Paying Attention To The Sky

Early in his life, van Gogh was a devout Christian and wanted to become involved in religion for his profession. He became a lay preacher and afterwards strived to become a painter of the working people. Capturing peasants’ everyday laboring in his paintings, he most famously did so in The Potato Eaters (1885). In a dark room lit only by a single candle hung above the table, the painting shows five peasants eating potatoes at the table. The overall darkness and dull green shades coloring the walls give off an impression of dirt and grime everywhere, and the shadows threaten that there are worse unseen areas in the room. The size of the people relative to the room and the low-hanging candle-lamp crowd the room to a stifling point, and the presence of only one community plate certainly is a statement of the family’s sanitary standards.

Some further reading selections from Kathleen Norris’ Acedia and Me.

Depression
Let’s call it sickness, a desert malady. Anyone could lose perspective in that heat, weakened by hunger, thirst, and uncertainty. Yet a curious fact about illness, including depression, is that it can bring us to clarity. We value the quality of attention that comes to us when we are not well. In “I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK [ her review of The Noonday Demon, Joyce Carol Oates observes that “those afflicted with depression are often ambivalent about it, as no one is ambivalent about physical illness.” Her latter assumption belies the fact that people of many faiths have experienced ailments and incapacities as a gateway to spiritual insight. But her observation about depression reflects the fact that many people are conflicted about a state in which the ploys they’ve used to color things in their favor are stripped away, and they sense that they are witnessing the world as it is. The light maybe harsher than we would like, but at least it forces us to see.

[This reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s creed: “One sees the truth more clearly when one is unhappy,” he wrote from Siberia. “And yet God gives me moments of perfect peace; in such moments I love and believe that I am loved; in such moments I have formulated my creed, wherein all is clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely simply: here it is. I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly and more perfect than the Saviour: I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like Him, but that there could be no one.”]

From his extensive research, Andrew Solomon reports evidence that depressed people have a more realistic view of the world than others. He writes of one study that showed “depressed and non-depressed people are equally good at answering abstract questions. When asked, however, about their control over an event, non-depressed people invariably believe themselves to have more control than they really have, and depressed people give an accurate assessment.”

In a test involving a video game, “depressed people. . . knew just how many little monsters they had killed’ while the non-depressed people consistently overestimated their kills by four to six times the actual amount. For all of that, Solomon reminds us that “major depression is far too stern a teacher: you needn’t go to the Sahara to avoid frostbite.” Still, we find ways to love that old devil we know. And “love” is not too strong a word. “Curiously enough:’ Solomon admits, “I love my depression. I do not love experiencing my depression, but I love the depression itself. I love who I am in the wake of it?’ He cannot help respecting that which gave him knowledge of “my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.”

Solomon’s perception is an ancient one; in the first century the Stoic Seneca observed that people “love their vices with a sort of despair, and hate them at the same time?’ Solomon is also in agreement with the desert fathers and mothers who made their stand in the desert in order to combat their demons and assess themselves more honestly. When he asserts that “the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality:’ he is echoing the existential monastic view that the opposite of acedia is an energetic devotion. When I am at my worst, mired in torpor and despair, simply recalling this can give me hope.

“Hope” is the title of Solomon’s last chapter, and in it he writes, poignantly, of valuing his depression because it unearthed “what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day . when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious discovery:’ It is also a costly one, and the price is exacted again and again. All too often we are like the man in the Gospel story who is cleansed of evil spirits only to find that the demons who have been displaced keep wandering, looking for a place to land. When they see that the house of his soul has once more been made neat and clean, they descend on him and make his condition even worse than before.

How is it possible to maintain our sanity, let alone to foster hope? Acedia is a particularly savage enemy, because it is not content with just a part of us. Evagrius writes that “the other demons are like the rising or setting sun in that they are found in only a part of the soul. The noonday demon, however, is accustomed to embrace the entire soul and oppress the spirit.” Evagrius, Cassian, and Andrew Solomon might agree that hope is nurtured when we can recall the peace of mind we once attained, and regard it as real, at least as real as our most troubled and anxious state. But we must start small. Often my first act of recovery is doing something as menial as dusting a bookshelf or balancing my checkbook.

If I am tempted to devalue such humble activities, I remember that acedia descended on Anthony as soon as he went to the desert, but when he prayed to be delivered from it, he was shown that any physical task, done in the right spirit, could free him. Likewise, Evagrius gives sound advice to anyone who has begun to recover from an assault of the demon: “What heals acedia is staunch persistence…Decide upon a set amount for yourself in every work and do not turn aside from it before you complete it?’

