On Kathleen Norris’ “Acedia & me”

Posted on April 6, 2010 by doradueck

I’ve just finished working my way through Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life by Kathleen Norris. It’s the last book in the “Take and Read” theological book discussion group I’ve been part of this year and is up for conversation tomorrow evening, along with the usual fabulous desserts.

This book has been widely reviewed, so I’ll save myself long explanations, except to say that Norris sets out to rescue the word/concept “acedia” from centuries past, to bring it — along with the wisdom of the monastics which she has come to treasure — into contemporary use and understanding. Acedia is a broad term, even slippery, it seems, but it generally means soul-weariness, indifference, sloth. Over time the “noonday demon” of acedia that plagued the monastics, tempting them to despair over their commitments, turned into a fashionable cultural melancholy. Today it masquerades as “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair”: essentially the inability to care enough about the right things.

As described throughout her book, acedia often sounds an awful lot like depression, but Norris insists it’s not the same. She acknowledges, however, that the difference will need to be carefully discerned. It seems to me, in fact, that if it’s anything, this is a book about discernment.

“It takes real courage,” [Thomas] Merton insists, “to recognize that we ourselves are the cause of our own unhappiness.” The trick is to maintain a nuanced view as we attempt to discern what trouble we have caused and are responsible for, and what is truly beyond our control. [p.273]

A book about discernment — and about commitment. Norris emphasizes keeping on with what we’ve begun, whether our work or the ins and outs of a marriage, as well as the daily habits of making our beds, doing the dishes, and praying the Psalms. She wants to put spiritual causes and cures back into the experience of “downness,” a surely necessary corrective in our culture. She wants us to “fight back.”

I’m a fan of Kathleen Norris’s poetry and other writing (her books include The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography), so I came to this book with fairly high expectations. I confess I was disappointed. It consists of a great deal of exposition on aspects of acedia and its history, but there are also pieces of Norris’ own story — of her adolescent soul-weariness, of her marriage to David J.Dwyer, of his illness and death, of her grief and widowhood. I found myself relieved whenever these passages of narrative appeared. I hope the reason is not some sloth of my own that wants story over study, but to me the expository parts seemed variously repetitive, confusing, and disjointed — wearing their vast research as collage instead of a journey — and too often (for an author who is a poet) plodding in their execution.

As I plodded along myself, trying to understand the whole business of acedia, which became not clearer but more sweeping and eventually seemed to underlie nearly everything that’s wrong with contemporary life, I kept trying to figure out what was bothering me about what I was reading. I concluded it was a problem of the book’s organization. I wished that instead of making the personal narratives illustrative of the notion of acedia, Norris had simply let her discoveries about acedia serve her own story, tucked in here, tucked in there.

Further, although I found the wisdom of the monastics on acedia compelling, I was not persuaded that their assessments of what tempts and troubles us, and their solutions to the same, were necessarily sound enough to lean into without reservation.

Then again, maybe it was all just a matter of timing. I might have saved the book for a down time, but I had to have it finished for tomorrow. The weather has been so gorgeous these last days, the Easter lilies on the coffee table gorgeous too, the fridge full of Easter leftovers to make this week’s food prep almost effortless, and then there was the music of Haydn transporting my thoughts upward while I dispatched (in breaks from reading) piles of ironing that had accumulated. Acedia? It didn’t seem possible!

Still, I’m glad to have “been assigned” this book. Two poems that Norris includes — “The Higher Arithmetic” by her late husband David Dwyer and one of her own about barren women, a black cat, and the laundry — seem almost worth the price of it. Norris also awakened my interest in knowing more about the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and I certainly needed her reminder about praying the Psalms. I used to practice this quite faithfully but lately it’s been too hit and miss.

To the Benedictine Luke Dysinger, the psalms are “a vision of the whole of creation” and “the training-ground of the Christian contemplative.”…. Every emotion is expressed, as humanity is laid bare before God and everyone…. If acedia is my primary temptation…praying the psalter [is] a tried-and-true means of battling it….

