Acedia Magic

I’m here. Here, to be exact. Working hard, trying to interpret my Sicily journals in more ways than one.  I would write them mostly at night, when I was tired, and since my handwriting is not the best under perfect conditions (unless I put my mind to it and actually try) , this is a challenge.

I would give you a picture in true bloggy style, but although I brought my camera, I left the usb cable at home. So you can’t see what I see here in Pepper Place (old Dr. Pepper bottling facilities, remade into offices, some shops – mostly interior design and such – and restaurants.) It’s okay. You can probably imagine.  Professionals lunching, the most dedicated professionals eschewing the food of mortals and using the time to run around the block and by the window here.

Over the past few days, 2 books:

Acedia & Me by Kathleen Norris.

It is vintage Norris – the personal explored on a tradition-rich, monastic-shaped spiritual landscape.  The question is naturally acedia or accidie- not depression (Norris takes quite a bit of time to explore the difference in various points of the book), but rather a dryness, a feeling (or conviction) that there is no point, it is all for naught. Screw it.

(I took notes, but in my journal, which is not my Sicily journals, but another one which I could not find earlier. I am really hoping I didn’t leave it at karate class.)

Norris looks at her own past for evidence of acedia, how she has always been prone to it, and how her husband’s terminal illness and death a few years ago brought it into sharper relief, and how faith, in particular the Psalms and the insights of Desert Fathers and other monastics bring her through it, since acedia also waits at the door of religious life.

I liked it. I found it a bit “thick” with external references, which is, again, her style and evidence of a widely-read smart person who looks to the sources, to others to help her understand, to help her through. I suppose my powers of concentration are not what they once were, so I did find myself skipping around at times, not too interested in studies of depression. I wonder if the digressions could have been cut by about a quarter. It might have helped. Me, at least.

But her insights are true and helpful, and not just for writers, and not just for those who have experienced loss. What I think I like most about Norris is her comfort in accepting all the ebbing and flowing of the spiritual life, which any serious spiritual writer understands.  We fall, we step back, we step forward, we feel embraced, we feel abandoned, we feel energized, we feel slammed on the ground. We feel paralyzed and puzzled. We feel – accidie.

It’s okay.  Just – and here is the lesson of monastic life – keep praying. Keep letting yourself be shaped by the Psalms.Keep serving and working. Pay attention. Believe, as Andre Dubus wrote in “A Father’s Story,” that God believes in you.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, I read last night. As you know, Didion’s husband was writer John Gregory Dunne  (brother of Dominick Dunne, who recently died), and on December 30, 2003, he had a massive coronary at their table right before dinner. She was there. He died immediately, she later figured out, not the time of death of an hour or so later.

(At the same time, their daughter was in a serious health crisis – they had just returned from visiting her at the hospital. She would die some time later, around the time the book was published.)

The Year of Magical Thinking is plain, unadorned. A journal of what happened of much of what Didion was thinking – the “magical thinking” was the conviction that Dunne would return.

I was surprised that this one the National Book Award. It is certainly honest and mostly interesting, but it is also spare, and not in a poetic way.   It is difficult to critique a book like this without seeming as if you are critiquing the person and her experience itself. And while I can’t resonate with the extended “year of magical thinking” (I don’t think – perhaps I am living in another sort of dream world, unidentified as yet), I could plug into various other parts of what she went through.  So she experienced what she experienced, and I suppose the focus of the book – which involves a great deal of research into “why” and “how” (not just of Dunne’s death but of her daughter’s illness) is an accurate reflection of her life as it was. But I got…I don’t know…impatient.

Both of these women’s experiences were the same – a husband dies – and different than mine. Norris’ husband had fought health battles his entire life and his illness was terminal, not sudden. They had no children – which makes, I think, a huge difference in how one walks through this experience, especially when those children are young. You cannot be self-absorbed, you cannot stand still, and you cannot think of this only in terms of how it affects you.  When a spouse dies, you wonder, “What do I do with this love I still feel?” When you have small children, you have part of the answer.

Didion’s experience was like mine in that Dunne’s death was sudden (although he’d had heart problems and had a pacemaker put in the summer before), it was heart. It was different in that she was present when it happened, as well as in that she was older and they had been married four times as long.    For me, the most powerful parts of her books are those in which she talks about “vortexes” – the moments in which she confronts places (mostly) that were meaningful to them, and the mental journey she unwillingly goes on, even as she tries to avoid, when she is confronted with a vortex.

Didion, I’ll add, doesn’t believe in God. “No eye is on the sparrow” recurs through the book, to the last sentence. It is sad.

That said, one thing I found…missing in Norris’ book was an explicit consideration of eternal life. This wasn’t the purpose of the book, granted, but as she looks for hope, consolation and reasons to go on, this doesn’t seem to factor. Perhaps it is assumed. Probably.

All I know is that one of the things I have “learned” over the past month is a new way of thinking about God, us and eternal life. I have written before that one of the most horrifying things I can consider is that Michael no longer is - at all. That all that he was has just vanished. This cannot be.  Many are struck by the apparent injustices of life – suffering, primarily. I am struck by the injustice of the possibility that all the love, yearning, creativity and hope that we live with and that drives us …just…ends.  I suppose the atheist would say that should be enough. We loved, we created, we served, we did our part – good enough. Not really. For the transcendent lives in that love and yearning and (good) striving.  The theologians and spiritual writers all talk about this in their own way, so this is mine. Feebly spoken.  There is a God. Who creates us. Creates. Us.  Our hearts are restless, but not only that, our hearts point us there, to rest. To the rest.

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