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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

Grief is the tax we pay on loving people. — Thomas Lynch

I appreciate the spiritual search of the non-churched, non-synagogued people as being full of imagination, discovery, and satisfaction for the individual. But I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “Spirituality doesn’t make hospice calls.” Spirituality remains, normally, individualistic. You may gather for a retreat, and then you disperse. You may gather at the coffee shop or the bookstore, and then you disperse. The people who are handling the homeless and dealing with addiction and trying to improve senior care and who care about the training of the young—they have to bond together. If they don’t do it in old-fashioned churches, they’ll do it in new-fashioned churches. But I don’t think it adds up to much unless there is some development of community, some bonding. — Martin Marty

We are punished by our sins, not for them. — Elbert Hubbard

The riches and beauty of the spiritual landscape are not disclosed to us in order that we may sit in the sun parlour, be grateful for the excellent hospitality, and contemplate the glorious view. Some people suppose that the spiritual life mainly consists in doing that. God provides the spectacle. We gaze with reverent appreciation from our comfortable seats, and call this proceeding to worship. . . . [T]he prevalent notion that spirituality and politics have nothing to do with one another is the exact opposite of the truth. Once it is accepted in a realistic sense, the spiritual life has everything to do with politics. It means that certain convictions about God and the world become the moral and spiritual imperatives of our life; and this must be decisive for the way we choose to behave about that bit of the world over which we have been given a limited control. — Evelyn Underhill

In a series of talks in the ‘60s, Thomas Merton spoke of how hollow the language of faith had become. “To say ‘God is love,’ he commented, ‘is like saying, ‘Eat Wheaties’. . . . There’s no difference, except . . . that people know they are supposed to look pious when God is mentioned, but not when cereal is." — Kathleen Norris