When I was an aspirant for Holy Orders, my sponsoring diocese had us participate in a Ministry-Study year. During that year, we were sent forth from our sponsoring parish to another one to 'try out' ordained ministry. We worked with a seasoned priest, doing whatever fit. Once a month, those of us in the process, eight when I went through, met having read a book in common, and written a paper. One of us would read the paper to the rest and we'd launch off into a discussion.
The priest with whom I worked said pretty early on, that whenever he was stuck on a sermon, he would visit someone and post visit he would get the necessary inspiration. I have always held those words in mind and so, this when the Holy Spirit (or muses) seemed recalcitrant, I was casting about. Then on Tuesday, in a conversation, I heard these three words put together — poverty, probability and possibility. Bingo! There was the thread. The original conversation focused on Sir John Smith and his Hope Institute but they work here.
POVERTY
Poverty is probably one of the most pervasive and paralysing aspects of the human condition. It is everywhere we turn; it is near and far. We struggle with Jesus’ saying that the poor will always be with us because surely that is not what God intends for creation.
I could show you any series of photographs of places in the world where there is extreme poverty and ultimately it would become numbing. Grinding poverty is like chronic pain: it wears down the soul until there is little fight or will left. Hope seems gone; God seems absent.
The images coming out of Haiti and now Chile are breathtaking in their devastation. Some of us saw just a few photos of Haiti last night but God knows, there are plenty more on television or in the paper. They are breathtaking when you think of the loss of life and the loss of potential. I don’t really think I need say more… and to show the photographs is perhaps even to descend into voyeurism.
This winter I saw a photo essay of Detroit. So much of the city now is abandoned that the local government is talking about razing the abandoned houses and moving people out of neighbourhoods if too much of one is empty. In fact, the city has lost half its population. A recent NPR report states: Drive down the Chrysler Freeway, and you see wave after wave of rotted-out, burned-out homes. Much of the city is a mausoleum of enormous, empty auto plants that need new life. It is astounding to see such landscapes in our country but we know they exist.
Then there’s the poverty that can surround us in our beautiful state of Vermont. Garret Keizer writes of Island Pond in his A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry:
‘Island Pond is like no other place on earth. Island Pond confirms no one’s belief in reincarnation: I cannot imagine anyone standing for the first time at the intersection of its main streets and thinking: “I’ve been here before.”
‘When I close my eyes and try to imagine Island Pond — or Brighton, as it is properly called — I find that no single mental picture can contain it. Instead, I see a kaleidoscopic view of discordant images — from the Old West, from Appalachia, from the blue-collar neighborhoods around Paterson, New Jersey, where I grew up, yes, from Vermont, too, turning slowly in the pale light of a mid-winter sun, and captioned with the original settlement’s name of Random. The same thing happens when I think in terms of time. Island Pond is not Lake Wobegon, “the little town that time forgot,” nor is it, as I once quipped, “the little town that time forsook,” but a town in which time has come undone. At least that’s how it seems, as one’s eyes move from the classic brick railroad station, to the boom-box-toting kinds leaning against the sheriff’s car, to the gray-haired hippies leaving the new supermarket, to the World War II tank parked outside the American Legion Hall, to the kerchief-covered heads of the women of an ever-growing religious sect that has chosen Island Pond as a good place to wait for the Apocalypse. …
‘Without a doubt, there is something depressed and depressing in this town, even for someone like me who has grown to love it. If a number of vacationers come here, so do a number of social workers. One magazine journalist called its main street “ugly,” much to the resentment of many Island Ponders, but I’ve never heard anyone call the main street “picturesque.” Actually, it’s the lack of anything even remotely precious that forms some of my affection for the place.’ (1)
There is local poverty, too. We don’t have to look far. Mary Pratt described it in her poem, ‘Benedicite Around the Block.’ (2) While dated, it describes well our neighbourhood.
Throughout the past year, I have been attending meetings of the downtown business partners. I say I am the odd one out because my business is a bit different than theirs — I am not selling anything to make a profit; I am inviting people to come and see, but some of our issues are the same as theirs. All you have to do is look out the door to see how empty West Street is between Church Street and Merchants Row. It would seem as though dissention between business owners, the city and the downtown partnership impedes cooperation and networking.
Physical poverty is very real for us. You can probably come up with your own examples.
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Spiritual poverty is just as present but perhaps harder to pinpoint. There is one form, acedia, the noon-day funk that was the enemy of monks.
The concept of acedia begins with the ever-observant desert fathers and mothers who first perceived and diagnosed the condition. Their first impulse was to shoo it away like a pesky insect by keeping occupied, as in the narrative of Anthony beset ‘by many sinful thoughts’ and cured by angelic advice to stay busy plaiting rope. Poemen avers that ‘acedia is there every time one begins something, and there is no worse passion, but if one recognizes it for what it is, one will gain peace.’ And John Cassian adds:
It is also good to recall what Abba Moses, one of the most experienced of the fathers, told me. I had not been living long in the desert when I was troubled by listlessness [i.e., acedia]. So I went to him and said: Yesterday I was greatly troubled and weakened by listlessness, and I was not able to free myself from it until I went to see Abba Paul. Abba Moses replied to me by saying: So far from freeing yourself from it, you have surrendered to it completely and become its slave. You must realize that it will attack all the more severely because you have deserted your post, unless from now on you strive to subdue it through patience, prayer and manual labor.
