Early Christian monks believed in something they called, Acedia, that was a flattening out, a dearth of energy, that put you into a semi-vegetative state that simply deadened all deep feeling and thoughts. Simplistically put, because we won’t sit down on our own and give our bodies and minds the rest, nourishment, and space they need, our bodies and minds conspire together to sit us down, forcibly. In essence, that’s acedia, and, in essence, it’s for our own health.
When you read the Judeo-Christian scriptures, particularly the early sections in Genesis which chronicle the creation of the world and how God “rested” on the Sabbath, you see that there’s a divinely-ordered rhythm to how work and rest are supposed to unfold in our lives. Briefly stated, there’s to be pattern, a rhythm, to our lives which works this way: You work for six days, and then have a one day sabbatical; you work for seven years, and then have a one-year sabbatical; you work for seven times seven years, and then have a Jubilee year, a sabbatical for the whole planet; and then you work for a lifetime, and go on an eternity of sabbatical.
We are finding ourselves today less and less able to step away from all that we are connected to through information technology, and consequently we are finding ourselves less and less able to simply rest, to let go of things, to be in Sabbath-mode. Seven hundred years ago, the Sufi poet, Rumi, lamented: I have lived too long where I can be reached! That’s a cry for Sabbath time that went up long before today’s information technology placed us where we can always be reached, and that cry is going up everywhere today as our addiction to information technology increases. One worries that we will not find the asceticism needed to curb our addiction, but then acedia may well do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Acedia and Sabbath” July 2017]