Coronavirus may allow us to address the distractions that separate us from each other and God

(Michael Hogue/Staff Artist)

By RYAN SANDERS

I work with a wizened old pastor who has an annoying habit of looking on the bright side. In the face of bad news, he will stubbornly ask, “What does this make possible?” He is an optimist, an opportunist, and a burr under the saddle of those of us who would rather worry and wallow in the rain than look for silver linings in the clouds.

As the torrent of bad coronavirus news keeps drenching my news feed, I’ve been imagining his reaction. He will lean back in his chair. He will rub his beard under a half smile with his right hand where he is missing part of a finger lost to a motorcycle chain decades ago — a deformity he declares to have “made possible” many interesting conversations with strangers. And he will ask, “What does a global pandemic make possible?”

None of us would have chosen this crisis. We should make every effort to limit and end it, but might there also be an invitation in it? An invitation to something that wouldn’t have been possible before life was interrupted? Could we make it our goal not just to survive this isolation with adequate supplies of Netflix and toilet paper, but actually to emerge on the other side more healthy, more connected than we were before? How might we get there?

In the fourth century, a Turkish ascetic with a gray beard and worried eyes named Evagrius the Solitary identified a condition of the soul he called acedia. He described it as spiritual sloth or apathy, and he reviled it so much that he listed it among eight of the soul’s most threatening distractions which, after an editor got hold of them, became the seven deadly sins. Acedia is not idleness. In fact, it causes its sufferers to stay busy, fill each moment with noise or task while neglecting deeper work. Soul work.

Father Peter Verhalen knows about soul work. He is the abbot at Cistercian Abbey, a Catholic monastery in Irving. When I called him last week to ask about acedia, he pointed to the word’s etymology. The prefix “a” meaning “without,” and kēdos meaning “to care.” It’s Greek. In fact, acedia is central to one of ancient Greece’s most enduring cultural contributions. In the play Antigone, the eponymous heroine has the courage to make up for a king’s failure to care for the body of her brother Polynices by giving him a proper burial. Acedia is a failure to care about things that matter. Antigone refuses acedia and becomes one of the first heroines of Western literature.

A more modern presentation, Father Peter said, is that acedia is an attitude that says: “I don’t give a flip. I’m kind-of indifferent, and I’ll do what I want to do. I’m no longer concerned about God.” And that is an attitude that should be very familiar to us in 2020. Before the coronavirus arrived, acedia might have been the plague of our age. We were busy with commerce but slothful with our souls. And even though the coronavirus has halted business, it hasn’t stopped the temptation to neglect things that matter. We are besieged by the inane. Dulled by stimulation. Made vain by documentary voyeurism. Made shallow by the bottomless scroll of our devices. So that an Uptown nightclub called Sidebar can exhort us in glowing purple neon, without irony, to “keep Dallas pretentious.”

And it’s just here that we might find the invitation in the pandemic. While we shelter in place, many of us are settling into a less frenzied, dare I say less pretentious, rule of life. We may have kids or video calls demanding more attention, but our calendars aren’t as overstuffed with travel, errands, practices or social events.

I asked Father Peter what we might learn from being cloistered, what he and his brothers have learned.

“Different people are accustomed to different levels of quiet and solitude, and I think, by and large, monks and nuns are accustomed to more solitude than most. But even for monks, it’s difficult.

“It’s a question of what one does with the quiet. Do we spend more time with internet, entertainment and distraction, or do we try to spend a little bit more time connecting with our brothers in the monastery, or connecting with family members? In the quiet of being sequestered, we have the opportunity to become more attentive to one another’s needs.”

Or possibly to our own needs. One of the effects of acedia is that we lose the ability to find ourselves, to be aware of the condition of our own souls. The sagacious Parker Palmer lays bare our ailment in his book A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.

“In our culture, we tend to gather information in ways that do not work very well when the source is the human soul. The soul is not responsive to subpoenas or cross-examinations. At best, it will stand in the dock only long enough to plead the Fifth Amendment. At worst, it will jump bail and never be heard from again. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting and trustworthy conditions. The soul is like a wild animal: tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”

Perhaps there is some precious wildness to be found in our coronavirus cloistering. Perhaps we might find time to sit at the base of a tree or the end of our driveway long enough to glimpse it. Father Peter said our acedia loses its allure when our relentless pursuit of distraction or productivity gets exposed.

“When we get pushed to the limits as we are getting pushed now, we can’t maintain that attitude,” he said. “You start saying, ‘No, things do matter.’”

Our sequestering in Dallas County has been extended at least through April 30. Schools won’t reopen until at least May 4. Those of us who celebrate Easter today won’t be enjoying big family brunches or neighborhood egg hunts. Those of us observing Passover held smaller, quieter seders. And those of us about to start Ramadan won’t be free to gather for evening prayers and Iftar.

But perhaps what all this makes possible is something higher up and further in, to borrow C.S. Lewis’ phrase. Perhaps there’s an invitation to a pathway that isn’t littered with fast-food wrappers and Tiger King episodes and bare-nerved conversations held too late at night because the day was busy, and traffic was snarled, and the kids just wouldn’t go to bed.

None of us would ever have chosen this crisis, but now that it’s upon us, perhaps there is something it makes possible.

Ryan Sanders is a pastor at Irving Bible Church and an opinion writer for The Dallas Morning News.