Kathleen Norris on Acedia in the Time Of Covid

Kathleen Norris has a wonderful new essay in The Porch: "Acedia, Today." It's available to read at that link whether or not you are a subscriber. About ten or so years ago, Norris wrote a book on acedia, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life. She then offered multiple definitions for the ancient word: absence or lack of care, sloth; spiritual torpor and apathy; listlessness, carelessness, melancholia. A reporter called her months into the Covid pandemic and asked for her thoughts about acedia now, and she told him that "acedia is as opportunistic as a virus." She admitted to being in a daze at the beginning of the pandemic's lockdown, but then she found her way by remembering what she'd learned about combating acedia, mostly from the hard-earned wisdom of the desert mothers and fathers for whom acedia was the "worst and most devastating temptation."

"They learned how to combat it and fortunately they passed that wisdom on: cling to your trust in God that acedia is determined to erode; cling to prayer, even though it is warfare to the last breath; go to your cell and your cell will teach you everything; pray the psalms, pray the psalms, pray the psalms."

To this, Norris added reading scripture in a leisurely thoughtful way; taking walks; reading good books; streaming good films; writing; talking to her neighbors (from a distance) and thanking the postal carriers, garbage collectors, and bus drivers; signing up for online seminar and talks; attending church online; praying for people including the people on her church's prayer chain; joining with others to ask and answer the important question of who can we help and how. Norris attributes the stop of acedia's "deadly spiral of self-absorption and despair" during the time of Covid to all these things, particularly choosing to care and choosing to love.

She included in her essay this beautiful prayer from the 13th century by Gertrude the Great. It's an appropriate prayer not just in the time of Covid but now also at the start of the season of Lent.

Be my honor, Lord,
My joy,
My beauty,
My consolation in sorrows,
My counsel in uncertainty,
My defense in everything unfair,
My patience in problems,
My abundance in poverty,
My food in fasting,
My sleep in vigilance,
And my healing in weakness.

~~~

[This post first appeared in my monthly newsletter. Click here to subscribe.]

Enough light to find your way by

Enough light to find your way by. In his sermon a few weeks ago, which my husband and I watched on YouTube, the minister of our church spoke of an Icelandic term that I’d never heard before.

Ratiljóst

He told us it means having “enough light to find your way by.” He likened it to other words from Northern Europe that have served a good purpose among us in recent years in terms of expanding our sense of how to live. Like “hygge,” the Danish word for coziness. Or “lagom,” the Swedish word for “not too much, not too little; just right.” Or “sisu,” Finnish for grit in the face of great adversity.

Ratiljóst, enough light to find your way by.

This word, or to be more honest, this definition, has been rolling around in my mind ever since I heard it. Enough light to find your way by. Isn’t that the longing of each day? Particularly in these days of Covid stress and fear and grief, these days of political angst, of economic angst, of division. Enough light to find your way by.

It reminded me of a time when I spent a couple 10-day periods on Whidbey Island on Puget Sound for graduate school residencies. To go from the building that served as the student center to the houses where we stayed, you had to walk through a wooded area. There were no lights on the path and at night it was pitch dark. Being already in a rural area with no nearby background urban lights that could share their glow, walking that path alone at night was unnerving, even if walking with a friend. The span was only that of about a long city block but in my memory it was much longer. We used the light from our flip phones—it would be several years yet before smartphones with built-in flashlights—to help light the way, but the faint light that shown from a phone’s open face barely illuminated where our next step would land, let alone what was on either side of you in the woods or a preview of what or who was approaching. Enough light to find our way by, but only just enough. If I’d known the Icelandic word then I may have been tempted to go to the nearby town some afternoon while there and have it tattooed on my hand as a reminder of all that was truly needed. Just enough light. For now, I’ve written the word on an index card and pinned it on my bulletin board above my desk. Maybe it’s a word you’d like to consider as well. Ratiljóst

~

The mention of light came again in the days after that sermon, at the presidential inauguration here in the US. The part of the inauguration event that I want to call to your attention has nothing to do with whether or not you voted for the man who is now our president. The part of the event I’m calling your attention to is when Amanda Gorman, the 22-year-old inaugural poet spoke. Two lines soared for me at that moment, and I quickly wrote them down:

"There's always light if we're brave enough to see it.
If we're brave enough to be it."

Let’s be light for each other, shall we? I need your light, and maybe you need mine. When walking through the dark wooded area I described above, it was all the better to walk with a friend by the light of two flip phones rather than one.

