is fraught with a lot of issues. So human law, civil law, while it seeks to do good, let’s just say blanketly, although that is kind of hard to believe lately, if human law can be fraught with issues, it’s kind of unstable in that sense. And Jean Charles Nault points out that this is a breeding ground for the concept or reality of authoritarianism. [00:16:00] So on page 100, he writes, “Every authority will be tempted to think that whatever it requires is good by reason of the very fact that it requires it. The authority will then have great difficulty in calling itself into question. The risk of sectarian or dictatorial trend is significant if the law of the strongest is the criterion for the good. Dictatorship is practically inevitable and any questioning of the law in terms of a superior law is considered by the authority to be a threat or even a crime.”

Woo. Okay, mic drop. So, when I read this, I was like, wow, that makes total sense. When you start to ground your actions, your idea of [00:17:00] good, in an external source and not the ultimate Truth with a capital T, which, Aquinas would argue is, written into our being as humans, well then the law is quote unquote, ‘the law of the land,’ right? And something becomes moral if the law says that’s what everybody should be doing. And we can see how unstable and slippery this is, because then you start to wonder, well, who’s making the law? And if the law has the final say, what if that person’s not being a good person?

And of course, I would be remiss to say that when I read this, I really thought of Trump because this idea that might is right and that any questioning of the policies or the law is considered to be a threat or even a [00:18:00] crime, that’s authoritarianism, right? And that’s why leaders like Trump are so, so, so dangerous. And part of the reason I think that we’ve allowed Trump to become what he is in yielding that power is, is exactly what we’re talking about here.

We as human beings have kind of steered clear of these questions of morality. We’ve moved out of the seat of the soul, and instead moved into everything being this extrinsic source of truth or something that we can figure out on our own. Not because we’re looking inwardly, but because we have intellect and reason and blah, blah, blah, blah.

So, we’ve as a society, I think, drifted away from deep conversations about where does truth come from? Where does good come [00:19:00] from? What is morality? What is our inner essence? And certainly, as we’ve become more secularized, we’ve also drifted away from us as created beings by God or by a divine Creator. If we let go of God, if we let go of that integration of humanity and God dwelling within one another. Then we have to revert to the extrinsic, which is law. And then again, we go on that slippery slope.

So, we lean into this freedom, almost to a fault. And in some ways, we do what Ockham kind of predicted in a way: we become indifferent to good and evil. We don’t wanna be told who and what we are and how we were made, and what we were made for. The modern day [00:20:00] kind of thinking is, you aren’t gonna tell me any of that. Instead, I have true freedom. I will choose what the answers to those things are. And I think largely because of that, we’ve just drifted away from God. We don’t look at ourselves or even our soul to plumb the depths of these questions like, hey, is this moral, is it not? And we instead think of extrinsic, flawed sources.

And again, I would be remiss not to bring up another example of how this is all playing out. And right now, it’s highly relevant because as I’m recording this, everything that’s happening in Minnesota with ICE and a lot of people right now are scratching their heads and saying, well, I don’t understand how Christians, or I would say Catholics, can support what they’re seeing I mean, how, how can anybody stay [00:21:00] silent or even get behind the atrocities that we’re seeing?

What we’re hearing and is coming out of this from conservative Christians, conservative Catholics, is this dominant narrative of, well, those immigrants broke the law, so they have to pay for their actions. So, they must be punished, right? What is the primary source of truth and goodness in that reasoning? The law, right? But there’s other people, Christians, Catholics, and you know, even folks who don’t identify with the religion, who I think are aligning more with Aquinas, though they might never describe it that way.

And that is when you look at this level of suffering, when you watch the news and you see the level of suffering that these immigration [00:22:00] policies are inflicting, a mother being dragged from her crying children, tear gas being put under a car with children, people being shot…There’s a part of people that says, intrinsically, I know that this is not right. This is not God. And this is not an understanding of goodness that was divinely created and put on our hearts.

In fact, it is because we’re divinely created that we can look at that and be so repulsed by it. What we’re seeing now is a quote, ‘moral law’ that humankind has created, and instead of seeing an immigrant as another created child of God, conservatives see them as either, hey, you are with us and of [00:23:00] us because you obeyed the law and you became a citizen, or you are nothing to us because you did not do it in that way. And again, where does that reasoning rest? On civil law, that somebody’s worth and their ability to be treated with dignity, rest on how in conformity or not they are with the law.

We who feel that what is going on is repulsive and immoral…We don’t base that knowing and understanding on the law. We base it on what we know to be true deep inside of us: that we are all connected because we were all created by God and thus we are brothers and sisters, in, for Catholics we would say, Christ.

So, in case you think I am ragging on conservatives a little bit too [00:24:00] much, and maybe I’ve just lost all my conservative listeners, who knows. John Charles Nault says, it also applies to an issue that I’m sure I will lose a lot of liberal listeners on, and he says it is that of abortion. He uses abortion as kind of an illustration of all of this. In saying that when most people talk about abortion, they don’t talk about, again, inwardly what their gut is telling them about this developing life. Instead, people are really more concerned with the legality of it or not versus the question of whether or not this is a human life and who has a right to end that life. Okay, so we’re not gonna get fully into abortion now because I think there’s a lot more complexity there on both [00:25:00] sides, but I think he uses it as an example to say, where is the discourse right now? Well, the discourse on issues like abortion is on legality. There’s not as much really coming together to really wrestle with the question of how we define life. Right?

Okay. So, take a breath. Time to recap. So, John Charles Nault helps us to keep these things straight in our head, and he uses these terms called third person or first person moralities. Third person, he writes on page 102 is quote, “The morality of the external observer who considers the act from the outside is something isolated and sees the goodness or malice of the act in terms of the law, in terms of whether or not it conforms to the [00:26:00] law.” He starts talking about conscience, as well, in that section. And that’s where I think it gets even more interesting.

So, when you have this third person or extrinsically-motivated morality, conscience here is still relevant. But conscience, in this case, means how do I use my conscience to allude the law? And the reason that conscious plays a role here is because even with civil law, we know that it’s incomplete and it’s up to interpretation, and therefore it cannot be applied to all cases. So conscious kicks in and fills in those gaps. If this law is really interpretable, or if it doesn’t explicitly say every single situation that it could, I consult my conscience.

First person morality, on the other hand, is more the [00:27:00] Aquinas morality, and quote, “What matters is the subject who develops himself in this activity.”

So, the embodied person that is engaging in this activity or not is really the heart of the matter, and John Charles Nault explains on page 102 that St. Thomas Aquinas then sees conscience as quote “the voice that we hear saying to us in the depths of our being, do good, avoid evil.” End quote.

So that’s kind of more the understanding of conscience that we hear about in church, right? Well, what is your conscience telling you? You know, what is your, your gut, your spirit, your soul, what’s coming up for you during your prayer? And this is actually the version of conscience that JP II [00:28:00] upholds in his encyclical Veritas Splendor, and this is also the type of conscience that the saints use.

So, when you think about how we deem someone a saint, it’s not necessarily like, hey, we wanna make this person a saint because they follow the law. You know, yeah, they, they did it, so we’re gonna make them a saint. Um, that would be interesting, and at the same time, kind of boring.

We instead tend to make people saints because they inspire us, because they followed the Holy Spirit in ways that challenged them and guided them that are truly extraordinary. I’ve learned a lot about [Mother] Cabrini. Cabrini became a saint because of this tireless spirit that she had, this connection to God that she had. That said, even if, well, let’s be candid, even if all the men around [00:29:00] you are saying, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, and even if they hold positions of power like the Mayor of New York, like the bishop, like the Pope, even if they are telling you this, God is telling you need to do this, and I’ve [God] written this vocation and this call for you on your heart, and you see her be so connected to that, that she defies even the religious hierarchy and what they say she should be doing because their quote unquote ‘laws’ that they’ve created are that women, and religious women especially, should not be doing such things, right?

So, when we think of sainthood, we think of people who really were so connected to that inner source of God, that inner sense of calling that they inspire us despite everything [00:30:00] extrinsic to them telling them otherwise. Woo. We’re getting to the end here.

But you might be wondering, at this stage, how does this all relate then to what became of acedia?

So, the reason we went through all of this, and Jean Charles Nault takes us through all of this is because that helps us understand how acedia slowly lost its place in moral theology.

So, Jean Charles Nault named some folks who were great commentators on St. Thomas. I won’t list all their names here, but they essentially lived from the mid 1400s to the mid 1600s. What they did was position acedia as no longer within the context of action. So, acedia kind of gets extracted, if you will, and it largely [00:31:00] disappears from Church discourse until the Second Vatican Council, where eventually it appears transformed in the works of spirituality.

So, it’s not the acedia that we’ve been like really leaning into in this series. It’s transformed and kind of given a more spirituality angle. So, Jean Charles Nault talks about this on page 105, [and] two things start to happen.

One, it appears as sloth. And that is mostly what people will refer to today instead of acedia is the sin of sloth, right? He writes, quote, “It is simply on the order of distraction,” end quote. Basically, acedia is not this you have a calling, the False Spirits trying to get you away from that calling. It’s not all of that. It’s simply sloth. [00:32:00] In other words, you’re just this distracted slothful being.

The other way it starts to show up is in the writings of Petrarch and Aire, and that is in for Petrarch, the early 1300s and for Baudelaire from 1821 to 1867, that moves into melancholy, and you’ll see acedia be lumped in with melancholy, as well, just as it was with sloth. And here the key words of this melancholy focus are “complacency” and a kind of quote “ill being.”

So, Jean Charles Nault summarizes on page 106, quote, “If you take the two definitions of acedia that we mentioned in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the sadness about spiritual good, and the [00:33:00] disgust with action, and you abandon the unified concept of Christian action in which the Holy Spirit and Christ are at the very heart of every action, you will see that sadness becomes melancholy and paralysis becomes sloth.” End quote.

Okay, if you take acedia out of a discussion and an understanding of the essence of who we are as God-created beings attracted to the good, and that makes us free, and instead bring it into this indifference about good and evil and this freedom that is motivated by the extrinsic law, then we name and describe how we are behaving or acting, [00:34:00] not by what we know to be true inwardly, but instead how we behave and act outwardly. Acedia, then, is no longer a spiritual issue, but more so a behavioral one.

So, it’s where we ground ourselves. What understanding do we have of human beings and why they act the way they do if it’s an extrinsically-motivated source? Then we look at how that person behaves, and we can call them melancholic; we can call them slothful. If we think of human beings as divinely-created and God dwelling within them, intrinsically motivated, then we can see things in the complexity of acedia and what’s happening in terms of the wrestling of the soul.

All this is to say [00:35:00] whenever you feel prone to despair, which I think is really easy right now, and you’re feeling like, okay, everyone is just so individualistic, and it’s all like ‘you do you’- and ‘I do me’-type culture, I just want you to remember that these things aren’t new, right?

We aren’t the first generation of human beings to wrestle with these questions, , and we’ve wrestled with it time and time again because this raises essential questions about what it means to be human and who created us and where we came from. We’ve been here before, and if we’ve been here before, we can look to what helped us before and then take that and let it help us in this moment.

And that friends to me [00:36:00] is the concept of acedia. What is it about who I am and who I am uniquely called to be that is precipitating these feelings, these actions, or these inactions, what is driving this? What is keeping me from that call? And honestly, to me, the reason I did acedia is the inaugural series of this podcast is because the way that we get out of this has a spiritual answer. I think we can start by recognizing acedia in our own life and work to overcome it.

So, this concludes this bonus episode. I hope you got the answer to your question. What happened to acedia? Well, it’s undergirded by these really interesting and somewhat conflicting understandings of morality.

But the hope is that because we’ve wrestled with these [00:37:00] questions before, we’ve also wrestled with the answers, and one of those answers. Acedia is something that we’ve been talking about here all along, and I hope that for you, you can take it into your life, continue to wrestle with it, and know that the answers are within you as a created child of God.

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]

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Balu Natarajan to discuss the interreligious aspects of acedia, particularly as it relates to Hinduism. Balu Natarajan identifies as friend, husband, father, son, educator, and lifelong learner.   By profession, practicing physician and Chief Medical Officer, maintaining board certifications in internal medicine, sports medicine, and hospice + palliative medicine.

[00:00:00] 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 Four: Acedia and the Signs of the Times Continued - Why acedia makes perfect sense right now. So welcome back to our podcast. So far, we have discussed a lot about acedia, including where it shows up for us personally, its symptoms and its manifestations.

And last time in episode three, we something called the Signs of the Times in Catholicism. And if you remember from episode three, the Signs of the Times are essentially our way of looking at what’s happening out in the world and interpreting it in the light of the Gospel.

I wanted to do a two-parter, and this is [00:01:00] part two on the Signs of the Times because I think it takes a little bit to sink in, and I hope that you will get more of that in this episode.

So why are we talking about acedia, and the Signs of the Times? Or in other words, why should we care about this intersection specifically? We talked about, early on in this series, acedia manifesting on a personal level and how that shows up acedia manifesting on a societal level is how the Signs of the Times come to be.

I want to offer a reason to go to the societal level, even though acedia is a deeply personal spiritual topic. And that is because the Signs of the Times have really been with us throughout all of human history. The Signs [00:02:00] of the Times, even though it’s a Vatican II-type phrase, is really about how do we look out into the world and see a lot of suffering and injustice and make sense of that in light of our faith.

