Restlessness (aka Acedia)

Restlessness is not unique to us in the midst of a pandemic. It's been around a long time, and we can learn how to combat it from early church leaders.

The Middle Part

On Sunday, I was thinking over the previous week, a discipline I do in preparation for worship. I reflect on when I've been aware of God's presence, and when I've missed God and why. Some weeks are full of encounters with God, and some, like last week, seem to be devoid of such experiences. As I considered why that might have been the case, it dawned on me that it was the middle of Lent and maybe that had something to do with my spiritual dryness.


The middle is not always a good place to be. The first week or so of Lent, I was excited to have begun the pilgrimage. For weeks prior to Ash Wednesday, I had been thinking about Lent, and what discipline would I take on for this forty-day journey as preparation for Easter. Like many anticipated journeys, there is excitement as the journey begins. The newness of the endeavor and the immediately apparent changes are reasons for celebration. Every step feels fresh. Every day of successfully practicing a new discipline is a victory.


But in the middle the new has worn off. The wilderness is now THE wilderness, where every day dawns much the same as the one before. The initial excitement is gone, and the pilgrimage now feels more like a forced march. Day after day, step after step. The end is too far out to motivate me forward, so I am in a dry and weary land in the middle of Lent.


The middle is where perseverance is needed, because the initial momentum is gone and it's too early for the final surge to the finish. In this place, the temptations aren't the big things, but the small ones. It's not the sharks, but instead the guppies--that look so harmless and actually kind of tickle as they nibble on my toes--that break my skin and allow my life to leak out of me ever so slowly. These nibbles come in many forms--the short answer given when someone says a hurtful word, the feeling-sorry-for-myself that results from being overlooked, the impatience with a lonely neighbor who talks too much. 


I've been reading Living With Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality, by Esther de Waal. The author notes that we face a "ceaseless round of daily duties," but that Benedict asks us to pray through all of this. So maybe that is the discipline needed to persevere through the middle part of the pilgrimage. Pray when I encounter others, pray when I am frustrated, pray when the scenery isn't changing, pray when I cannot see the end in sight. Pray for safe travels.

Spiritual Doldrums

Lately, I feel as though my spiritual engine is stuck in neutral. It reminds me of what happens when I'm traveling and using my GPS and there are no turns or exits or recalculating--just one long stretch of sameness. I have not felt alone or abandoned by God, but neither have I been the recipient of an unexpected revelation as I read scripture or pray or contemplate. Earlier this week, I read a devotional message that talked about looking for the secret joys of God, so I decided to take on the challenge.

With my secret joy radar turned on, I experienced the joy of driving down the road and seeing a yard filled with yellow flowers (others might have called them weeds, but since God made them, I chose to look at them differently). I watched a wren hop all over our patio table, inspecting everything on it. I savored the smell and taste of a freshly-brewed cup of coffee. I was awed by the huge thunderheads in the afternoon sky.

A friend of mine is in Swaziland right now and has set up a blog that allows us to keep up with her. When I logged on yesterday to read her first posts, I noticed a sentence she had written: What a glorious day. It was then that I connected the secret joys I had observed with my spiritual doldrums and realized that this day was truly a glorious day. Every day can be a glorious day--it just requires that I approach it with an attitude of expectancy, and an openness to see what God has already put before me. What a glorious day! What a glorious God!