“Time” in the Time of Corona
Acedia.
How do you pronounce that? What does it mean? I like the Latin pronunciation.
Thomas Aquinas referred to Acedia as,
a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world. In ancient Greece akidÃa literally meant an inert state without pain or care.[1] Early Christian monks used the term to define a spiritual state of listlessness and from there the term developed a markedly Christian moral tone.
We were made for joy, and joy is a response to something good.
True joy, like walking through my backyard seeing clusters of love in the form of flowers or grass, or herbs and vegetables grown and cultivated by Brayde, or vines with baby grapes growing in clusters, a gift from a childhood friend.
True joy….
The true joy as our 21-month-old grandson Javier tries to replicate his PaPaw’s very unique laugh.
The True Joy in our 7-month old Lucia’s voice as she sings the same soul humming tune that has been used to lull so many of our children throughout generations to sleep.
The True Joy of a meal eaten together at a slow and easy pace with no pressing appointment to be made and no running late to experience!
The True joy of youngest siblings banding together whenever they feel the need to make an important point.
The true joy of siblings practicing love and forgiveness first amongst themselves, even when it is difficult, and knowing that it must happen with those closest to them so that it can be extended to the society at large, and ultimately to the world.
The true joy in the real-life form that stirs something in your soul.
Or we can choose “Fake Joy”, hours of sedate in the form of entertainment and the entanglement of threads of which the spool never runs out.
Pleasure without actually possessing the “true good.”
Or we can choose to lose ourselves in the inebriation of alcohol or other forms of escape trying to “Be Somebody”, the kind of somebody who is unrecognizable to those who love us. The kind of person, if we could only see ourselves, would also be unrecognizable to ourselves.
Fake Joy in the form of hours of idleness, seemingly working our way from one season to another or cheering on the futile battles of invented games of war and dominance on a pretend battlefield in a futile competition, and all the while missing out on precious hours of contemplation and conversation with those who we say we love.
Acedia is a “deep-seated lack of calm which makes leisure impossible.” It is a restlessness that does not mean only inactivity as commonly understood, but rather, as Kierkegaard noted, a “despairing refusal to be oneself.” This refusal can take the form of a couch potato or a workaholic. Theologically, the person refuses “to be what God wants him to be, and that means that he does not want to be what he really, and in the ultimate sense, is.” This definition confronts the all too often modern idea that we can be whatever we want to be. What we want to be is too often a false self that fails to discover what we are created to be. In psychological language, we create masks, false selves, that disable us from allowing the real person to come through. (Naughton)
Sloth is known as acedia. It’s an aversion to becoming more God-like.
T.S. Eliot wrote (in part) in The Four Quartets of Burnt Norton
...Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after. -T.S. Eliot
Ultimately acedia leads us to deny our own potential for greatness. This is the vice of faint-heartedness( lack of courage) or pusillanimity, which Aquinas opposes to the virtue of magnanimity, the greatness of soul.
I AM of course guilty of falling into a state of listlessness, but in The Time Of Corona I am afforded the gift of time and self-examination and I am humbly in pursuit of magnanimity.
It is my deepest desire to keep and use this gift of time, and to be able to say that in the Time of Corona I chose love in the form of movement, unlike idle busyness, that I chose to be more God-like and that in The Time of Corona, I did not choose “Fake Joy.”
Let this Life in the Time of Corona be our metanoia! Our change of heart and mind.