If my pride recoils from endeavors that seem futile in the face of my world-weary despair, I have to remember that disdaining ordinary, mundane chores that come to nothing can lead to my discounting personal relationships as well. Why honor my mother and my father, when they will grow old and infirm and then abandon me by dying? My own “antirrheticus” for that thought comes from Psalm 27:“Though father and mother forsake me, / the Lord will receive me.”  Under acedia’s siege I might ask: Why vow myself to a spouse, if it is “until death do us part”? We all die anyway, and even our sun will one day burn itself out, destroying life as we know it on earth. Does this mean that I don’t need to bother about loving, or living, here and now? I am better off asking: Why is it that acedia brings such thoughts to the table just as I would feast on life’s bounty? Only then can I fight back, embracing love and commitment as a source of strength and peace instead of despondency. Only then will I have defeated acedia, At least for now.

Both ancient and modern writers speak of the profound serenity that can come after a period of torment and trial. As Solomon puts it, “Depression at its worst is the most horrifying loneliness, and from it I learned the value of intimacy.” The pain is real, but remedy may yet be found. For Evagrius, the struggle with acedia is worthy because it leads not only to peace but also to joy. If, as the scholar Christoph Joest has written, acedia for Evagrius was the culmination of all the temptations, then its absence is the fulfillment of all virtues, which find their ultimate expression in love. That is why the struggle is worth our while.

Isaiah 43
I thought, “Oh, hell, it’s getting close to Christmas — I might as well see what’s up.” After consulting the liturgical calendar, I opened the Gideon Bible to Isaiah 43 and found this:

But now thus says the LORD, who created you; O Jacob,
And He who formed you, O Israel:
Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by your name;
You are Mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
And through the rivers, they shall not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned,
Nor shall the flame scorch you.
For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
Isaiah 43: 1-3 (NICJV)

Taking in these words as I listened to the steady sound of my husband’s breathing, I was profoundly glad for everything. This is a blessed time, I thought to myself. We wait and want for nothing. We are free to love, which is the ultimate freedom. Our situation might appear hopeless to others. But we are Adam and Eve, before the Fall, and all we know is heaven.

A Little Riff on Heaven and Hell
I suspect that any married person, or any monk for that matter, has at one time or another felt the loss and diminishment expressed by the fourth-century Abba Megethius when he said to his fellow monks, “Originally, when we met together we spoke of edifying things, encouraging one another. We were ‘like the angels’; we ascended up to the heavens. But now when we come together, we only drag one another down by gossiping, and so we go down to hell.”

For the early Christian abbas and ammas, both heaven and hell were to be found in present reality. While both were envisioned as an inheritance — one to be hoped for, the other avoided — neither existed apart from everyday experience. No doubt these monastics would have greeted Sartre’s famous existentialist credo “Hell is other people” by saying, “Yes, of course, and heaven as well.”

Eugene Ionesco wrote that “there is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think we live in alienation: in one way or another. . . humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real life, plenitude, light?’ Heaven or hell? Either place is within our reach, for we carry it within us. Today is the first day, and the last. Heaven or hell: this is the moment, here, now. Make of it what you will.

To Say ‘God Is Love’ Is Like Saying, ‘Eat Wheaties’
In a series of talks in the 1960s, Thomas Merton foresaw our contemporary world as one-dimensional, a world in which “all words have become alike. . . To say ‘God is love:” he commented, “is like saying, ‘Eat Wheaties? – . . There’s no difference, except… that people know they are supposed to look pious when God is mentioned, but not when cereal is? Now that expensive handbags and jackets are displayed in store windows as reverentially as icons, and swimsuits alleged to have a slimming effect are advertised with the tagline “Why pray for a miracle when you can wear one?” even that distinction has been compromised.

And it matters. When magazines such as Time and Newsweek pretend that the news consists of page after page of unpaid advertisements for the latest gadgets, we may, as Merton predicted, fall into the trap of “[thinking we are informed:’ when in fact we are “living in an imaginary world?’

In this hyped-up world, broadcast and Internet news media have emerged as acedia’s perfect vehicles, demanding that we care, all at once, about a suicide bombing, a celebrity divorce, and the latest advance in nanotechnology. Advertisements direct our attention to automobiles; medications to combat high blood pressure, hemorrhoids, and insomnia; the Red Cross; a new household cleanser. When the “news” returns, there are appalling segues, such as one I witnessed recently, the screen going from “Child Sex Offender Search” to “Gas Prices Rise.” It all comes at us on the same level, and an innocent from another world might assume that we consider these matters to be of equal value and importance.

We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring.

As Thomas Merton predicted, our world has been flattened, and we’ve been had. Our concern with being up-to-date on the latest product -- be it a lotion promising to make our skin more youthful or a trend in politics, medicine, or spirituality -- is both “hypnotic [and] narcissistic, which is what a closed circle always is?’ Presented with a seductive product or idea, “you allow yourself to be seduced by it, and then…you’re happy?’ The problem, as Merton notes, is that “this is the way the abuse of language functions?’ Inundated with “self-validating, hypnotic formulas [that] are immune to contradictions” —  he uses as an example a maxim employed by military officers during the Vietnam War: We are destroying a village in order to save it — we lose the ability to reflect on either world events or our own lives.