When I go about the world today, which is rampant with injustice, I personally can feel really overwhelmed and really powerless. And this intersection of acedia and the Signs of the Times actually helps me to make a little bit of sense of it, although certainly not all of it does make sense. But also, to temper my reaction in the wider arc of human history. Something I like to tell myself is that we really aren’t that special right now. A lot of times you hear people say, [00:03:00] oh my gosh, this is the worst it’s ever been, or never in my lifetime can I remember a time when we’re so divided and it’s been this terrible. And certainly, that could be true, especially in the course of a lifetime. But I think what’s on the flip side of that type of thinking is this idea that we are perhaps in the worst part of human history, or we’re dealing with the worst humans that have ever existed.

And that can lead to a lot of hopelessness and also a lot of despair. And as Christians, we have to push through that and get to what we are meant to do and called to do in light of the teachings of Jesus Christ. So, it helps us to make sense of what we’re seeing, to know that the Signs of the Times have always been with us and so has our faith [00:04:00] and we’re alive here and now in this particular moment using those tools to try to navigate all of this and live as Christ would intend us to live.

It also helps, I think, to know how the false spirit, or in other words, the devil, or in other words, evil, operates in the world. I hear a lot of people saying right now, I just can’t believe the amount of good people that are doing awful things or supporting awful things, and again, it’s hard to make sense of that as Christians, especially people who say they’re Christians.

But when you look at it through the lens of acedia and the false spirit, the goal of the false spirit is to get as many people off track as possible, and that is how acedia operates on a [00:05:00] larger scale. So, when I see all these things happening and I see otherwise good people supporting really bad things, I tend to not let myself drown in despair.

Although I would be lying if I said I had succeeded in that at times, but I instead try to think about how is this false spirit moving in this and what does the false spirit want us to do? It helps me to see humanity really struggling with evil, and that makes it more manageable in my brain more towards action as opposed to despair.

So just as a recap, we know the false spirit has two goals: one, to keep us from living out our God-given vocation, and two, from allowing us to do the most right that we [00:06:00] can do in the world.

And when you think of it that way, in the framework of those two goals, what we’re seeing right now is a lot of people who are straying from their God-given vocation and a lot of people who are not living into the most right or justice that they can do in the world.

Think about the world that we would live in: Everybody living into their God-given vocation, trying to do good. We would live in a very different world than what we find ourselves right now. That’s where we’re heading, right? That’s the Kingdom. That’s heaven. That’s the world where everybody finally gets it right and we live in this peace and harmony and love of God. We as Christians, and I think specifically as Catholics, are called to work to bring about the [00:07:00] Kingdom here on Earth. It doesn’t say to accomplish it necessarily with some finality, but our goal is to not dwell on the when and the how and the where, because Jesus says nobody knows the day or the hour anyway, but to try to bring about the work of the Kingdom in the here and now.

So today we will be again, primarily drawing from the two books the Edia and Me by Kathleen Norris and the Noonday Devil by Jean Child Malt. And we will review right now the four signs that we brought up in this last episode, and we’re gonna continue on. With more signs today. So just as a review, the four signs from last time that we’re [00:08:00] seeing, is number one, many people not having a closeness with God or drifting away from God.

Number two, the sensationalization of everything from media to sex to violence, like the most evocative thing, the most graphic thing, the most wow factor. Number three, thinking that it might be better to not exist.

And if that’s a little too much, too heavy, too extreme, think about questioning our own worth and our existence here and now. And finally, number four the one that I resonate with personally is this idea of instability and restlessness and how we kind of flee from the depths of what we’re called to and we busy ourselves with a lot of other [00:09:00] things the false spirit needs this in order to thrive because the false spirit doesn’t want us to live into our calling or do the most good in the world because that’s quite frankly how evil in the false spirit are overcome.

I think of it a lot of time, too, of just like the false spirit is always trying to make us spin our wheels like you go over there in the corner and run on the hamster wheel, and that will gimme a lot of time to focus on carrying out my false spirit plan because you’re gonna be distracted on your little hamster wheel Peloton that you’re doing, nothing against Peloton. I just am picturing a little hamster on a wheel with a Peloton.

The other thing the false spirit is doing, while we’re so distracted, is making division among us. The false spirit knows that the soil of all of this is a divisive world, and that’s something [00:10:00] we’re feeling so much right now. It’s like putting all of us on our own little respective hamster wheels in different corners of the house, and what happens? One, we get really absorbed in our little hamster wheel, Peloton. Two, we aren’t communicating with each other, we’re making assumptions about each other. We’re exaggerating what we think the other person may or may not be doing because we’re not in connection and we’re not having a healthy encounter with each other. What better way to keep us divided than to keep us all restless away from God questioning life and getting whiplash from every sensational thing coming our way on our screens, right? The false spirit in that sense keeps us in a holding pattern, and that is exactly by design.

And our job is to say, as [00:11:00] Becky, my wonderful spiritual director told me, our job is to say, I see you little punk. And yes, she did use the word punk, and I love her for that. You are not going to do that to me. I believe in what is good and right and compassionate and true, and you won’t fool me.

You won’t keep me town. And it’s important to remember that it’s a hamster wheel, but it’s not a cage with a lock on it. We have free will. We can exit the wheel at any time and we can step off of it and say, hey, false spirit, I get what you’re doing now. I’m getting off the hamster wheel. I’m gonna go find my friends and we’re gonna work together to put you in your own corner.

So that my friends is a prayer right now, if there ever was one. And with that, I will talk to you [00:12:00] about the remaining Signs now we’re going to move on to number five. All right, so signs of the time, number five: struggling with being alone, and in the Noonday Devil on page 116, Evagrius, remember our like main dude here, calls acedia, a flight from oneself, it’s not just the temptation to flee what you’re called to do, but it’s actually to escape your true self.

And that might show up as no longer knowing how to be alone or perhaps being afraid to be alone. And this is not the kind of afraid to be alone, like in COVID when you know we craved social interaction because we’re social beings and all that stuff. It’s more [00:13:00] so that in solitude, he writes, what’s scary about it is that we discover what we are really. Like who we really are and we start to face our own demons. And Jean Charles Nault writes: “I do not play a role for long when I am alone, since there is no one to observe me except myself.”

I love that quote. He’s essentially saying, we all kind of role play when we’re out being our social creatures. Maybe some of that is our true, authentic selves that we show others. But there’s a lot bearing down on us in a social environment, whether it’s how we look as a parent, how we look as a coworker, how we look as a neighbor, whatever it is.

But when you’re alone, there are no roles to play. So, we’re left with our [00:14:00] authenticity, which might be a little scary. As Christians, we also believe that if we tend to flee ourselves like our inner being, that in its essence is also fleeing God because God dwells within us. So, there’s also a quote on page 131-132, and it says, quote, “No one thinks of anything but getting away. But wherever he goes, he takes himself along. Now, if emptiness, anxiety, boredom, dwell within a being, this emptiness, anxiety, and boredom will follow him to the ends of the earth. The tenacious illusion of always being better off somewhere else does not abandon the individual. [00:15:00] Anything seems preferable to self-awareness and diffuse pain.” Woo. Okay.

What I appreciate about this quote is when we flee ourselves. We always have these kind of false attachments to this idea that we will get somewhere and that’s when we will finally resolve the things that we’re unhappy about.

And part of that might be true, right? Like I said in previous episodes, you know, the goal is not to sit in misery, right? But sometimes we have an attachment to a false promise that if we flee ourselves or circumstances, we can somehow make it better. And some of it might be better, but we also might acquire new problems.

But what I like about this quote is it says it [00:16:00] will follow us. And that’s what I’m trying to get at in those earlier episodes when we talk about this: it’s not about punishing yourself and sticking around. It’s essentially to say, be careful when you’re thinking that way, because what you’re actually unhappy about might be something internal. That circumstances and whatnot is not going to change because it will follow you and it’ll follow you into the new bright, shiny, right? So I really love this. So again, sign number five.

Struggling with being alone because it really turns the mirror on ourselves and we have to look honestly at what we see now. Sign number six, not having the courage to live into our own [00:17:00] greatness. You guys, I love this one so much. I’m gonna have to say it again. Not having the courage to live into our own greatness, to reject one’s own greatness.

Jean Charles Nault, page 117 says, “It is the inability to believe in the greatness of the vocation to which God is calling us.” When you first read this, you might think, I don’t know if that’s actually true, because who would not wanna be great? Of course, yes. We all wanna get there, but if we are talking about a true vocation, a calling from God, it could be like the coolest, best, happiest thing we’ve ever done with our lives. But chances are what I’ve discovered is [00:18:00] it might be some of that and also a lot of other really hard, difficult things, and that can engender a lot of fear. And that’s why when we talk about vocation, we talk about the need for courage. Because when we say yes to God. It is not yes to simply the good parts of what we wanna do, but also the extremely hard parts of what He’s calling us to do. Future Pope Benedict is also quoted in the book and he talks about, “A false humility that has become so common today. Man does not want to believe that God is concerned about him, knows him, loves him, watches over him is close to him.”

So, if we don’t think very highly ourselves, which can look like [00:19:00] humility, but it’s again a false humility. We can on the outside look very humble, but maybe on the inside what we’re actually doing is running away from what we’re being called to do by almost like downplaying ourselves. If we really lean into, like he says, a God who’s concerned about us, knows us, loves us, watches over us is close to us, like that actually takes courage because what you find when you finally get to that space might be the most fulfilling, yet challenging thing that you can do in your life.

We also might be struggling with guilt or shame, or we feel that God has wronged us in some way or told us that God doesn’t love us or pretend that we don’t need God, or we’ll just be fine without God. Those are all [00:20:00] ways, again, that we run from this. So, we tell ourselves, oh, I can’t go there because God wronged me in some way and I’m gonna hide behind that instead of living into my purpose. Or maybe, sadly, tragically, somebody belittled us, maybe even a religious person told us that we were small instead of the big fullness that God has created us to be.

Or maybe we tell ourselves stories about how we don’t need God’s calling. We don’t need that vocation, and we will just be fine without God. When I think about this, I think back to a time on Facebook, and usually these stories go the way of all stories when I think about a time on Facebook. But I was in this group, and I don’t remember the exact [00:21:00] situation that it was brought up, but the question was, what is the hardest thing to accept about God do and what do people struggle with more?

Do they struggle more with the idea that God is angry with them for not following all the God rules. Or something else. And a lot of people were saying, oh, people are so egotistical, they’re so self-absorbed. Like they can’t accept a God that’s like about the Truth, they run away from it and all their vanity and all this stuff.

I was looking at it and I was like, eh, I don’t actually think that’s what’s plaguing our modern world. I think a lot of conservatives like to hold that up is like all these godless, vain, ego-driven people, narcissistic, running around. We’ve all strayed from the path. That’s how we got to this place, and I’m like, no, I think it’s actually [00:22:00] the opposite. And I argued on Facebook with strangers that what is actually hard to accept for people nowadays is that God is so in love with them unconditionally. Not that He is angry at them for not following all his God rules and this, that, and the other, but actually the harder thing is to accept this unconditional abundance of love that God has for us.

Of course, the commenters, were like, what? That’s nonsense. But to me it makes total sense because I actually think we live in a world where we get a lot of negative messages already. Either about ourselves, our worth, our inabilities, how we measure up or don’t, we’re almost constantly [00:23:00] surrounded by that criticism, and we can get really down on ourselves and say, oh man, I’m just like screwing up, or I failed, or I didn’t rise to the challenge, whatever it is. But actually, I think what is counter-cultural right now is to accept that at least one Being out there will love us no matter how tremendously flawed we are. No matter how tremendously, we miss the mark, like what is actually quite radical is God’s unconditional love for us.

And we might even run from it because we don’t think we’re worthy of it. But God is constantly there. I always say trying to woo us. God is always trying to tell us how absolutely in love with us He really is. And I think to [00:24:00] sit with that, talk about being alone and sitting with things is actually what we’re struggling with the most.

So, another way to think about this, sign number six, not having the courage to live into our own greatness, is to say things like, who am I to be? ... That’s the way that I most understand the sign it’s not that. We don’t want to be whatever this vision is of our vocation, but we have doubt in ourselves that we are actually worthy of such a call. And again, I struggled with this when I first read it because I was like, no, if God’s calling you, you know you’re worthy of it ‘cause God’s saying it, or I don’t know what I was thinking.

But then I [00:25:00] started to think back and I was like, no, I actually do this a lot in my life, especially in the years that I did spiritual direction, one thing I wrestled with was I just kept staying the course, even though it wasn’t my calling, or maybe it wasn’t my calling anymore, and when we hear ourselves say things like I’ve always thought about doing… Those are the whispers, but we tend to drown them out with our sense of stability for one, which is of course, legitimate. But two, we drown them out by thinking maybe there is no way we could ever do that. We start to talk ourselves out of it. I talk myself out of a lot of things and one of them is actually what I’m doing right now, which is [00:26:00] reflecting and talking to you all on this very public platform, in spiritual direction. What came up for me is [that] I need to write more. I need to reflect more in a public way. A lot of times I would look at other Catholic, Christian, female writers out there and say they have all these followers, they have all these books, they have all these connections. There’s no way I could get to that level. Or who am I to speak messages into the world that resonate with people, and I talked myself out of it because that was easier than actually living into it.