~~~

[Photo: taken of light on a nearby lake just after the new year. The winter solstice is now behind us and the days are getting longer. Thanks be to God.]

Lonely? Here's Hope

A book on loneliness was released this past week, and I highly recommend it to you: The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other by Charlotte Boyd Donlon. If you and I are friends on social media you may have seen my post about it on Facebook or Instagram a couple weeks ago after I received a preview copy. I wondered then, before even reading it, how Donlon could have known while writing it in pre-Covid days that her book on loneliness would be released during the most lonely time in recent history. I'm grateful for the book's arrival.

Instead of spelling out "Ten Ways to To Beat Loneliness," Donlon, a spiritual director, instead models for us how to be curious about loneliness, and by being curious, to discover what there is to discover because of loneliness. Through curiosity, loneliness shifts from being something to avoid at all costs toward instead becoming a kind of wise companion on the journey of life. Through her meditations and stories, Donlon asks us to consider what loneliness is teaching us and to consider how God's grace supports us in our loneliness.

"Loneliness doesn't always teach me a nice lesson. Sometimes it offers me a chance to slow down and encourages me to reach out to my husband or a friend. Sometimes it asks me to grieve the loss of a relationship or the loss of what I hoped a relationship might one day become. At other times my loneliness is silent, with nothing to give—a child with her jaw clenched tight and her arms crossed, stubborn and refusing to speak. But I want to keep sitting with her whenever she shows up, because I never know when she might open her arms and pull me close. I never know when she might whisper some wisdom into my ear."

Charlotte Donlon also has a podcast you might be interested in: Hope for the Lonely

~

When I finished reading Donlon's book, I thought about a poem I've long loved by the Persian poet Hafiz. Years ago I wrote it out on a card and have kept it tucked inside a daily notebook ever since.

Absolutely Clear
Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

~

[Photo: taken on a recent walk. The leafless birch speak to many things, not the least of which are loneliness and also beauty.]

Blessed Are the Nones

“[A]s Sister Theresa said a few months ago at Saint John’s Abbey, God is walking with us regardless of what particulars we believe at any given moment, and life is long. Who knows where exactly we will end up!”

— Blessed Are the Nones, Stina Kielsmeier-Cook

A friend of mine, Stina Kielsmeier-Cook, has just had her first book published, Blessed Are the Nones (InterVarsity Press). I first met Stina online a couple years ago through the Collegeville Institute, and then just before Covid struck, I met her in person at a newly formed writing group here in Minneapolis. Blessed Are the Nones is a spiritual memoir that tells the story of her marriage as she came to terms with her husband leaving their shared Christian faith even as they stayed very much together.

Stina meets the monastic Salesian nuns who live in an ordinary house not far from hers while she and her husband were out trick-or-treating with their young children one Halloween. Befriended by these nuns, Stina wrote that discovering that they were in her neighborhood was as if God were winking at her. These nuns and their hospitality to Stina become a doorway through which she learns to live in the vital juncture of spiritual singleness and spiritual community.

Just as a good spiritual memoir should, the story Stina tells is not just her story, and the gains and losses she describes are not only hers. Blessed Are the Nones speaks to the faith journey of so many of us. For some, the way seems to get more and more sure; for others, the way veers in a different direction. For others, doubt visits, prompting a pause of short or long or unknown duration. Stina shares Bonhoeffer’s warning to love people more than our own visions of life.