Clearly acedia is not willful sloth or indolence, less so ‘sin,’ but a spiritual lethargy or indifference, a turpitude that affects the well-intentioned. Amma Theodora says:
You should realize that as soon as you intend to live in peace, at once evil comes and weighs down your soul through acedia, faint-heartedness, and evil thoughts. It also attacks your body through sickness, debility, weakening of the knees, and all the members. It dissipates the strength of soul and body. ... But if we are vigilant, all the temptations fall away.
John Cassian went further than his conversation with Abba Moses to describe the physical symptoms so literally, even to the hour of the day when they peak, that acedia became known as the ‘noonday devil.’ He provides an excellent description of the psychology of acedia as well, indicating that acedia is a ‘tedium or perturbation of heart ... akin to dejection and especially felt by wandering monks and solitaries, a persistent and obnoxious enemy to such as dwell in the desert.’ He goes on:
When this [acedia] besieges the unhappy mind, it begets aversion from the place, boredom with one’s cell, and scorn and contempt for one’s brethren, whether they be dwelling with one or some way off, as careless and unspiritual-minded persons.
The listlessness of acedia is akin to a feeling of inertness, John Cassian notes, producing no spiritual fruit, a sense of any practice being ‘empty of spiritual profit.’ John’s remedy, following desert tradition, is a level of sustained activity approximating rigorous physical labor and what were to be called works of mercy, which fend off cynicisms. Physical labor as a solution is seen in the example of the first Christian desert hermit Paul, who regularly wove baskets of palm leaves. But being too far from a market to sell them Paul would burn his handiwork once a year and start over. (3)
Acedia might be seen as tedium of soul but what to do with those moments of the dark night of the soul, those moments when the poverty of the soul is so great that one feels unable to move? Those times are the moments when one touches the bottom, and perhaps finds out that despite it all, it is solid, even if one feels like a hermit crab scuttling for shelter. Those are the moments we call outright depression. And if the soul is troubled, so then, is the mind and the body because all operate in a trinity of energy.
If the soul is troubled, how does one function?
The writer of Psalm 22 expresses so well that despair in the opening line, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me and are so far from my distress?’ My reaction to this psalm is Pavlovian because we say it on Maundy Thursday as we strip the altar and chancel, and then pour wine on the horns of the altar before washing it entirely, rendering the altar a mortuary slab as a presage of Good Friday. I can hear the congregation praying this psalm as the altar party quietly and reverently removes everything that is not nailed down.
And then we pray this psalm again on Good Friday prior to the reading of the Passion according to Saint John. The theme of abandonment and desolation threaten to overpower us. We can scarcely breathe, so deep is our grief unleashed by the events of so long ago that take on the losses and sorrows of the current day.
Psalm 22 aptly is called a psalm of desolation. It probably is one that you have uttered in some form or another at some point in your life. Despair is understandable. Feeling as though God has abandoned you is equally understandable. But even Simone Weil, a French Jew, writing in the 1930s perceived that even when we have turned our face away from God our feet are nailed to the ground at the foot of the cross and God is still there, waiting for us to turn back again.
The psalm alternates between utter desolation —
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? *
and are so far from my cry
and from the words of my distress?
2 O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; *
by night as well, but I find no rest.
6 But as for me, I am a worm and no man, *
scorned by all and despised by the people.
7 All who see me laugh me to scorn; *
they curl their lips and wag their heads, saying,
8 He trusted in the LORD; let him deliver him; *
let him rescue him, if he delights in him.’
12 Many young bulls encircle me; *
strong bulls of Bashan surround me.
13 They open wide their jaws at me, *
like a ravening and a roaring lion.
14 I am poured out like water;
all my bones are out of joint; *
my heart within my breast is melting wax.
15 My mouth is dried out like a pot-sherd;
my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; *
and you have laid me in the dust of the grave.
16 Packs of dogs close me in,
and gangs of evildoers circle around me; *
they pierce my hands and my feet;
I can count all my bones.
17 They stare and gloat over me; *
they divide my garments among them;
they cast lots for my clothing.
to moments of hope and confidence:
9 Yet you are he who took me out of the womb, *
and kept me safe upon my mother's breast.
10 I have been entrusted to you ever since I was born; *
you were my God when I was still in my mother’s womb.
11 Be not far from me, for trouble is near, *
and there is none to help.
18 Be not far away, O LORD; *
you are my strength; hasten to help me.
24 My praise is of him in the great assembly; *
I will perform my vows in the presence of those who worship him.
As with any psalm of desolation, by psalm’s end, the tone has changed into confidence. The psalmist says he will praise God in the great congregation. By psalm’s end, the psalmist promises:
My soul shall live for him; my descendants shall serve him;
they shall be known as the LORD’S for ever.
An unknown Jew wrote on a cellar wall in Colgone, Germany during WWII:
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.
I believe in love even when I cannot feel it.
I believe in God even when he is silent.
It is possible to move from a place of acedia or, worse, desolation, with God’s mercy and grace. Even when we are in those moments, we do discover that the bottom is solid. There are even people walking with us. And, yes, God has not abandoned us even though we might feel as much.
Poverty is real. But it is not the whole story.
END NOTES
(1) Garrett Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1991), 39-42.
(2) In Women’s Uncommon Prayers, Elizabeth Geitz, Marjorie Burke, Ann Smith, eds., Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2000, 32-33.
(3) http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/acedia.html
Questions for first meditation
Where in your life do you feel poor?
Where is there spiritual poverty?
What does being poor in heart mean?
Where do you find consolation?
Where is God in all this?
Psalms for meditation: 22, 103
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