Alongside that as a parallel is internalizing messages from society that tell us that we’re not good enough. Like when I look at my Instagram or my Substack, I look at that number of followers and I say I did put [00:27:00] myself out there and four people liked it, we’re always getting these messages from society as whether or not what we’re doing is being deemed acceptable. It’s essentially being told by the external world, you’re not good enough, or who are you to think you’re going to make this impact, whatever it is.

The good thing is that God is there for all of us, and He’s in there with us in all of it. Whatever the self-doubt is, whatever the comparison that we’re making between ourselves and someone or something else is God is always in our corner because He is literally inside of us.

Trying to call us into a greater sense of being, in that sense, it is revolutionary, and I think resistance [00:28:00] to accept not only how much God loves us unconditionally. But also, to see how wonderfully God has made all of us with all the talents and skills and beautiful gifts that He put upon our hearts.

What are our gifts? What might He be whispering to us and calling us to do? And for the false spirit, what a better way to keep us down than to trick us into denying our own greatness. The false spirits wants us to walk around with our heads hung down low, not held up high.

Not proud of who we are as a created child of God with a meaningful purpose in this life. So, for you, dear listener, the next time you are talking yourself out of doing something great or even just daydreaming about it, think about how acedia is showing up and acting on you.

[00:29:00] In the books it talks about how this particular problem can be really inherent in the midlife. Or the midlife crisis years. Not believing our own greatness, when we get to a certain age or as we get older, we start to convince ourselves that it’s quote too late to do our lives over or to take our lives in a different direction.

So Jean Charles Nault on page 129. “So it is that acedia is above all the devil who causes us to regret the decision that we have made. This is the sense in which it is the devil of maturity. Even though one may still be young, whereas there is one devil who keeps man from making a commitment, from taking a step, acedia makes him regret having taken it. So, we see the paradox of [00:30:00] flight. While it seems to be in advance, it is instead a genuine regression.”

Wow, that’s really deep. What I like about it and what resonated for me was [that] one of the ways we can talk ourselves out of our own greatness, is by saying, it’s too late for me. Or who am I to switch gears or pivot and all the people that it might affect, which again, legitimate concerns, but what does it mean also to radically trust in God and to say, okay, God, if you really want me to do this, help me help me find the way. St. Thomas Aquinas says, “The reason that acedia is so pernicious is that it is a response to good and not a response to evil. We tend to deny or hate [00:31:00] our own goodness.” So that’s really powerful too, because, it is a response to our own goodness that is false. Think about the false spirit. The false spirit does not want us to see that truth and instead clutters our lies with all the acedia.

What if we take it to the level then of never living our purpose in the world because we take up too much space. Who are we to speak our truths or our voice in the world? This is how the false spirit, again, purposely keeps us down, but also from realizing how truly wonderful we are in the eyes of God.

So, I want you to reach for the stars, and when I say reach for the stars, what I really mean is reach for the Heavens, which is God. Our stars are to truly be in the service of our calling and [00:32:00] to do the most good in the world and to not sink into mediocrity, which is one of the synonyms for acedia.

Remember, mediocrity autopilot hamster wheel when it seems too late to do one’s life over. The decision on the other side of that is to go on living in mediocrity. To sit on the conveyor belt of life to turn on the autopilot.

I think that’s why Thoreau pointed out that a lot of people live these quiet lives of desperation, right? When they maybe have rumblings of their greatness and what they’re meant to do in the world, and they’re desperate to get there, but they just hold it all in, put the light under the bushel basket and live this quiet life of desperation. [00:33:00] Jean Charles Nault writes on page 130, “When someone no longer dares to do what is essential and great one must be content with what is secondary and mediocre.”

Again, on page 131, “The devil’s tactic is to propose what is reasonable. Yes, he is the prince of lukewarmness, the king of compromise. His goal is not to make us fall into specific errors, but on the contrary to leave us in uncertainty. To submerge truth and uncertainty because it is impossible to stake one’s life on vague ideas and consequently to become a saint under those conditions.”

Wow. So the prince of lukewarmness, the king of [00:34:00] compromise to submerge truth in uncertainty because it’s impossible to stake one’s life on vague ideas. That says it the best.

And that brings us to sign number seven if you’re falling along with the numbering. And there are actually eight, so we are almost there. Sign number seven is what’s called ideological optimism. This is a sign of the time that John Charles Nault talks about it on page 124 and describes it as, quote, “A boundless confidence in the progress of humanity and science. Therefore, it is necessary to accept nothing that cannot be verified, demonstrated, or experienced by reason.”

Okay, so you might be thinking. [00:35:00] No, actually we’re not trying to go into this territory where we reject science, and that sort of thing. That’s led us to some really bad situations, but it’s not necessarily that they’re talking about a rejection of science outright. It’s an idolization of science and this idea that logic and reason is the end all be all, and that’s what will save us. It’s basically humanity saying to God, we don’t need you because we have science. We don’t see science as an enemy, God gave us reason and we have science because God so beautifully and intricately created the world.

I think if done in the right framework, the study of science is actually a way to come closer to the awe [00:36:00] of God and not the rejection of God. So that’s sign number seven. This idea that we have it all figured out by ourselves with science, our own ego, we start to drift away from God, which we talked about earlier.

Again, the false spirit, and we start to lose the mystery of life itself. And mystery is something that Catholicism specifically calls us to embrace and meditate upon that. There’s just some things that we might not fully be able to prove or understand about our faith, but we take it upon ourselves to sit in the mystery and want more and more every day to deepen our belief.

And finally, the last sign, sign number eight, is something that I think is really applicable to what we’re seeing right now [00:37:00] on a societal level, and that is excessive nostalgia for the past. So this is really happening right now. Okay. And I think you know where I’m gonna go with this, but before I go there, Jean Charles Nault on page 125 says, “As a reaction to the gloominess of the present, there may indeed be a tendency to cultivate an excessive nostalgia for the successful, well-spent moments of the past to embellish it, to delight in it, to tell stories about it. When nothing goes well anymore in the present, it is so reassuring to become attached to the past. When one quote ‘did so many good things,’ end quote, then one tells the stories to oneself or to [00:38:00] others.” So again, I think you know where I’m gonna go with this.

This is exactly the strategy that Trump and the Make America Great Again, folks use to woo people. And I use the word woo because there’s a lot of romanticism involved. So going back to the false spirit who wants to keep us spinning our wheels and distracted. This fits in with that because this attachment to the past is a really great way to keep us down because it takes our focus off the present and our God-given calling and how to react to it.

When we get wooed by this mentality, we think that the solution is to recreate the past. Make America Great Again is this [00:39:00] illusion that back in the day was better today is, gone to blazes. And so, what we need to do is go back to where we were and it preys on people’s one selective memory of the past.

And when I think about this. I think about my friend Chris, and he is someone I met in college and became friends with, and he is a Black man. And one day we were talking and I told him how much I loved the movie Pleasantville, which for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is this magical surrealism film about going back in time to like the 1950s. And at that point in my life, I was really enamored with the 1950s, I think, because like my dad loved a lot of the music [00:40:00] from the 1950s. And I just had this idea in my head that it was just like this awesome idyllic time with like poodle skirts and stuff like that.

And I was talking to Chris about this, and he stopped me and he said, it wouldn’t have been for me. And what he was saying was, as a Black man in the mid-20th century, his life would’ve been vastly different than the Pleasantville movie, right? It was the time of Jim Crow and a lot of rampant, overt racism, which still exists today, but I think this idea of Pleasantville, the attachment to the past, the idolization of the past, is a strategy to keep us down because we tend to live in the romance of it and distract ourselves from the work that is in the here and now and what we’re called [00:41:00] to do.

Another example I wanna give, in addition to the conversation I had with my friend Chris, is this movement, or this fervor around Traditionalism within Catholicism right now. Or maybe within an orthodoxy. It’s been talked about in the New York Times and so on and so forth. I’ll just stick to Traditionalism and Catholicism because that’s something that I am more aware of and grew up in, for at least some of my life in that part of my extended family, really embraced this. And while our immediate family was not part of that, I was around it a lot growing up because family functions like funerals and weddings and so on and so forth would occur within this kind of radical traditional [00:42:00] Catholic setting.

Traditionalism similar to MAGA, they use the same tactic of idealizing things so as to distract from the present moment. And one thing that really troubles me about Traditionalism, especially in raising families, is the call is to actually, one, regress to the past and build that again if that can ever truly be, or two, to live in a bubble, this kind of protective bubble, which sounds like a good intention, but remember the false spirit twist those good intentions, right? It manipulates it, so it might sound like you’re doing a good thing to protect your children, to raise them in this kind of insular environment where you can control like what they [00:43:00] consume and who they interact with whatever it is, it might seem like a true good intention parenting act. But instead, the false spirit twists that and keeps the holding pattern for this viewpoint as one of constantly looking in the past, idealizing the past, being nostalgic for the past, and not being in and of the world and doing God’s work in the here and now.

And the Catholic church warns us about this. The Catholic Church in so many documents, stresses to us that we are meant to engage with society. We are meant to be in and of this world. We are to wrestle with modern-day ethics and challenges. We are not to retreat and hide or create a false narrative in order to comfort [00:44:00] ourselves or flee, which would allow us to avoid our calling again and the call to engage and to do good. So, you can see how this is really attractive right now because the false spirit is using this nostalgia, this romanticism, this us versus them, so protect yourself to bring us farther and farther out of the world and back into a time that doesn’t even exist anymore.

When I think about growing up, I sometimes slip into this mentality because sometimes I say to myself, life used to be a lot easier before there wasn’t smartphones, there wasn’t constantly the screens, but when I think about it, when I was a kid, there were a lot of bad things happening then too. That is [00:45:00] still present here today. But I was either being appropriately guarded from it or. I was not yet having the mental acuity to notice and understand it.

What’s worrisome to me about this last sign of the time is I think the false spirit tries to distract us back to the past so that we give up on the present. It makes the present seem so exceptionally bad that it feels like it is forever irredeemable, and all we can do is yearn for this idyllic time in the past. And again, I think the MAGA movement has capitalized on this. They know that people are discontent and overwhelmed with the way things are. I’m definitely not arguing [00:46:00] that, and they use the false spirit tactic to say, we’re gonna make it great again. But it’s really a smoke and mirrors in the name of this false vision. Again, a false vision by the false spirit to keep us distracted from the present moment and from doing the most good. So, in that sense, to overcome it, we need to name it if we are ever to get out of it in our current context.

So those are the full eight Signs of the Times. I hope it gave you something to chew on. I am really happy to have prepared these episodes to share them with you, even if you don’t agree with all of the content, I hope that there’s something there that allows you to go a little bit deeper in your own personal life or how you see the world and make sense of it. [00:47:00]

In the next episode, we have a really special treat. It will be the inaugural interview of the moderate Catholic, and it is going to be about how Acedia has dialogue with other world religions or as we say interreligious dialogue.

So, stay tuned and I can’t wait to meet you there.

[00:00:00] 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 three, Acedia and the Signs of the Times.

So, if you’ve been following along these first two episodes, you’ll know that we’re here to talk about acedia. Acedia is, in brief, what used to be one of the seven deadly sins, but got lumped in with sloth and has kind of fallen out of favor of our modern spiritual discourse. In episode one, I talked a lot about how I knew that acedia was showing up in my life, but I didn’t quite know what the name [of it] was yet.

And in episode two, I start to describe acedia using two [00:01:00] books, The Noonday Devil by Jean Charles Nault and another one called Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. You may have been tuning in so far and thought a lot about the episodes, I’m sure, and still be wondering what is acedia. I wanted to pause before we get to today’s topic and just say that if you aren’t sure what acedia is still, that is okay.

It takes a while to wrap your head around it. And really, it’s goals and its symptoms and how it moves in the world is actually quite simple. But at least, for me, getting to naming it and understanding it was a little more complex. So, I just wanna tell you, if you’re [00:02:00] like, is she gonna keep talking about that acedia thing? Because I’m thoroughly lost. The answer is yes for now. I’m gonna keep talking about the acedia thing, and it’s totally okay if you’re lost.

I was thinking this week a little bit about how to better describe acedia, just in my own words, and I thought a lot about something we discussed in episode two, which was how is acedia different from depression?

I think depression is something that we all either have experienced or maybe we have experienced it by proxy as showing up in someone’s life whom we love. So I wanna talk a little bit about that difference there, because I think most people have a fair enough understanding of depression, and that can be a launching point to understand more [00:03:00] about acedia. The way that I would describe it is if you were to exist in the world, and you were to exist free of depression, let’s just say, normal mental health, depression has been treated.

Maybe it’s not even an issue, maybe it never was, and yet you still feel something that is nagging at you or seems to bother you, but you can’t quite figure out why, because nothing seems apparently wrong. That even if you have the most sound, mental health at that point in your life or maybe your entire life, if you’re really lucky, you still feel this unsettledness in your spirit.

And that’s where I think depression and [00:04:00] acedia can start to diverge is, as I explained in episode two, depression can be a very true clinical issue that has clinical therapies and medications designed to overcome it, thank God. But acedia creeps into the realm of spirituality, and it affects our spirit.

