Apatheia and Acedia

Years ago I read two incredibly important books on desert spirituality. The first was Alan Jones' Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality and the second was Belden Lane's The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. These two books have continued to shape the way I pray and think about the spiritual life in general and practice ministry in particular. In the May 18 issue of The Christian Century, an article by Lane entitled "Caring and not caring" reminds me why this is so.

In this article, Lane explores two very different kinds of indifference, apatheia and acedia - both rooted in the experience of the desert mothers and fathers of the early centuries of the Church's life. Apatheia is rooted in the experience of the desert itself and the wild fierceness of it's unforgiving harshness. The lack of water and food strips life to its bare essentials and it is that stripping down (not only for the desert Christians but one could argue for the Hebrews who wandered for forty years in Sinai many centuries earlier and for Christians who embrace the practices of Lent to this very day) that reveals what matters and what doesn't. We need to learn how to be indifferent to what is in the long run unimportant. So much of our worrying and bitterness and anxiety is about stuff that really doesn't matter. Apatheia is about learning to not care. This includes, as Lane reveals in his article about himself, worrying about what other people think about us, and the need for their approval. Of the desert Christians, he writes: "They went to the desert to learn not to care about what was unimportant, so as to begin to care about what really mattered." This leads, however, to the second kind of indifference - the temptation to acedia, an unholy indifference that obliterates any spiritual desire whatsoever. If we are not careful with our lives, we can get stuck in routine and flounder "in a self-absorbed paralysis of spiritual boredom." We can stop caring about anything at all. Wisdom of course, is found in discovering both how to care and not to care; in discerning what matters and what doesn't. Ultimately Lane reminds us that the wisdom of desert spirituality and all Christian prayer is to foster agape love. And so this line, which I think is worth pondering: "Apatheia is the ability to ignore what impedes our progress on the spiritual journey, acedia is the deadening lassitude that strikes when we're alone in the heat of the day, and agape is the freedom to love that is made possible by the one and destroyed by the other." Good stuff, I think - with so much to ponder.