BOOK REVIEW: Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life

By Kathleen Norris

Riverhead Books, 2008, $25.95

The Greek root of the word "acedia" means "the absence of care." When Kathleen Norris - poet, writer, and author of the bestselling books Dakota, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith - first found the word in an early church text, she recognized that there was a name for the feelings she had experienced for so much of her life. The spiritual concept perfectly described her periods of soul-weariness and despair, lack of energy and enthusiasm for life, and the inability to care about what was happening to her or to the world.

Sometimes manifesting as "restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobias, and enervating despair," acedia is often mistaken for depression. Yet Norris sees depression as an illness with symptoms that can be relieved medically, while acedia is a "temptation that can be resisted," putting it into the realm of the spiritual and needing a spiritual remedy. Not only are monks and nuns likely to be afflicted with acedia, but anyone in situations demanding long-term devotion will find it a problem. Norris describes her life and thoughts while caring for her terminally ill husband, and we may recognize in her words our own feelings of hopelessness; even without the stress of illness, we may give up on long-term relationships with their inevitable ups and downs, not because they are impossible to sustain, but because acedia has convinced us that we are justified in seeking fulfillment with someone else.

Writers, artists, and others who spend years laboring at their crafts are especially prone to deadening attacks of acedia, and Norris herself has been tempted to give up her vocation when under its influence. Acedia attacks us at our roots, eroding our strength to believe that what we do can make a difference and attacking our capacity for wonder and amazement. Advertising is aware of this and aims to "make us anxious, doubting that what we have is enough, or enough of the best and latest stuff," says Norris. "It also engenders a low-level but treacherous dissatisfaction that makes us susceptible to acedia and its handmaid, narcissism."

Where is the remedy? It is not found on the shelves of pharmacists or on the couches of psychoanalysts. Norris suggests that it can best be dealt with through stability, community, and prayer. She has been supported by the deeply moving poetry of the Psalms and the awareness that even barrenness, whether of spirit or of womb, can be the harbinger of transformation. Her life and work give assent to Thomas Merton's words: "Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone."

Kathleen Norris is an oblate of Assumption Abbey in North Dakota and has twice been in residence at the Collegeville Institute at St. John's Abbey in Minnesota. She is an editor at large at the Christian Century and has published seven books of poetry.