While it might show up looking like what we’re familiar with as signs of depression, it really at its root comes from the depression of the spirit, if you will. I hope that helps you to delineate a little bit better, and it will begin to make more sense as we go along.

The second thing I wanna talk about, and I did mention a little bit before, is the false spirit. So the false spirit is [00:05:00] what I will refer to as the devil. I think I might have explained that I’m not usually a person that goes around talking about the devil. So, the false spirit for me is a much more palatable version of how to talk about it. I like the phrase, the false spirit, which comes from St. Ignatius of Loyola because it literally describes what I think, evil or the devil is the spirit, which is good, obviously, but the false spirit, which is kind of the antithesis of the good spirit, right?

So, I wanna talk about the false spirit a lot in the next two episodes, including today and to understand and try to make sense of what’s going on right now, which is completely overwhelming if you’ve been following along [00:06:00] in the world. We need to understand how evil is at work through a spiritual lens. The false spirit, in other words, the devil, is acting in the world. Even if you’re not okay with the phrase, the false spirit or the devil, you can just call it evil, whatever spiritual tradition you come from, there probably is some conception of evil.

So how does the false spirit operate, especially today, and I’d like to give you two goals that it has. The first goal of the false spirit is to keep us from living our God given vocation. And when I say vocation, I don’t necessarily mean like becoming a nun or becoming a firefighter. I really just mean what is it [00:07:00] that you are meant to do in this world? You specifically, a beloved child of God. Some people might call that, you know, living your best self, living your best life, living into God’s calling for you. Living into your purpose.

There’s a lot of ways to describe that, and God wants us to live in that space, to live in that authentic being that we were created to be. However, the false spirit being false wants to keep us from getting there as best that he can. Okay? He wants to deter us from what is good and what is ultimately the purpose and fulfillment of our lives.

The second thing, the false spirit does is keep us from doing [00:08:00] the most good that we can in the world. And I say the most because I do think, especially right now, there are a lot of good people out there, and they are doing otherwise seemingly good things, and maybe not outrightly bad things, although some people are doing outrightly bad things, but let’s just talk about a normal person, just kind of existing.

They might not be doing bad, but they might not be doing the most good that they can do, even for myself, and I do consider myself someone who cares about doing good in the world. That is the growth point for me, always spiritually, am I doing the most good that I can do? Because if I kind of sit with [00:09:00] contentment and say, well, I’m doing good enough, I don’t really know if I’m going to reach the point that God wants me to be at, but also that the world needs, so again, the false spirit, two goals. One, keeping us from our God-given vocation or calling in life. And two, keeping us from doing the most good that we can in the world.

The false spirit is really clever and really smart. I think back to the theology I had growing up which was like, the devil is bad and he tells you to do bad stuff. And if you do the bad stuff, it means you listen to him. As I’ve gotten older, I will say I have never truly abandoned that thinking.

I realized, much to my shame, I still have a part of [00:10:00] me that thinks that the devil is like this little person that sits on your ear and says like, take the candy, do it. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that understanding of the devil or evil, or the false spirit served me well in childhood because that was kind of the extent of my moral thinking at the time, but I really have graduated instead to this idea that the devil is not necessarily the thing that’s sitting on your shoulder every day telling you to do the bad thing that’s in front of you. The devil is clever and smart and way more manipulative than at least I was told growing up.

And one way that the false spirit shows up for me and my life is by actually. preying [00:11:00] on my good intentions and twisting it the devil knows that trying to get a good person off track is going to be really, really hard because that person has already, let’s say, made a commitment to goodness in their life. So the devil or the false spirit being clever thinks okay, well, how can I get that person to reneg on that? And one of the ways the false spirit does it is by using our inclinations, even sometimes our good inclinations and twisting and manipulating them towards evil or towards not doing enough good in the world or towards not going to the fullness of our God-given vocation.[00:12:00]

So how does this all relate back to acedia? Acedia is one of the tools that the false spirit uses to keep us away from those two things. Living out our vocation, doing the most right in the world.

And that’s what really was one of those things that clicked for me when I was doing spiritual direction, which I talked about in episode two. My intention has always been to listen to God, to do the most right in the world, to do what God is asking me to do. I’ve always tried to center my life around that.

When I kept feeling these feelings of acedia, I was like, well, if I’m trying, trying, trying, why am I still feeling this unsettledness or this nagging or [00:13:00] this inertia or this restlessness? I keep at it every single day and I’m not trying to outrightly do something bad, so what is going on inside of me spiritually and naming acedia and realizing how it can affect people that are trying to work for the good it can really show up in that way.

So, today what we’re gonna do is talk about acedia showing up in the world today, and I actually think that the false spirit is pounding us with acedia right now because there is so much evil going on and the false spirit knows that an order for that evil to survive, he’s gotta kind of mess with the goodness and the [00:14:00] good intentions of so many people out there. I think today is one of the most critical moments to talk about acedia because I think understanding it and being able to recognize it in society is what’s gonna actually help us to get out.

I’m operating from a belief that we are right now in a time of great upheaval and very, very severe division. That is kind of the foundation that I’m going to talk about acedia in the modern context. It is feeling very, very overwhelming in every corner of the world, to be honest with you, and how pervasive these things are becoming, the false spirit in order to keep perpetrating evil in the world counts on this division.

I [00:15:00] know we say it all the time, and it sounds super cliche, but think how much stronger we are when we’re together and we have all these people being alongside one another, towards a common goal or a common good. The devil knows that there’s strength in that and. If the devil wants to try to stop that or suppress it, sowing the seeds of division is a way to get at that strong force.

The fact that we are experiencing so much evil and it’s so divisive, to me, are two really strong clues that the false spirit is waging some really good tactics to keep us away from the good. Another question that I think helps to confirm this is one that I’ve been seeing a lot [00:16:00] online in social media, but also in conversations that I’ve had with people about this, and many are just really scratching their head and asking the question, why are so many good people doing X, Y, and Z right now?

Insert whatever example you like, and that is a conundrum. It is very unnerving to try to figure out the answer to that question, and I’ll even take it one step further and say, for me, I’ve asked how can two good people, otherwise good people, generally good people, even people that are Christians or even Catholics, have such opposing views about X, Y, or Z?

On the one hand there’s people that are saying, we’re doing X, Y, and Z in the name of God, and [00:17:00] there’s other people who believe in God saying that is directly against God. That’s like not at all what Jesus was talking about. Hopefully, I have your attention now because I have a suspicion that some of that might resonate with you and your experience of life right now.

And instead of feeling really overwhelmed and discouraged by the contradictory nature of all of it, I’m hoping that explaining acedia to you will help you look at it, still see the same things, perhaps still draw the same conclusions, but understand that what is happening right now is a tactic of the false spirit, and it’s by design of the false spirit that we keep finding ourselves here. What I’m asking you to [00:18:00] do along with me in this podcast is to name that and to do what we need to do personally to spiritually know how to push against that.

What I’m trying to provide to you in this podcast is a personal spiritual outlet toward it, I do believe that it is not truly acting alone to look at this spiritually. I do believe, when you’re on the right spiritual path towards goodness, it knows no boundaries in this world. It will emanate from you. It will infuse everything you do and it’ll touch everybody around you.

So I wanna pause and talk a little bit about a phrase in Catholicism that’ll, set the stage for. How we frame this. In [00:19:00] Catholicism we have this phrase, called the signs of the times.

I Googled a quick, what are the signs of the times in Catholicism, and the internet came up with a really good. Definition, the internet says signs of the times, a phrase popularized by the Second Vatican Council to describe events and trends in contemporary history that the church must try to interpret in light of the gospel, in other words, Jesus’ teaching. It is a theological method for the church to engage with the world by understanding cultural and social phenomena to discern how those phenomena relate to God’s plan this includes scrutinizing current events, social ideas, and cultural trends to [00:20:00] see where they align with or contradict the teachings of Christ. Okay, so TLDR or too long didn’t listen. TLDL, if that’s a thing, basically the signs of the times are looking out into the world and doing what a lot of us are trying to do right now, which is try to make sense of it in light of what we know to be good. And for Catholics and Christians, what we know to be the life ministry teaching example and legacy of Jesus Christ.

In the Noonday Devil, Jean Charles Nault talks about [how] acedia is perhaps one of the most forgotten topics of modern morality. And on the other hand, it is perhaps the root cause of the greatest crisis in the church. I would [00:21:00] use also the world today. So, what we’ll do the rest of this episode is go through four signs that Acedia is showing up.

So, the first sign is that a lot of people are drifting away from God or not having a closeness with God. I wanna say that this is without judgment from me certainly, a lot of folks might be struggling with the concept of God, maybe be open to it, but not willing to really dig in or just not even know what to make of it. Because especially when things are so evil in the world, we can really start to doubt who God is and how God shows up in our life. [00:22:00] So on page 18 in the Noonday Devil, I’d like to read a quote from Cardinal Schoenborn from 1996, and he says, “it seems to me that the deepest crisis in the church today is that we no longer dare to believe and what God can do for the good and those who love him. The spiritual masters traditionally call this torpor of mind and heart, or acedia.” I think this idea of we have lessened our belief in what God can do for us does resonate in the feelings of hopelessness that are really pervasive.

The second quote is from Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Aquinas is a Doctor of the Church, [00:23:00] and we will talk a lot more about him when we get to how acedia and Aquinas intersected. But for now, I just wanna read a quote from him that I think, again, fits into this not having closeness with God. He says, “We possess everything, but we do not have God. We have power, but we have lost meaning. Our society, which is oozing with anxiety, is going to disappear.” Again, very powerful. Little bit foreboding, but obviously anxiety is quite rampant in our modern times, and I think he’s just basically saying that we’ve drifted away, right, from God, from true meaning. Even from truth as we believe it to be like actual truth, right? [00:24:00]

So the second sign is a kind of sensationalization of everything, and I think this shows up in a lot of places, especially the media. But I’m gonna again read a quote from the Noonday Devil from then Joseph Ratzinger and in it he says, “We are beginning to understand afresh the saying about the quote, sorrow of the world. The forbidden joys lose their attraction the moment they’re no longer forbidden. They had and have to be radicalized. The pitch increasingly raised and nevertheless seem finally flat and stale because they are all finite while the hunger is for the infinite.” [00:25:00] Woo. That’s a sentence or two, that has a lot going on in it.

I think what he’s saying here is that when we have this unparalleled, let’s say, access to everything and this idea of freedom that we have in our world today of being able to do or be or exist in whatever way we want to, this idea of something being off of limits for us is met with this way of upping the ante, if you will. So, it’s this idea that we’re chasing something that can truly never be caught and getting lost along the way. [00:26:00]

For instance, something that was unthinkable in movies or unthinkable as an act of violence several decades ago is now something that we might see regularly on the television. I think about this a lot when I watch modern television, which I still watch, and I’m not saying, to just never watch TV again or whatever, but some of the things that happen in television and with these characters is like really deep and distressing and unsettling, and I don’t know that would’ve been so explicit so many decades ago.

And you might think that I’m sounding like an old fogey, but I think there’s a point in there which is we keep amping it up because we have to be the next kind of shock and awe factor in the society that we’ve built. And [00:27:00] I think we do it with movies. I think it happens with violence. I think it happens with sex and explicitness, to give you another example. I’ve stopped looking at my phone when it says breaking because everything’s breaking news nowadays. And I literally just stopped and I’m just like, it’s probably not that breaking or that surprising, and it’ll probably change by the end of the day, so why even look at it? That’s what he’s talking about. We keep trying to raise the pitch, but we just fall flat and stale every time because the next new sensational aspect of it is right around the corner. And then that’s where we throw all of our attention. So again, that’s the second sign of the time.

The third sign is a sad one, and that is thinking that it’s better not to [00:28:00] exist, and this shows up in a lot of suicide and depression, which our society is really struggling with right now. I was just reminded the other day by a priest who was giving the homily here that at a local university, nine students within the course of I think a year, had committed suicide. Troubling, troubling statistics of young adults and teenagers are happening with rates of suicide or attempts at suicide, and I don’t wanna talk about suicide specifically because that in and of itself requires its own due treatment, but I wanna focus on this idea of existence. And whether or not it’s worth it, right?

So,in the Noonday Devil, they talk about acedia is a lack of love. [00:29:00] “The lack of the Great Love. It shatters the impulse of hope and threatens to lead to the rejection of life itself. It is a real flirtation with death.” So, acedia is then essentially the absence of love, the absence of hope. And when you have the absence of love and hope, one begins to question existence itself.

There’s another quote that goes on to say, “acedia is at the source of despair. Of our contemporaries who think it would be better not to exist.” So, this feeling, which I think again, we can associate with like suicide, depression, euthanasia, and other big ones. And that has certainly picked up [00:30:00] steam. Those are the outright, huge manifestations of it, but I also think that it shows up in subtler ways, even if those things aren’t on our mind. Is it a burden to exist? Is it a burden to someone else to exist? What is really the point of being here? And that is a way that acedia can show up and it’s a very dark way. But I think, again, there’s more explicit and subtler ways that we experience it.

The fourth sign that we’ll talk about, and this is the last one for this episode, and we’re gonna continue on in the next episode, is this feeling of instability. And if the first three didn’t quite make sense, I have a gut sense that this one will be more relatable.