I’ll be interested to hear what our discussion leader and the rest of the group will have to say about Acedia & me tomorrow. I’ll let you know. And I’d be interested in the reactions from those of you who have also read this book.

Via biography

Posted on April 3, 2010 by doradueck

Further to the previous post’s musings on living in the age of memoir —

In the midst of this week’s celebration of the passion and resurrection of Christ — what the Christian faith knows as its Holy Week — it’s worth noting that what we most clearly know about God also comes via biography. It came in the lived life of Jesus, but we know that life because it was written down. The Gospels carry the voices, research, concerns, and passion of their authors. They tell a life using the thematic approach of memoir.

So we listen to and read and use the Gospels as the life-writing they are, not to make the texts themselves the focus of our veneration, but to enter into and explore in order to know a person.

Life-writing, though, it’s important to remember. Not public relations, as Philip Yancey notes in The Jesus I Never Knew, quoting Scott Peck: “I was absolutely thunderstruck by the extraordinary reality of the man I found in the Gospels…”

Reality. For the age of memoir.

A blessed Easter!

photo by C. Dueck

Happy in the age of memoir

Posted on March 31, 2010 by doradueck

We live, it’s often said, in the age of memoir.

On one level, a statement like that is simply an assessment of what’s obvious in so many aspects of our culture. Certainly in the media — books, television, radio, internet — the weight of communication now often rests on the shoulders of personal narrative, on “reality” by way of experience. It’s a democratization of ideas and values supported by technology, especially in social media like Facebook or Twitter, where anyone can record the progress of their existence publicly, with as much inanity or imagination as they possess, or in places like the blogosphere, with its vast potential to reference and record one’s life. (And yes, here I am, too.)

And just this past Sunday, an example of living in the age of memoir in our church: whereas baptismal candidates at one time marked their desire for baptism by memorizing and assenting to a catechism, however formally or informally that might be presented, the five young adults who will be baptized in our congregation this Easter Sunday shared their life stories thus far, at least in relation to faith. And as they did so, they revealed the differences that individuals have, and the inspiration and insight we have come to expect when we listen to people’s stories.

At another level, it’s clear that there’s plenty of room for critique, and for criticism too, in the notion of “age of memoir.” Even in describing it, there’s the implication of narcissism, the contagion of the me-generation, the focus on the individual at the expense of community (which in Anabaptist circles, at least, is not quite how it’s supposed to be) lying not that far under the surface.

The now battered copy of Little Pilgrim's Progress my mother read to me, which I later also read to our children

I’m in no mood for complaint or criticism, however. Beginning with the children’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress which fixed itself indelibly on my mind in my earliest childhood — and was, as far as I’m concerned, a first taste of “life-writing” (a term I prefer to memoir, as it encompasses biography, confession, memoir, journals, letters, autobiography) because of its journey motif, even if not strictly life-writing itself — I’ve been steadily shaped by the expressed experiences of other people. And I still haven’t had enough, frankly.

Some of my interest is plain curiosity about others, but some is the quest for resonance with and wisdom from others which I need to live my own life. And I’m not sure that women in the particular categories I fit have been expressed nearly enough; I’m hungry for more of that too.

So if it’s the age of memoir, I’m saying that I don’t mind at all. I just want to find the right pieces of it, and think about it properly. Which brings me to a blog site I often visit, a kind of one-stop beginning for lessons, guides, discussions, and reviews in the area of memoir: 100 Memoirs. (I love the witty subtitle: “because 99 just isn’t enough.”) Shirley Hershey Showalter hosts/writes the site. She’s a former president (1996-2004) of Goshen (Ind.) College and wants to read 100 memoirs on the way to writing her own memoir of growing up Mennonite in America, 1948-1966. She picked the name for her blog from Heather Seller’s advice to new writers, as she puts it in her opening post, “to read 100 excellent examples of their genre before attempting to enter the ring with the best.” If you’re interested in memoir, whether as a reader or writer, it’s a great place to learn and stay connected.