“For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill and a time to heal;
a time to break down and a time to build up;
a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek and a time to lose;
a time to keep and a time to throw away;
a time to tear and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace.”
This text is from Ecclesiastes 3: 1–8, also popularized in a song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” written by Pete Seeger.
Before my question, “How long must I suffer?” stands this text challengingly. I often complain that whatever I’m suffering (chronic depression, meaninglessness, existential homelessness, etc.) has gone far too long, that things haven’t changed for a long while, and a resolution is nowhere in sight. I imagine a vast stretch of uniform sand as long as eyes can see, and I’ll never get out of this endless desert, because, look at me, I’ve been in this desert forever. This perception is convincing (I feel it so!), but is it accurate? The text says there is a time for everything, meaning, nothing stays the same. A time to be be stuck and a time to be freed. Who’s right? The text or my perception? Am I actually just trapped in my Default Mode Network’s way of perceiving life?
My habitual way of thinking reminds me of the condition called by ascetic monks of early Christianity acedia, a condition that often afflicted them due to their lifestyle. Monks at that time lived a very monotonous, solitary, and quiet life of prayer, fasting, and manual labor, often in actual deserts, and spent their time in individual rooms called cells. Along with other evil thoughts, acedia hinders a monk’s spiritual progress. Originally classified as one of the deadly sins, acedia morphed into what we now call depression. What used to be a sin or demon possession is now a psychiatric illness.1 Here is the monk Evagrius Ponticus, who lived in 4th century A.D. describing the condition:
"First of all he [i.e., the demon of acedia] makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long.... Then too he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself.... [Acedia] leads him to reflect that charity [love] has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement. Should there be someone at this period who happens to offend him in some way or other, this too the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred. [...] [Acedia] depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings before the mind's eye the toil of the ascetic struggle and, as the saying has it, leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to leave his cell and drop out of the fight. [No other demon follows close up on the heels of this one in parentheses when he is defeated but only a state of deep peace and inexpressible joy a rise out of the struggle.]"2
Acedia leads one to think that one has been in the desert forever and that is and will be one’s entire life. It’s a state of doldrums and ennui, deep, spreading boredom. It seemed, though, that monks regularly got a break from acedia nearing dinner time,3 perhaps because eating was a distraction, which was the reason Evagrius called acedia the noonday demon.
When a fleeting feeling has solidified into a state of mind or a conviction, it is hard to notice other feelings that go through us, especially those that are of distant families from our habitual ones. The scope of the Ecclesiastes text may have been a person's lifetime or even an epoch or several of it, but suppose we experiment using a day, from the moment we first awake in the morning to the moment we go to bed at night. Are there different “Ecclesiastic times” in your day, are there varieties, despite the chronic unhappiness? A time to mourn and a time to dance? A time to tear and a time to sew? Or have we become addicted to our favorite story of unhappiness and thereby ignoring other inputs that come to our minds?
- See for example, Mark D. Altschule, “Acedia: Its Evolution from Deadly Sin ↩︎
- Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos: Chapters on Prayer. Trans. John Eudes Bamberger OCSO (Spencer, Massachusetts: Cistercian Publications, 1973). 18-19. ↩︎
- “Then [acedia] constrains the monk to look constantly at the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour [3 pm, which was the usual time for dinner]…” in Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos: Chapters on Prayer. 18 ↩︎
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