So, the fourth [00:31:00] sign is this attachment to instability. So, let’s remember where the framework of acedia really took hold. I talk about it in episode two, and that is out in the desert with these Christian monks who were living among each other, maybe in an intentional community like a monastery, living very austere lives, very simple lives, and their whole goal was to concentrate on spirituality and the interior life and pray, and certainly to do chores and cook and have all their basic needs so they lived in these little cells.

Think about it as a very tiny room with not much in it. Maybe a bed, a table, a [00:32:00] chair, a candle, a Bible and monk-like paraphernalia. These monks were living a very countercultural life. That was the point, but it didn’t mean that they weren’t continually tempted to leave that life and be in society again. The monks experienced acedia by these feelings of restlessness and instability.

Their calling was to stay in a very circumspect space and pray and grow in relationship with God. But they had temptations through acedia to reject all of that and do other things. I remember reading in one of the books about acedia they were always thinking about maybe I need to go into town, or maybe I have [00:33:00] this unfinished chore outside and instead of sitting here praying today, I need to go do that. Or wouldn’t it be better if I was like a teacher in the town, like, what purpose is it that I’m serving just sitting here by myself praying. So these were like real temptations, and it made them want to flee their God-given purpose and their vocation.

Okay. To go back to that, so it might seem a little unrelatable to us because we certainly aren’t living in the same circumstances that they [were], but I think it shows up really convincingly another way that it’s described in the Noonday Devil is the perpetual need for change. This instability is manifested, first of all by “a constant need to [00:34:00] move to change one’s locality, work situation, institution, occupation, spouse and friends.”

So that’s where I think we can relate is that the sign of the time that we’re experiencing right now is this idea of constantly being attached to change and movement, which can show up as restlessness, and it might mean moving cities, changing jobs, changing our situation, changing our friends. It says in the quote, changing our spouse. I hope not. That doesn’t sound good, but this idea that we will be better off if we were to do X, Y, Z. Okay? And there’s a quote in there from a 12th century author, Galand de Reigny [00:35:00] . And that author says, quote, “For everything that last horrifies me.”

So, it’s this aversion to lasting, staying put going, the distance, completing the thing. We really struggle with that nowadays. The book goes on to say we are witnessing, therefore, “a frenzy of novelty and ipso facto, a horror of anything lasting, of everything that stays in one place. Both are the signs of general dissatisfaction. As soon as someone has obtained what he desires, he wants something else. Just as children do.”

So, it’s almost like this childlike fidgetiness, if you will, going from one thing to another because you’re [00:36:00] constantly some level of dissatisfied with the thing present before you.

I think switching jobs and careers is one of the ways that it really shows up. We don’t have those long-lasting careers anymore that perhaps our parents’ generation may have had. There’s a lot of things we don’t like about our current job, so we apply to a different job thinking that will finally be better. But it might be in some ways, but then not in other ways. Then there’s like the throwaway culture, the fast fashion, the dollar aisle at Target. Guilty as charged. And also, I think channel surfing and doom scrolling are a version of this. Like we’re always just looking for the next video. Everything’s three seconds long to keep our attention. Just like this restlessness and instability are everywhere. The book [00:37:00] goes on to say, “One could say that acedia is the temptation to reject passing beyond and to stick with passing through, thus losing sight of the dynamic of desire, which is the dynamic of love.”

I really like the first part of that quote, this temptation to reject passing beyond, so maybe staying in that place, feeling all those feelings of wanting to flee and change and escape, but instead staying the course and passing beyond that, whereas we tend to value passing through something.

If I am sitting here and I reach my boiling point, I can pass through and change and experience something else. Even if it’s not like a career, we don’t have as [00:38:00] many major life projects anymore, maybe even outside of our work. Even if we’re [not] discontent with our jobs, we’re frenetically running around doing all the other things and all the other hours of the day we have this attachment to being stressed and busy and we don’t have as many hobbyists, things that people sink themselves deep into. And instead we’re just constantly trying to do a little bit of everything. Definitely guilty of that.

We also don’t have as many commitments to things that require our own gift of self and sacrifice, and I think a lot of people trying to do good still do try to do that, but I think what they’re talking about here is not just like instances of gift and sacrifice, but in it for the long haul type thing.

There’s a quote in the book from [00:39:00] someone whose first initial is C. and then last name Flipo, and it has a French title, which I won’t even dare to pronounce. But it says, “The end of the will coincides with the era of pure indifference, with the disappearance of the major goals and great enterprises for which life deserves to be sacrificed.” I like this juxtaposition of the phrase: the era of pure indifference because what do you have when you tend to stay away from going deep? Oftentimes what remains is indifference.

I think another way to give another example to bring it back down is like this idea of fear of missing out. An example I can use from my own life is this kind of craze around traveling. And I love to travel, so [00:40:00] those of you who know me are gonna be like, Christina, this is so hypocritical ‘cause you travel all the time. And I’m like, yes I do. And here are some things I’ve learned about that. Traveling I think is good, right, at its base foundation. Experiencing different places, different cultures, different ways of being, has really opened my eyes up to how to do more good in the world and how to be in the world in a good way, and also the beauty of the diversity of what God has created in every human being and every topography and land on the planet, so I’m not saying, don’t travel because you’re seized by instability, so you gotta stay put. I think instead what it is an attachment to that.

So, I’ll give you an example. A lot of people might travel for enrichment purposes, but then I also [00:41:00] think there’s people out there who travel because they feel like they’re gonna miss out or not see something or not experience something it’s like they’re constantly trying to escape their normal life by leaving it and going away. And I think that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about acedia, right? It’s the modern, a person who’s sitting in front of their computer and they’re at work and they hate work, and they’re like, let me plan my next trip to be away from work in my life. And again, guilty as charged, right?

It’s this attachment to the idea that I will be happier and better off if I’m not in my current situation. I wanna also pause here and just say, it’s not that I am trying to say, or that acedia is trying to say, you know what, you should probably just chill there and be like real miserable. Okay? That’s not [00:42:00] necessarily it either. What it’s trying to say is that it’s our attachment to leaving and changing, that can be the source of the problem.

So, I’ll give the example in my own life of my parents who both worked 40 years at their job, which again, we know just doesn’t even exist anymore, but they didn’t really particularly care for the work that they were doing. They loved the people at the work and the customers but if you were to say, hey, do you absolutely love being a customer service rep, or do you absolutely love grinding tools? I don’t know what they would really say.

I actually think like in our parents’ generation till now, it was like, oh, now my kids can have the opportunity to have the “It” career that I didn’t [00:43:00] have. And at least for my parents, they didn’t really travel a whole lot, and my desire to travel was almost like a rejection of that. Just to be like if you’re not gonna travel, or we didn’t travel as a family, I’m gonna go everywhere and anywhere I can be, but what I’ve realized, I think, as I’ve gotten older, is, yes, I’m glad I went and saw and did all the things that they dreamed about doing in retirement.

But the biggest thing that has struck me about my parents lives day to day is that they really were content. And that is what has almost stopped me in my tracks a little bit because. They led such different lives than what I lead today. They worked nine to five. Again, not at the most “it” of all jobs. They traveled maybe once during the summer, we never went [00:44:00] abroad. No national parks. No Disney World, not doing any of that. But I can honestly say, like, I had a very content childhood, and my parents were very content with their lives and very much in love with each other.

And so, when I think of my life today and this fourth sign of instability, do I think I need to stay in a job for 40 years? Not necessarily. I don’t think I’ve discerned that that’s what I feel called to do. I don’t even know what that job would be. But do I need to learn the lesson of where I am right now might not be the bee’s knees for me, but I have a choice. Do I stay the course? And learn and sit [00:45:00] with the 75% satisfaction, let’s say, or do I constantly flee and jump from thing to thing, chasing that other 25%, but in essence really spinning my wheels. And that’s what I think Aedi is trying to say is. We have this temptation to flee, to escape, to change, to undo, to hop around. And it’s not motivated by bad reasons, but it’s chasing a false destination nation.

Maybe what we need to do is look deeply inward and stay the course and try to figure out where that source of dissatisfaction is coming from. Part of it might truly be the situation we’re in, and part of it honestly might be within [00:46:00] ourselves. That’s what I think is really powerful. I think the proof of this for me is that my parents really didn’t and couldn’t because of their educational attainment, they couldn’t, hop around from job to job or. Like they had good study work, and they were just very happy to exist, and by virtue of them being happy, I was also happy growing up. I certainly give thanks to them for setting the example of how to be content in one’s own life, in one’s own shoes.

So just to recap, today we focused on the Signs of the Times. We went through four of them, and the signs of the times are ways that acedia is showing [00:47:00] up and our concept of the signs of the times and Catholicism is to look at what’s showing up and interpret it in light of the gospel and the teachings of Jesus Christ. So, I choose to do that with the lens of acedia. I think it helps us to make sense a little bit of why we’re seeing what we’re seeing, and also why we’re feeling what we’re feeling, and finally why we feel tempted to do the things we do.

Because this is all coming at us so strongly right now, I think naming it as the false spirit at work gives it a persona and makes it less overwhelming because we can point to it and name it and therefore fight it and overcome it.

So, in the next episode we’ll talk a little bit more about this and eventually we are getting to what we need to do personally [00:48:00] to realize the acedia and overcome it in our own path.

Episode 2 Transcript (includes links for further reading)

[00:00:00] Okay, 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 two. So, it's been a little bit since episode one. I know that I left y'all on kind of a cliffhanger of sorts. Life has really been life’n lately, so I haven't had time to record the next episode, but I've been thinking a lot about it and it's been highly anticipated.

So, my sincere apologies for leaving you for such a long time and also on such a cliffhanger, and I hope that you will enjoy this episode that we have today. So, if you remember from the very first episode, what I had been talking about is essentially what [00:01:00] led me to do spiritual direction, namely the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola with my spiritual director. And that was around a six-month process where we very slowly went through those exercises, and I was trying to gain some insight into how I was feeling, which was somewhat new to me, I guess you could say, in the sense that I hadn't quite felt that way before.

And while it was perhaps a close cousin of other feelings I had had in the past, like maybe depression, it was somewhat different. And the way that I described it in episode one, in telling other people about it, was that I [00:02:00] think I had a spiritual problem that needed to be solved as opposed to a medical problem or a mental health problem, of which I was really familiar with up until that point in my life.

So. I laid out that whole scene and promised to tell you what I would eventually come to know that it is, and that's what we're gonna focus on today. So today we are going to name it, and we are going to do that in the next episodes where we really unpack what it is. It's nature. And ultimately how to overcome it.

I do wanna mention that most of my research around this not only came from my conversations in spiritual direction with Becky Eldredge, but also from [00:03:00] two texts that I read subsequently to learn more about it. And I'd like to share those with you because one, you might be interested in reading them and two, I want to give credit to the authors that wrote them and they have informed me of so much of its history and how it can manifest in our lives.

So the first text that I wanna draw to your attention, and we will be going over these in multiple episodes, is called The Noonday Devil: Acedia and the Unnamed Evil of our Times. So that's kind of a bit of a foreboding, somewhat, Uh, interesting title. It talks about the devil. It talks about evil. And if you know me, and you know how I talk about spirituality, I don't tend to bring up those two things [00:04:00] frequently. I prefer to use a different word for the devil, which is one that I learned during spiritual direction, which is the False Spirit, and that's something that St. Ignatius kind of coined, if you will.

And this text is written by Jean Charles Nault. Nault is spelled N-A-U-L-T, and he is with the Order of St. Benedict, (Benedict is a saint in the Catholic church) and he resides at the Abbott of Saint-Wandrille. And if you're noticing my very poor French accent that I've tried to salvage from my time in high school, though I doubt it was ever actually there, he resides in France. And [00:05:00] he is a monk there at this Benedictine Abbey in Normandy, France.

His book is one that I read, actually second after the next one I'll tell you about, and I will say it is a little more academic in its writing, so. I would not consider it to be kind of an entry level read to this topic. It is definitely a lot more theological, and also just academic in its approach to the topic, but it is really excellent. So if you're up for that, definitely check it out.

The second book that I wanna bring to your attention, and the first one I read. At the recommendation of Becky while I was going through direction is actually a New York Times bestseller, so that bodes well, and it is called Acedia [00:06:00] and Me: A Marriage, Monk’s, and Writer's Life. And that author is Kathleen Norris. And she is an American poet and essayist. She currently is Episcopalian, so that's one denomination of Christianity within the United States, but she also became what's called a Benedictine Oblate at the Assumption Abbey in North Dakota, which sounds like a really intriguing place to visit.

A Benedictine Oblate is essentially when a layperson, and by layperson we mean somebody who's not a priest or an ordained religious person, comes to an order like the Order of St. Benedict and says, I'm not going to become a monk [00:07:00] or an ordained follower of this St. Benedictine order, if you will, but I'm going to remain a lay person, and I want to live my life in accordance with the values and teachings of this saint. So, she is essentially a lay person like me and you. I would imagine not many of the people listening are priests or ordained religious, though if you are welcome, we are happy to have you here. But she really felt drawn to St. Benedict so much so that she wanted to make this commitment.

