Quotes

Acedia . . . is a profound withdrawal into self. Action is no longer perceived as a gift of oneself, as the response to a prior love that calls us. . . . It is seen instead as an uninhibited seeking of personal satisfaction in the fear of “losing” something. The desire to save one’s “freedom” at any price reveals, in reality, a deeper enslavement to the “self.” There is no longer any room for an abandonment . . . to the other or for the joy of gift; what remains is sadness or bitterness within the one who distances himself from the community and who, being separated from others, finds himself likewise separated from God. — Jean-Charles Nault, OSB

Friend Jesus, you have said to us, “My peace I leave with you.” This peace that you give is not that of this world: it is not the peace of order, when order oppresses; it is not the peace of silence, when silence is born of suppression; it is not the peace of resignation, when such resignation is unworthy. Your peace is love for all people, is justice for all people, is truth for all people, the truth that liberates and stimulates growth. Lord, it is this peace we believe in because of your promise. Grant us peace, and may we give this peace to others. — Prayer from the Italian Waldensian Community

Begin to weave and God will give you the thread. — German proverb

It is not at all clear that these three features of modern society—fun industries, fashions, and celebrity cult—banish boredom. Analogy with aspirin is appropriate: high dosage means not the absence but the presence of pain. — Orrin E. Klapp

Most of us want to be safe. We want to find a cocoon, a spiritually, psychologically, economically, and physically gated community in which to live without danger and disturbance. The care-free life, a life a-cedia, is our cultural ideal. — R.R. Reno

We may say this of the face of Sloth: . . . it is the face of those . . . in whom the sap seems never to have arisen. — Henry Fairlie

The vice of noninvolvement is said to be endemic in the Western world. The acedias is a person without commitment, who lives in a world characterized by mobility, passive entertainment, self-indulgence, and the effective denial of the validity of any external claim. . . . Sometimes [acedia] is identified with sloth or idleness, but that is only the external face of an attitude marked by chronic withdrawal from reality into the more comfortable zone of uncommitted and free-floating fantasy. The temptation to acedia is an invitation to abandon involvement and leave the pangs of creativity to others. — Michael Casey, OCSO

Sloth is a type of escapism, an evasion of responsibility. It comes down to a form of “practical atheism”. . . . What is at stake [whether in] pride or slothfulness is a negation of appropriate humility; a denial of relationality and community; a quest for self-sufficiency that, in the case of sloth, involves too thoroughgoing an adsorption in the views and evaluations of others. . . . — Jean Bethke Eishtain

When used in the moral sense, the person seized by acedia is the affect-less individual, the one incapable of investment or commitment, a person who cannot get deeply involved in any cause or relationship. . . . Sloth as moral apathy is what hinders a person from pursuing that which is good. It is a refusal to seek the good because it is difficult and demanding. — Kenneth R. Himes, OFM

Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God and not in God himself. — Madeleine l’Engle