Blessed Are the Nones shows that deep love can transcend dissimilar faith journeys and that God offers community to sustain us on the way. Echoing her words earlier in the book, and shown at the start of this post, near the book’s end Stina writes, “I rest in Sister Theresa’s wisdom that everyone is on a journey with God, whether they know it or not.”

Something to do instead of worrying

In Marilyn McEntyre's book, Make A List: How a Simple Practice Can Change Our Lives and Open Our Hearts, she suggests making a list about nearly anything. I wrote about this book a couple years ago, which you can read here. She gives lots of ideas for lists, some serious and some fun, including: Things to let go of, What's new in the garden, How to cope with a steady stream of bad news, How to enjoy what I have, Books to read, Favorite films of the past five years. McEntyre writes that lists are mirrors of what matters to you, lists are a way of listening, a way of loving, a way of letting go, a way to practice prayer. One morning several weeks ago, while still lying in bed after a night of little sleep, having forgotten my practice of practicing not worrying, I remembered her book and her encouragement to make lists. Let's make a list instead of worry, I told myself. My brain started making a list of lists to write, and it felt joy to be occupied with something other than worry. Try it yourself: pick a topic and just start.

Practice not worrying

At the beginning of Lent and in response to worrying far too much about too many things, I decided to give up worry for Lent. About two minutes after coming to that decision, however, I realized the impossibility of that intention, and so I changed it to practice not worrying, with definite emphasis on practice. The "practice" part immediately took the pressure off and turned the Lenten intention into something creative and responsive. I've kept this intention past the end of Lent and am still practicing and hope I'll always continue to practice. Even so, I forget to practice and worry builds until I remember again the practice, and just the remembrance of it, the words alone (practice not worrying), brings release, reminding me there are alternatives to toxic rumination. Practice. Practice. Like practicing my scales at the piano when I was a child. Over and over. Missed notes, missed fingering, stumbling, no matter, keep practicing. Again. Again. Today, tomorrow. Practice.

Handwringing versus joy and expectation; talking versus serving

The most recent issue of Comment (fall 2019) carries an editorial by the journal's editor, Anne Snyder, which I've been thinking about since first reading it a couple weeks ago. You can read it here at this link, and I encourage you to do so.

Snyder contrasts two approaches to societal concerns based on and expanding from her observations of two groups within a single weekend. One approach was full of handwringing, while the other was full of joy and expectation. The first emerged primarily from the elite while the second primarily from those who were "indigenous, immigrant, Asian, Latin, and African American." The first featured panels and debates while the second featured actual service in churches, social agencies, schools, and counselling centers within home neighborhoods."

She suggests the first group has much to learn from the second group. The churches associated with the first group tend to focus on preaching and teaching, whereas the churches associated with the second group often tend to function as the "field hospitals Pope Francis speaks about—welcoming everyone, regardless of sin or circumstance, and caring for the needs of the whole person, not just the soul." They often offer job banks and homeless shelters to their community in addition to the preaching and teaching.

"This realism," writes Snyder, "grants these local churches moral authority—not only in their home community, but in the world at large. And they offer an important lesson: If you want entrée to a hurting if skeptical world, care for it, don’t try to rule it."

And here’s one more thing she wrote in this editorial, "There’s a growing awareness that love can never be abstracted—we’re touched by incarnational living and doing, less prescription from on high."

So much is abstract these days with our social media tweets and Instagram shots, our disagreements about the evening news; I write this as a challenge to myself as much as to anyone. I do hope you’ll read her full editorial and consider what she wrote.

~~~

Interesting coincidence: when writing this post I found that the link in the above editorial by Anne Synder went to the same article featuring Pope Francis, which I had first read 6 years ago, that I had linked to in the prior post. Of all the pieces that have been written about Pope Francis what are the odds that my two little posts, whose origins are years apart, link to the same one? I believe there is something significant in coincidence, that a message of "pay attention" is being given even if I don't understand why. Maybe it is saying something to you? I wrote a bit more about this in my newsletter.

~~~

[Photo: taken of stars in the windows of the American Swedish Institute.]