So if you haven't guessed already by the two titles, I have just read to you the thing that we are going to name and the thing that I feel I was really struggling with at that point in my life, and to be honest, still do or else I [00:08:00] wouldn't be here talking about it, is acedia.

So, acedia is spelled. A-C-E-D-I-A, and I spell these things only because if you want to Google them, you won't be like me guessing at the spelling when you do so acedia, say it with me if you'd like, because we're going to talk a lot about it. And what's interesting is that Jean Charles Nault calls it the root cause of the greatest crisis in the world today.

And while he is a contemporary with the rest of us, he did write his book a little bit ago (2015), but the fact that he [00:09:00] calls it the root cause of the greatest crisis in the world today speaks to how this concept of acedia has lasted for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and how we still find relevance in it today.

And one of my goals is to help you understand where it might operate in your own life, but also where it's operating, on a very large scale in our society, and hopefully you can find some comfort in naming it like I did. So, I'm going to read a little bit about Acedia from the Acedia and Me book.

On page three, she talks a little bit about where the word came from, and I think it starts to unpack its meaning and mystery. So [00:10:00] on page three, she says, “At its Greek root, the word acedia means the absence of care. The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care. Or is incapable of doing so when life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding. Acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine. You know the pain is there yet you can't rouse yourself to give a damn.”

So, that is a really intense definition, and having told you that I experienced this at a certain point in my life and perhaps still do, as I said, might seem a little contrary to those who know me because I certainly [00:11:00], like you, care a lot about what's going on in our world.

And a word to describe the absence of care seems a little bit contradictory on one level, but I want you to keep an open mind because I think that Greek root, the absence of care, is not essentially the way that you and I would think of as not caring today, but perhaps not caring to our fullest.

And that's a little bit of a teaser as to what we will be talking about. So, Kathleen also talks about naming it, and naming it, for me, you might remember from our first episode, was a bit of a liberation because it [00:12:00] is really difficult to suffer from something that you don't know the name or the nature of, but you're certainly feeling its impact and its symptoms.

And Kathleen struggled with this, which is one of the reasons I imagine she wrote this New York Times bestseller, and perhaps a lot of people do, if it was such a popular book. Yeah, but naming it, for her, and also for me, was like a point of liberation because I didn't really know how to describe it, and I sensed that it was not something that was in our modern day discourse that I could entirely point to, again, like depression is close, but not quite. It's a little bit different.

So I'd like to read a little excerpt from page four of Acedia and Me. She says, “As I read this, (and [00:13:00] she was referring to when she learned about acedia), I felt a weight lift from my soul for I had just discovered an accurate description of something that had plagued me for years but that I had never been able to name as any reader of fairytales can tell you not knowing the true name of your enemy, be it a troll, a demon, or a “issue,” puts you at a great disadvantage and learning the name can help to set you free. He's describing, (she was referring again to how she came to light of acedia and who wrote about it) He's describing half my life.”

I thought to myself. So, wow. Again, this is really powerful. [00:14:00] She uses the word enemy. She uses the word demon, but she also says, it set her free. As if she was in a way bound by this, and she says it describes half her life. I mean, that's pretty significant.

So again, I think this is a real issue and I think a lot of people either experience it or have periods of it, and she writes very eloquently and honestly about how it affected her.

So in reading these two books, I learned a lot and I took some handwritten notes as I was reading the first book, the Noonday Devil, and I jotted down the many ways that acedia is described or ways that kind of came to me as I was reading about it, [00:15:00] and these are synonyms, if you will, but I think with this being perhaps your first introduction to acedia, this list will help you to understand what I'm talking about as it helped me in reading it.

When I'm out and about talking to people about acedia, which happens a little more frequently than you might think, I had a wonderful discussion with a friend in DC about it some time ago, the first phrase that comes to mind for me is a tepidness of spirit, a tepidness of spirit. So, tepidness is like a lukewarmness, if you will.

And when we talk about spirit, especially our spirit, we want it to be big and maybe loud and proud and dynamic and honorable and all these things, [00:16:00] but the synonym for how acedia makes you feel is a tepidness of that.

Another phrase that comes up a lot when you read about acedia is spiritual sloth, so not necessarily sloth in the sense of like we're just liaising about on the couch doing nothing, but that we've ground to a bit of a spiritual halt, and it's taking every fiber of our being to get out of that place. It's an arrestment of our spirituality.

Another word is sadness, we'll talk about what type of sadness, specifically. Another phrase, a loss of meaning in life or losing a [00:17:00] relish for life. That relish for life is something that I think resonated with me because I've noticed this as I've gotten older, that back in the day when I was young or maybe high school age, I had this zeal for life and everything felt really vivid and interesting and profound and important, and I was almost like “sensorarily,” if that's a word, waking up to everything that life had to offer, and as I've gone through life, that volume has been turned down a little bit, and I think that's maybe part of aging and just part of growing older.

There's a lot more to life than you once thought, so you have to make room in your brain and you can't [00:18:00] respond with this intense reaction to everything because you would be exhausted. But this idea of losing a relish for life, I think, is something not just in the realm of age, but also in the realm of the spirit.

And this next phrase, again, another synonym, speaks to that and that is torpor of mind and spirit. So, torpor, T-O-R-P-O-R, is a word that I certainly did not know and don't particularly use. I didn't do the best on my SATs despite studying the flashcards for hours on end. So, if like me, you're not sure what torpor means, it means lethargy or a state of physical and mental inactivity.

So, in this [00:19:00] context, the phrase is torpor of mind and spirit. Other phrases, the midlife crisis. And being now 40 plus, I can definitely understand how acedia might creep up during this time. Disgust with activity, losing the joy of living, a spiritual depression, a break in the search for God. With that last one, you can see this grinding to a halt that we talked about with the other synonym, spiritual sloth.

The last one I wanna bring to you today is this phrase, the noonday devil, which again, is a synonym, but we don't really say noon day. And we probably don't talk about the devil casually in our everyday [00:20:00] life. This kind of noonday devil was a phrase that maybe would've been a little more used prior to our existence.

And it talks about the middle of the day, and I think we actually do still experience this because, I don't know about you, but when we get to like one, two o'clock in the afternoon. I kind of just feel like calling it a day and going to sleep. And a lot of us describe our hardest work hours as that stretch between lunch and the end of the day that seem to drag on for literally ever, and we're not super motivated to do much. So if you know what I'm talking about, perhaps you have experienced the noonday devil.

But back in the day before, offices and fluorescent lights and working [00:21:00] in front of a computer ad nauseum, people worked outside mostly, and they talk about the noonday devil as happening during the high heat of the day. So think of like the sun is directly above you in the sky. There's very little shadow because everything is directly under the sun. It's really hot. It's perhaps really still. They describe it as the hours when time stands still, and you are weary and fatigued. Think about working out in a field, plowing and harvesting in the dead of heat in the middle of the day so that describes the noonday devil, but I think even though we work primarily inside, probably most of us in front of a screen, I think we still do experience this when we have to really [00:22:00] get the jumper cables out and try to get ourselves going in the afternoon.

You might be wondering, how far back does this acedia thing go? So Jean Charles Nault, who wrote The Noon Day Devil talks about the person who gave it a sort of coherent doctrine and who continued to shed light on it was actually a fourth century Christian monk.

Let's unpack that a little bit because what is a fourth century Christian monk? And this person does have a name. His name is Evagrius Pontius, spelled E-V-A-G-R-I-U-S, lived between 345 and 399 AD. So he lived a really, really, [00:23:00] really long time ago, and the Christian monks, particularly his contemporaries, were a very well-known group in church history, and Jean Charles Nault talks about actually around page 21 of his book that after the Edict of Milan in 1313, and if you're like me, I'm like, I sure as heck don't remember what the Edict of Milan of 1313 is, but it was essentially a ruling by Roman Emperors Constantine the First and Emperor Licinius, which ended the decades-long persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, and it served as a birth certificate, if you will, for freedom of religion. You could [00:24:00] practice any religion in the Roman Empire and not be persecuted for it, particularly Christianity.

So these folks that Evagrius joined went out into the desert and started to lead a very interesting acetic, if you will, but also a mystical type life. And they did that in monasteries. So he lived in a monastery, but it was a monastery that surely he lived with other people nearby, but there was an intense focus on your individual spirituality and your prayer life, and he might've spent a lot of time in his small, simple room being encouraged to pray and deepen his faith.

You might be thinking, that sounds really unrelatable. [00:25:00] I haven't gone out into the desert or elsewhere and joined a monastery where I spend copious amounts of time in my tiny cell praying, but Evagrius, I mean, he's kind of become my dude, to be honest with you in learning about all this, and I think you will find that he has a lot more in common with us than we might think.

I want to also talk about some symptoms of acedia because like the synonyms, I actually think talking about the symptoms of something, just like we would talk about the symptoms of a disease or an illness, helps us to understand the nature of it. So again, I'm gonna read this list and what I hope it'll do for you is draw you into more understanding this concept.

So [00:26:00] symptoms of acedia: weariness, melancholy, feeling overworked. Is there anyone out there in this day and age that does not feel overworked? Please let me know so we can have you on this podcast and tell your secret to all of us! Other symptoms: discouragement, instability, and restlessness. This is interesting because I described acedia earlier as a sloth, a tepidness, an inability to get unstuck, but there's actually a little bit of a paradox going on.

When you experience acedia, you might feel that sloth and that paralysis, but you [00:27:00] also might experience a desire for instability and a restlessness, and it shows up in both ways. And we're gonna talk a lot more about how, despite seeming really paradoxical, it actually makes sense.

More symptoms: sinking into mediocrity. I added being on the hamster wheel of life or being on autopilot, which I think is very indicative of the time we find ourselves in. Paralysis, despair, gloominess, boredom, sloth, mediocrity. And Jean Charles Nault also describes it as everything bores us and burdens [00:28:00] us. So everything feels a burden or a bore, and one begins to lose interest and incentive.

So, intense, but perhaps some of you have experienced this in your line of work. You know, when it can feel like a chore to go in every day, or it seems boring in the sense that you feel like you're on autopilot and maybe nothing will ever change sort of thing.

These are quite intense, but I do think that they show up in our lives in different ways. I wanna also take a moment to talk about the difference between acedia and depression, something that I feel like I really needed to [00:29:00] put my finger on, especially when I was experiencing it because my friends who knew me and I was talking to about it would often say, do you think you're depressed? Because that's a legitimate question that we should ask ourselves and ask our friends when we're concerned about them.

I don't necessarily run from the word depression. I think it is a real thing, but I also knew that what I was experiencing was unlike the times that I had experienced depression earlier on in my life. Kathleen Norris really confronts this question head on. And I'm gonna read for you a passage that is on page 22 that starts to pose this question:

“I suspect that many [00:30:00] people now would answer the question, is acedia depression with a reflexive and assured yes, of course. Depression having become a catchall for not only mental illness, but also a wide range of emotions. Pharmaceutical companies advertise in newspapers and popular magazines with lists of symptoms, feeling down, anxious, fatigued, or discouraged. That would seem to cover most everyone at some time, as is, no doubt the point. These advertisements can inspire people who need treatment to seek it, but they also serve the purpose of commerce and feed a disturbing tendency to medicalize all human experience.”

So, she is not anti-depression, which she might come across as a little bit [00:31:00] in the latter part of that passage, but she believes in depression, and certainly I do, too. She makes this distinction that sometimes depression is what we feel in life, and it can run away from us, in which case we might need treatment, but it can also be a very normal and appropriate reaction to what we feel.

It's just perhaps part of our human experience. She poses the question, what if one responded to such a loss with a casual yawn? As if none of it had mattered in the first place, that is a different thing altogether. Depression might be a very legitimate response to something, but this lackadaisical [00:32:00] feeling of why does it matter anyway, starts to actually creep into acedia.

She talks about a contemporary scholar who she read up on in terms of acedia, and that scholar says, “For despair, participation in the divine nature through grace (in other words, God) is perceived as appealing, but impossible for a acedia. The prospect is possible, but unappealing.” Okay, let's unpack that a little bit.

So for despair, let's just say depression, perhaps we look at life as maybe appealing, but we feel like it's not possible for us right now because we're tethered in the throes of depression. [00:33:00] For acedia, we know that it's possible to engage and take action, let's say get up off the couch sort of thing, but it remains unappealing.

And that's where she talks about that casual yawn, right? I could do X, Y, and Z, but does it honestly matter? I wanna reiterate. I am very pro depression is real, and I think SSRIs are great. I think that brains are an organ and sometimes they malfunction, and we take a medication for our brain just as we would any other organ in our body that was going awry.

What I appreciate about what she brings up in this part of the book is that we tend to lump a lot of things into [00:34:00] the concept of depression, and we feel that we have the answer, which is, pharmaceutical medication, which obviously does work, but some of what we're feeling that maybe gets lumped into depression but is actually different is a spiritual problem.

When we screen for depression or just any sort of imbalance in mental health, we rarely talk about spirituality and faith and religion and how we're feeling on that front. Right? And we don't do that, I think as much, especially in the United States because one, the assumption is not that people are spiritual or religious, the assumption is that they might not be, and therefore it would be like rude or inappropriate to ask that question perhaps. But it is [00:35:00] part of our wellbeing and our spiritual health is tied to our overall health, so I appreciate that. What she's trying to say is, yes, depression exists, but are we casting so wide and net around it that we're actually missing the nuances of what we're feeling. And some of those feelings might be spiritual issues.