It is hard work to look beneath the surfaces presented to us and examine the cultural and historical forces underlying current conditions. Why should we care enough to make the effort? In positing this question, we are well advised to name and confront our acedia. For it is an unseen enemy; like a windstorm, it is witnessed only in its damaging effects.

Acedia is not a relic of the fourth century or a hang-up of some weird Christian monks, but a force we ignore at our peril. Whenever we focus on the foibles of celebrities to the detriment of learning more about the real world — the emergence of fundamentalist religious and nationalist movements, the economic factors endangering our reefs and rain forests, the social and ecological damage caused by factory farming — acedia is at work. Wherever we run to escape it, acedia is there, propelling us to “the next best thing;’ another paradise to revel in and wantonly destroy. It also sends us backward, prettying the past with the gloss of nostalgia. Acedia has come so far with us that it easily attaches to our hectic and overburdened schedules. We appear to be anything but slothflul, yet that is exactly what we are, as we do more and care less, and feel pressured to do still more.

We may well ask: If we are always in motion, constantly engaged in self-improvement, and even trying to do good for others, how can we be considered uncaring or slothful? In Sloth, the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein concluded a brilliant parody of a self-help book, titled Sloth and How to Get It, with a cogent observation of the “ubermotivated” people of our time.

“When you achieve true slothdom’ she writes, “you have no desire for the world to change. True sloths are not revolutionaries, but the lazy guardians at the gate of the status quo:’ The culture may glorify people who do Pilates at dawn, work their BlackBerrys obsessively on the morning commute, multitask all day at the office, and put a gourmet meal on the table at night afier the kids come home from French and fencing lessons, but, Wasserstein asks, “are these hyper-scheduled, overactive individuals really creating anything new? Are they guilty of passion in any way? Do they have a new vision for their government? For their community? Or for themselves?” She suspects that “their purpose is to keep themselves so busy, so entrenched in their active lives, that their spirit reaches a permanent state of lethargiosis (the process of eliminating energy and drive, the vital first step in becoming a sloth.)”

Just look at us, with more money and less sleep than we know how to handle, except to go into debt, and take pills that get us up in the morning and others that let us rest at night. If we are to believe Bertrand Russell, who remarked that “one of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important:’ then a good many of us are on the edge. Despite the abundance of available therapies, we are still bewildered in the face of our neuroses and spiritual poverty and may be less well equipped than a fourth-century monk to deal with them.

In our desperate seeking after more precise terms to define our condition, we have become like the hapless citizens of Jean-Luc Godard’s savagely comic film Alphaville, who, in a dystopian future, receive new government-issued “Bibles” every day, dictionaries from which words are continually vanishing, because, as one character says, “they are no longer allowed.” She adds, mournfully, that “some words have disappeared that I liked very much” among them weep, tenderness, and conscience. Recalling a man she knew who wrote intriguing but “incomprehensible things” she says, “they used to call it poetry.”

I wonder whether that future is now, and why, if we have effectively banished the word demon, we are still so demon-haunted. It may be acceptable to speak again of demons. The New Yorker recently published a cartoon depicting an unshaven, bleary-looking businessman leaving for work, holding a liquor bottle along with his briefcase, and saying to his wife, “It’s Take Your Inner Demons to Work Day.”

To me this haggard man, even in his slothful appearance, epitomizes our latest, purely acedic mantra, “I don’t have time to think,” which presumes that we also don’t have time to care. Our busyness can’t disguise the suspicion that we are being steadily diminished, not so much living as passing time in a desert of our own devising. We might look for guidance to those earlier desert-dwellers, who had no word for depression, but whose vocabulary did include words for accidie, discernment, faith, grace, hope, and mercy.

They gave one another good counsel: Perform the humblest of tasks with full attention and no fussing over the whys and wherefores; remember that you are susceptible, at the beginning of any new venture, to being distracted from your purpose by such things as a headache, an intense ill will toward another, a neurotic and potent self-doubt. To dwell in this desert and make it bloom requires that we indulge in neither guilt nor vainglorious fantasizing, but struggle to know ourselves as we are.

In this process we will not escape sadness and pain; it can help to employ Amma Syncletica’s distinction between two forms of grief, one that liberates, another that destroys. “The first sort;’ she writes, “consists in weeping over one’s own faults” and over “the weakness of one’s neighbors, in order not to destroy one’s purpose, and attach oneself to the perfect good.” Yet “there is also a grief that comes from the enemy, full of mockery, which some call accidie. This spirit must be cast out, mainly by prayer and psalmody.” If we recognize the bad thought of acedia for what it is, we can indeed cast it out using the very means it has employed to torment us. Amma Syncletica called on prayer and psalmody for a reason. As the slogan has it, life’s a bitch, and then you die: so you might as well find a psalm and sing anyway.