Acedia and Me

Sometimes I encounter a book that speaks to me so forcefully that I want to urge others to read it. Such urging is not always effective. People need to choose what they read, not have others choose it. The present time may not be the right time for you to read this book. But if you think it might be, read Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, Penguin, 2008).

Norris is author of several previous must reads, including The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. She is a poet who writes a lot of prose. She was married to a poet, the late David J. Dwyer. She is a protestant who hangs out in Benedictine monasteries. She is a thoughtful, honest Christian.

Acedia and Me seems to have been a long-term project for her, completed during and after the death of her husband in 2003. It tells you more than you might want to know about the deadly sin of acedia, sloth, uncaring, depression, despair, etc. But it is not just a negative book. It is really a book about life under the rubric of the difficulty of living life fully. Norris draws on Scripture, especially the Psalms, the writings of the desert fathers, especially Evagrius and Cassian, Kierkegaard, modern day Benedictines and Cistercians, psychology, poetry, and most of all, her own experience, especially her marriage to a brilliant agnostic Catholic poet who struggled with serious mental and physical illness.

As I read the book I often thought of particular people I know who struggle with depression, physical illness, or the burden of caring for those who are ill. I hope some of them will be encouraged to read it. It certainly encouraged me.

Words in Search of Wisdom

Blogs seem to need names. I have named this one "Words in Search of Wisdom." Why? Wouldn't "Wise Words" be better? Maybe, but it would also be presumptuous and inaccurate.

Another question: Can words search for wisdom? Isn't that what writers are supposed to do before they write? And are words capable of searching for, much less, finding, wisdom? Do they have the power of action independent of a human agent? No, not really. But in my experience of writing, words do have a life of their own even as they come from the mind and the hand of the writer. At least the process of writing brings into being insights that would not have existed had the writer not put forth some words.

That's what I hear in Joan Didion's declaration: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.” Or in Rebecca West's explanation, "I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something."

A website on academic writing suggests, “Write to find out what you think. Your thoughts will be somewhat muddled until you get them in writing. Don't go around and around in circles internally until you know what to write. Write before you know what you're going to say.”

Robert Kellogg in The Psychology of Writing suggests that the act of writing can even be therapeutic. "Psychotherapists have also looked to writing as a means of personal restoration. . . People seek meaning in their lives. Not all must write in order to find meaning, but the mindfulness required by writing could well serve as a tool for therapy."

That has been my experience, so I write in order that I may understand (to paraphrase Anselm, who said, "I believe in order that I may understand"). Or, to bring it into the digital age, I blog in order that I may understand.