So I also wanna say, too, that when I was on SSRIs and actually have been for quite a while, when I was first prescribed them, I was told the goal of where I was trying to get, having been on them, was not to feel nothing at all. But instead to feel more like myself with a wide range of emotions. That was a bit of a [00:36:00] “aha” moment for me, like I thought depression medication was, so you can just kinda wipe the slate clean and just cruise through life.

I was a little hesitant about going on them, I remember, because I was worried that I would not only lose the bad parts of what I was feeling, but also maybe the good parts of myself, the happiness. I think those deep feelings also made me a really good writer. And it was the basis of my empathy, the way that I could listen to and understand other people that felt that way. So it was a bit of a relief when the wonderful nurse practitioner who I saw told me, no, actually we're not trying to mute everything that you are, right. Instead, we want you to feel like yourself, and we want you to have a wide range of emotions. She told me, if you're not crying [00:37:00] at all, you need to tell me, if crying is an appropriate response that you once had to x, Y, or Z and you can't do that we need to know.

So I think all of this is to say that there are a lot of nuances when we feel down or we feel paralyzed or glum or sad, if you've experienced those things, I hope you are open to talking to mental health professionals. If there is also, something else going on and you feel like it's not quite that, but it certainly is there, then you might be interested in acedia and how it impacts us.

I think acedia is so important to discuss right now, because going back to what we just talked about with [00:38:00] depression, if depression is appropriate response to loss, let's say, a part of our human experience to feel depressed sometimes, then to me, acedia is a logical response to the world we find ourselves in today. So right now, we tend to find ourselves in a place of overwhelming injustice on a really wider scale. I certainly feel that way right now. I would imagine many of you do, too, and we are experiencing a lot of unchecked evil.

Every time I open the one email a day, I let myself get about the news. I'm just overwhelmed, it's war, it's tragedy, it's exploitation, it's lying, deceit, [00:39:00] manipulation, seeing people as less than human, not honoring people's personhood,

Certainly, there is a reaction to that that I think the wider society is feeling right now. That can take the form of almost an apathy towards it. Like, well, it is what it is, or that's just the way it's gonna go, I guess, you know? It can also appear as despair at ever really overcoming it. It feels so overwhelming that we question whether we can ever get out of this or ever get to that better place that we've been working towards.

Or we know it exists, but we're resigned to the fact that it does. And we experience in those [00:40:00] feelings a type of paralysis. Maybe we have the response of just going on autopilot, putting our head down and just trying to get from point A to B every day because the rest of it is just too much.

That paralysis, that going into autopilot, or it might even be a restlessness, like we almost feel like there's a jitteriness, a constant need for activity and distraction that we can't shake is in the realm of acedia and these feelings of acedia hit people who are actually trying to do good in the world and have a lot of empathy.

A lot of my friends and myself, and that's part of the reason we're friends, tried to go into do-gooder [00:41:00] professions, to do good in the world. For me, that was because of my faith and spirituality convictions. I can't imagine existing in the world without trying to work towards justice and peace, but a lot of people, because of similar values or the call to do what is right and good, pursued professions with that lens in mind.

But something I've seen happen to myself and a lot of my friends is we get really burnt out and we feel a little bit listless, sometimes empty, or our response is just to try to clock in and clock out. Like, we have to create boundaries with our jobs because it is so draining despite working for the good.

We tend to feel ground down by all [00:42:00] the systems. It seems overwhelming. It's like we don't know whether to resign to the fact that these things exist or constantly weary ourselves trying to navigate them and overcome them. For a lot of my friends who've been in the helping professions and especially in the nonprofit sector, all y'all out there, the struggle is real in the nonprofit sector, right now, we feel this sense of should I just throw the towel in? Should I “sell out” and just make income and live my life and just stop trying to do this? And that is burnout, right? And that is also a bit of a acedia bearing down on us.

So, especially for those folks for whom you are in these professions and you're listening and you're like, yeah, I feel like that sometimes, or maybe [00:43:00] sometimes meaning every day, I really encourage you to keep listening to this podcast because I think you might find, the feeling of aloe on a burn, because we are feeling really burnt out, and we need something to cool our skin.

One of the best descriptions of acedia that I've heard of one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, Lena Dunham. Lena wrote, “I wouldn't say I am not happy, but I could be a lot happier.” And when I read that, I literally laughed out loud because I was like, that is such a good description of life. And that last part is really what I'm trying to focus on here with you with acedia, is that it's not that things are necessarily outrightly bad, [00:44:00] but we've lost something. We've lost that spark of life, and we realize that we have gotten in some ways to where we're trying to go, but once we've arrived, we might feel some emptiness or overwhelm or even a deep sense of fatigue. It's almost if the volume of life is turned down.

I see it a lot, too, in the paradoxical nature of acedia and where we find ourselves at this point in our lives while we do feel these feelings of a bit of glum and kind of autopilot, we also might feel feelings of restlessness and we're not sure why. One way that I think about this restlessness is the proverbial question, [00:45:00] Is this all there is? Or is this what I was really trying to do all these years and now I'm here and it doesn't feel or look like what I thought it would.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a career. It could be just, getting to family life or getting to retirement or, getting to be more independent growing up. One reaction to that feeling I think is restlessness of acedia, where we have this sense of wanting to move and maybe move around. So really what I need is a new job or. I need a new environment. I need a new home. Or I need to be in a different city. This would start to feel right or feel the way I thought it would if I change cities or change locations. And we have this [00:46:00] idea that if we make this change, it'll solve this feeling. That something else or somewhere else shows promise.

But I think what acedia would say is be careful that it's not giving you a false promise, because acedia is something that we have to sit here and bravely challenge ourselves, and it is not something that we can necessarily solve by running away or fleeing, or the grass is greener on the other side.

So all of this is just say, this is the challenge of our time. Maybe not all of what I've said here today resonates with you, but maybe parts of it do. If there's any part of it, whether it's where you find yourself in life, how [00:47:00] you're feeling about it, wondering, could I be better, happier, more fulfilled if I did X, Y, Z instead…If you're having those feelings of overwhelm, you're opening the newsreel app of your choice and you're feeling defeated, or why should I even keep caring? You know, when this just all feels so immense, I think this podcast is for you, and it's certainly is for me because again, once I named this feeling that I was having, which shows up in all those different ways, I felt an intense amount of liberation and freedom, and I wouldn't say that I've overcome it, spoiler alert, but it's much easier to try to overcome it when you truly know what it is.

We must [00:48:00] confront this head on. We need to understand it. We need to name it, and ultimately, we do need to overcome it. That vision of the world or our lives of being a more peaceful, fulfilled, and just place. I believe overcoming feelings of acedia is paramount to getting there.

I also wanna say that a lot of this is very religious, because it comes from specifically Catholic church history and teaching. And you may or may not be Catholic. I know, some folks on here might be of a different religion, and that's actually really encouraging because I think this shows up in several world religions.

So you might not be a religious person. Maybe you're more of a spiritual person or maybe you [00:49:00] don't even know, like, if you would put yourself in either of those two categories at this point in your life. Maybe you were raised religious or spiritual, or you've gotten away from it or. Maybe it harmed you in some way 'cause that's a real thing.

But if you're open to listening and hearing and you're okay with me prattling on about how this affects our religion and spirituality, I think that you will find this interesting because I think the feeling is real. The manifestation is real, and how you choose to confront it is ultimately your journey.

So, if you are open, we can explore and answer all these questions together.

Welcome to the very first Podcast Episode of The Moderate Catholic!

Launching this has been a (good) itch in my side for quite a long time now, and it feels great to finally “scratch” the surface of podcasting.

I am including the transcript below for your listening/viewing ease.

Thank you for supporting me in this big step.

~ Christina

Episode 1 Transcript (includes links for further reading)

Hello, my name is Christina Gebel, and I am with the Moderate Catholic. This is our first episode of the Moderate Catholic, and I'm very happy that you're here. So today I would like to tell you a little bit more about myself, my background, what we hope to do here in our time, listening to the Moderate Catholic, and discussing the topics as well as what we're gonna focus on in the next episodes.

So, a little bit about me. I am a public health professional, specifically maternal and child health, and have been doing that [00:01:00] for about 11 years now. And in addition to that formal training, I have also been a doula for about 14 years now .

But that's actually not the expertise that I am bringing to this podcast at the outset.

I also have a deep love for spirituality and also my Catholic faith. So much so that I majored in theology and undergrad, and within theology, I focused a lot on ethics, particularly sexual ethics. And just developed a really deep love of the Catholic Church and many of the documents it's written, and I started to get more and more into social justice and particularly Catholic social teaching.

Some of the main figures out [00:02:00] there in Catholicism regarding social justice became heroes of mine, and I went on to try to live my life in a really intentional way.

So fast forward to today, which is a lot of years between today and undergrad, but I have remained in my Catholic faith, and one thing that has been a little bit of a challenge to me throughout these years post undergrad has been finding spaces where I can get together with like-minded Catholics and discuss not only my own thoughts and feelings, but also our faith and how it relates to the world that we're in. I noticed oftentimes that as I was moving from city to city and quote unquote [00:03:00] church shopping, which if you're not familiar with the phrase “church shopping,” it's when you go around to a bunch of parishes and try to figure out which one you feel most at home with, which resonates with a lot of your interest and values.

And granted, it's all Catholic, but for those who are Catholic and listening, you might know that some parishes have, let's say, a take on what to focus on within Catholicism. And so for me, the thing that was important to me in selecting a parish throughout these years since undergrad has been where can I find people that want to be in and of this world and also want to be Catholic and want to lead with compassion and social justice, and always putting vulnerable populations in mind whenever we're [00:04:00] making decisions that could affect them.

What I found is that, in every major city I've lived in so far, which is outside of where I grew up in Cincinnati…I've lived in St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, and now Durham. I found that, there are certainly just your run of the mill Catholic parishes with, let's say in aging population that aren't as active, but just go along, have Mass, have the sacraments, have a ladies' auxiliary function that sells, baked goods, a fish fry, all the good things that we remember, or at least I do from childhood.

But there's also some really traditional leaning parishes, and those seem to be. Very popular right now and growing in number. Those tend to be a [00:05:00] little more conservative. And also, there are parishes, which have more of a progressive, if you will, or a social justice leaning, and they might have a rainbow ministry for L-G-B-T-Q Catholics, they're not afraid to go there with the issues of the day, like immigration and so many of the hot button issues that actually we're experiencing right now in spades, they're not trying to shy away from the world or create an alternate world, or create a world as though it should be according to them. But more so a world as it should be according to the life and teaching and example of Jesus Christ.

And [in] those parishes, I feel good and at [00:06:00] home because there's a tension there, and it sounds odd in a way to say I feel good in a tension, but it kind of is, I think, where our faith lives. And that is in the tension of we have this 2000 plus year old religion, the Roman Catholic Church, and a lot has happened in 2000 years, and some of it looks familiar, some of it's slightly nuanced with different players and names and faces.

But a lot has happened, and we find ourselves as Catholics just continuing to wrestle and wrestle with taking the foundational values that Jesus laid out, again in his life example ministry and teachings, and trying to be in and of this world and apply them and. In my personal [00:07:00] opinion, as we keep going down the road in modernity, so to speak, that to me gets a lot more complicated.

Now, we're in this world where people still fight wars and people still get ill and, die and we still have widespread illnesses unfortunately.

But the way in which we confront those things has become a lot more complicated. And there's a lot more within our grasp right now that has never been available, and on the one hand that's good because it shows that we're progressing and we're using our, human intelligence and our ability to reason to solve the problems of the world.

But within it come really deep ethical questions about just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should. And that is my focus on ethics in a [00:08:00] nutshell, and why I naturally gravitated towards that when I started studying theology. And within that, I found kind of sexual ethics and marriage and family ethics, too.

And you'll come to know this about me, but I am married, which I'm very happy and proud of, to a wonderful, loving, compassionate man, who I found a little bit later in life compared to my peers, but was well worth the wait. And he grew up Hindu and it worked for me, not only because he is this incredible person, but I actually really appreciate when perspectives on Eastern theology and thinking come into my life because I think that Eastern religions and thought, enriches really our whole being, but also our [00:09:00] understanding of God, in my case, and even my understanding of what it means to be a good person on this earth and for me as a Christian to better live as Jesus intended.

So anyway, there's these parishes, there's this interest on ethics, there's the social justice vibe. It's been a journey in the modern world since then. But again, going back to why we're here today. I think that people really are craving community and spaces, and for me, there have become less and less spaces out there for so-called “moderate Catholics” who are looking to talk to each other, but not strictly within the bounds of these kind of polarized frameworks that we keep finding ourselves in today, [00:10:00] particularly conservative and liberal.

And as many good Catholic teachers and professors and priests have taught me over the years, if we really are to live into this Catholic faith, it's not going to fit really nicely into those frameworks. It transcends our secular understanding of conservative, liberal, or a lot of other philosophies that have come up throughout the ages.

So, at this point, maybe part of any of what I've just said and rambled on about, might speak to you and, I realize in articulating all of this, that, everything I'm saying is like über Catholic, you know? And sometimes I have to stop myself a little bit and be like, Christina, not [00:11:00] everybody wants to hear about everything you think about Catholicism.

