(Note: Part 1 appeared yesterday.)
Second, there is the threat of acedia.
Acedia is an old word roughly equivalent to “sloth” or “listlessness.”
It is not a synonym for leisure, or even laziness. Acedia suggests
indifference and spiritual forgetfulness. It’s like the dark night of
the soul, but more blah, more vanilla, less interesting. As Richard John
Neuhaus explains, “Acedia is evenings without number obliterated by
television, evenings neither of entertainment nor of education but of
narcoticized defense against time and duty. Above all, acedia is apathy,
the refusal to engage the pathos of other lives and of God’s life with
them” (Freedom for Ministry, 227).
For too many of us, the hustle and bustle of electronic activity is a
sad expression of a deeper acedia. We feel busy, but not with a hobby
or recreation or play. We are busy with busyness. Rather than figure out
what to do with our spare minutes and hours, we are content to swim in
the shallows and pass our time with passing the time. How many of us,
growing too accustomed to the acedia of our age, feel this strange mix
of busyness and lifelessness? We are always engaged with our thumbs, but
rarely engaged with our thoughts. We keep downloading information, but
rarely get down into the depths of our hearts. That’s
acedia—purposelessness disguised as constant commotion. Continue at Kevin DeYoung
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