But maybe there's some of you who do. And for some of you who are listening just because you're interested or you, felt guilty 'cause I encouraged you to, I'll try to stop and explain a little bit about some of the Catholic things that I keep, referring to, not only for folks who are less familiar with it, but also for folks who are Catholic themselves.

Because I'll be the first to say, I listen and read a lot of Catholic things out there, and I don't always know everything that they're referring to, to be honest with you. I would definitely love some refreshers on terms and people and all the things that's wrapped up in this like 2000 years of existence of the Roman Catholic Church and.[00:12:00]

I always love learning new things, too. There's a lot that I don't know, I don't really fully understand. I've talked a little bit already about what my focus has been within these years, but I think that was guided by the Holy Spirit, and I think the Holy Spirit helps us to figure out where our strengths lie, where the mission that we're trying to meet in the world is, and as the saying goes, marry those two things. So, you might see that reflected a little bit as well in the logo of the Moderate Catholic. So, there's a dove, which represents the Holy Spirit as a symbol, and the dove’s speaking kind of these audio tongues, you know, so it's a podcast, so it has audio things.

And then again, the Moderate Catholic piece comes from what I've started to describe, and we'll talk a [00:13:00] lot more about in future episodes, which is basically what does it mean to be moderate? And maybe that's not even the term for it. Maybe it's just that you find yourself somewhere that is not on one of the poles of the polarization, and you're just trying to do your best and live in the world and be a good person and imitate the life of Christ.

So, I wanted to launch right into, like, here's everything I think about politics right now and how, the left and the right aren't getting it right. And both of them have major flaws, but I've written a lot about that on my Substack. It doesn't always tend to go well, as you can imagine. I think one hard thing about being quote unquote moderate, and we'll just keep using that for expediency sake, is that you're always [00:14:00] gonna have somebody that disagrees with you because most people do tend to be a little closer to the left or the right, and also you don't really know how to name what you are as evidenced by “moderate,” maybe not capturing fully how you or I feel in these spaces. I think part of that is by design. Like, I think we ingest a lot of things every day that make us think that there's either right or wrong or left or right, or a person is either good or bad. And, I started having a reaction to that as a person because I really do think people are really a mixed bag and issues are really a mixed bag, and our media is definitely slanted in a variety of ways.

I think one [00:15:00] question, Catholic or not, that we're all facing right now is well, where do I stand in all of this? Because this is really overwhelming. It's at times confusing. It's triggering things in us about our values, our beliefs, our identities, our sense of justice. But yet, it all feels so unsettling.

It's like, where can I rest my head because I'm kind of drowning in the headlines and everything that's happening, so again, where I wanted to start was a place where I would talk about that, hey, you wanna be Catholic, you wanna be a good person, but how does that fit into the Signs of the Times that we're seeing, the politics, the policies and injustices that are [00:16:00] happening before our eyes, as well as the things that seem, quote unquote random, but not like natural disasters or pockets of violence that nobody saw coming. You know, there's so much there. And how do you be a person of faith and explain why these things are happening, or even more so what our response is supposed to be to them? But I think we can get there in our podcast.

And maybe just start somewhere that is a little more digestible, a little more personal. Because I do think in all of this and all of this kind of chaos for lack of a better word, that we are living in, I do think that working on ourselves…It's not necessarily a cop out, as some people might say that it is, [00:17:00] but I have thought a lot more about in this day and age. I feel very overwhelmed and sometimes powerless in the face of so much suffering and injustice.

How can I work on myself internally to really, hopefully, have more compassion? Compassion has kind of been my buzzword since January because if I really am living into this Christian calling, I need to ask myself if I am really being Christian in the midst of all of this. And it's easy, I think, to be Christian when you're around people that feel the same way that you do or quote unquote it's easy to love, but it's a lot harder when things aren't so clear cut and people aren't such [00:18:00] a clear example. And they might do really great things, and they might do really awful things.

So I kept coming back to this piece of personal spirituality and growth. And it's helped me in a way, not that I've exited the world or any of these issues, still very much in them, but it has given me a bit of an interior life, if you will, where I can be quiet, sit in the silence and think about that question that I raised earlier:

What really is my role here? What am I being asked to do?

But also I think in order to do that well, we have to really hold ourselves accountable internally. And therefore, starting out with a more spiritual [00:19:00] topic in the coming weeks, I think, it's just a good place to begin.

To better explain what spiritual topic I decided on as our start, I wanna tell you a little bit about a space that I was in roughly three years ago, three and change, which would've been 2022.

We had moved down to North Carolina in 2020. We had bought a house on a beautiful wooded lot. We had adopted our cat Stella, who you'll probably hear a lot about in the podcast. And you might even hear in the background if I'm not able to edit out all the sounds that she likes to make .

We had moved down from the Northeast, and my husband is a family physician, so he [00:20:00] continued to follow that path. And I had worked mostly from home, and most of my work is still in the Northeast, but. I found myself, like many people did after the pandemic started, being a very remote worker and just kind of plugging away at the computer with my cat.

And, my husband, he's in healthcare. He has very hands-on work, so a lot of days he's out of the house, and I started to notice, I guess, in those stiller moments where there was more silence in the house and in the woods that surround the house, that I was having kind of a particular feeling, and that feeling was really, really [00:21:00] hard for me to name.

And at this point in time in my life, I honestly had a lot of stability. Like I had a job and good colleagues and was doing good work and we were finally not renting, and we had a house and I enjoyed all my creative projects around the house, and so for all intents and purposes, things were where I had hoped they would be. We were both very happy. And honestly still are today in this current context, but I was having this feeling, if you will, of nagging, and it was not kind of your typical anxiety or depression, which I am all in favor of talking about, getting [00:22:00] all the things for counseling, SSRIs, whatever they may be. It was different than that and I knew that it wasn't that, but I also didn't know what it was, so I started talking to, my husband, my friends, people that usually are okay with me rambling on about abstract semi deep things, and I kept telling them I don't know what I'm feeling, but I have this nagging feeling of just unsettledness.

And it's not a positive feeling. It's restlessness in a certain way. So there's an energy to it there, but there's also this inertia, too. And [00:23:00] it was very, as you can tell from just that brief explanation, it was very paradoxical to me because, how can you feel restless and in art at the same time?

I went back to this phrase, which I believe is from St. Augustine: “My heart is restless until it rests in you, Oh, God.” I'll repeat that just to kinda let it gel: “My heart is restless until it rests in you, Oh, God.” And that phrase was the closest thing that I could get to articulating what I was going through.

I had a lot of really good people in my life who know me and know where I've been and how I felt over the years. And a lot of them asked a lot of really good questions. Like, well, do you think you're [00:24:00] depressed? And I'm like. Yeah, I, no, I was like, I, really don't think it's that.

It's just, it's something else. And I don't know. This went on for honestly, like probably, prior to 2022. (And I'm describing the moments in which it came to a head.) I think prior to that, maybe like 2019 onward to 2022. I had really felt this in some form and again, it came to the head in the time I was describing in, in 2022, but it was certainly there.

And it was in the background, and it would show up in different ways. And another way that it would show [00:25:00] up to help you conceptualize it, even though I'm talking about a time in my life where I couldn't conceptualize it, was I had kind of lost some of my zest for life.

It was good. Again, I was so confused because I was having all the things and doing all the things, so it was confusing to me why I felt toned down, if you will. There was a kind of lack of the fervor that I had felt for many years, and the energy that kind of came with that fervor, and it troubled me.

I guess I could have said at that point, Hey, it's probably the [COVID-19] pandemic. The pandemic has sucked all the things out of all of us who were, [00:26:00] lucky and thankful to have survived it, first of all. But, I think all of us came out a little wounded, a little worn, maybe a little bit better, but also just carrying some heavy wounds and maybe some traumas from that time.

It didn't strike me as kind of the pandemic slump that I think I did experience at certain points, but this was, again, different and again, frustrating. You're probably even just frustrated hearing me talk about this, like Christina gets to the point, what are you talking about?

What is this thing that you are struggling with? And if you're feeling that emotion right now, that's where I was. I was in this emotion of could it be this, could it be that? Not really, not exactly, but I also can't name it. And so I thought about a phrase that I came up with [00:27:00] shortly thereafter about how to talk to people about this, and the phrase I came up with was, I don't think I'm having a mental health problem. I think I'm having a spiritual problem. Lke, I think I have a spiritual problem.

It is an existential problem. It's a problem of the spirit and nothing materially is glaringly bad, but this goes deeper and penetrates into the level of the soul, you know, the spirit, the identity, who I am. Along that line of logic, I said to myself, okay, well if one has a spiritual issue, where does one go?

I was trying to like, find things to read, but I was blindly searching like I feel [00:28:00] spiritually, blah, you know, what, what book should I read? All of this to say where I settled was on a thing called Spiritual Direction. And for those of you who aren't familiar spiritual direction or spiritual directors within several denominations are people who train to be in some ways a counselor of the spirit.

They are like, in some ways, a coach in some ways, a guide, in some ways a counselor. It feels a little bit like counseling when you go and you talk to them about where you are and what's on your mind lately, what you're struggling with, but they have this kind of scope of work that is not mental health because that really is a clinical problem. But they're the spiritual health people, if you [00:29:00] will. I'd done a little bit of spiritual direction, at different times in my life throughout those years after undergrad. And I'd always gotten something out of it,

So, I started asking around and I really wanted somebody who is a writer and the reason for that was one thing that was coming up on the positive side throughout this was that I wanted to do more writing in my life and not like journal article writing or grant deliverable writing, but just like honest to God, reflective, putting it out there, putting my voice out there, writing that engages faith.

So, I set out on that journey, and I was trying to look for somebody who is a writer. And I asked one of my Catholic writer friends and she referred me to one of her Catholic writer friends, [00:30:00] And that person is Becky Eldredge.

Becky is phenomenal. She is the bee's knees in just about every way. And if you Google Becky, you will see that she's written some books, that she has a whole brand around Ignatian spirituality, which I highly, highly encourage you to support and follow. Becky, thankfully, had some time and availability to do direction with me and within spiritual direction, she led me through something called the Spiritual Exercises.

I needed to spiritually exercise. I needed to get stronger and push my boundaries and my limits and my spirit to really get at what was happening to me. And so the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola are things that Jesuits in training [00:31:00] do in order to strengthen their spiritual lives as they're going about their Jesuit journey. It's a guided experience. Becky had adapted the experience to work with lay people and lay people are people who aren't priests. She had given it to me in a way that was very accessible.

And normally a lot of Jesuits in training would do this during a 30-day silent retreat and they would meet with a spiritual director and it'd kind of be like this 30 day intensive, if you will. But there was an [19th] annotation, Ignatius wrote about that basically said, hey, if you can't do a 30 day silent retreat. It's like, yeah, dude, a lot of people can't do that, you know? Then there's this annotation where you gradually work through the exercises piecemeal and you still do them. Becky told me, she's like, [00:32:00] this might take a full six or so months, and I was like, dang, how long are these exercises? But I was like, okay, cool. And I met with her once a week and that's what we did. We went through this process.

And so, to make a long story short, 'cause we're gonna talk about it in the next episodes, it really was one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life and it honest to God, could not have come at a better time. And even a part of me wishes I had found this experience earlier.

And Becky was the right person for me to journey with. I'm so grateful to her to this day that I had this profound experience with love and tenderness and compassion and openness, and even a little [00:33:00] tough love sometimes, you know? And I walked away, not necessarily - spoiler alert - solving the problem that I had, because to be honest with you, I am still solving the problem, but I was able to name the problem, and if you've ever named a problem that you have had but can't really like name, to name something is almost like to untether yourself from its control. I really felt a sense of deep, deep peace and freedom just in the naming of it, just in saying, this is what it is, [00:34:00] and I see you. I can see, I see you, I see you there. And I was getting more spiritual freedom now that I had named it to actually understand it, and to overcome it. That is where I want to journey with you all in this series.

Because I have a haunting suspicion that, one, I'm not the only person that has felt this way. And two, I think people are feeling this way a lot, and I believe that you want a better world and you want to be better in this world . And maybe you have those feelings, too, or at least some of them that I described, where it's like the [00:35:00] overwhelm, the inertia, the restlessness, the kind of tepidness of your spirit, and if that's speaking to you on any level, I really do think that you're gonna enjoy these next episodes because we're really gonna unpack that.

I'm going to use my own life as an example of how I named it with Becky. It has a name, and I'm gonna talk more about its symptoms, how it showed up in my life. I'm gonna talk about ways that in the Catholic tradition, we are encouraged to overcome it. But I think they really extend to all faith traditions and even just normal people walking around on the street. And then we're gonna talk about, how to overcome it or at least to [00:36:00] live with it in a way that we're mindful of it, and that again, it doesn't have that hold on us, like it wants to, and we're gonna personify it, because I think that it's easier to conceptualize, like, this is a real thing, and we struggle with it.

We're just human beings having a really human experience with a spirit in our body, in a world that is very tough and also wonderful. So that's all for this episode. I really am glad and grateful if you hung in this whole time. And I really look forward to continuing this series specifically on this topic and journeying together on this road.

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