Pints With Aquinas - SPIRITUAL SLUGGISHNESS: The Evils of Laziness and Anger | Mthr Natalia

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

Mother continues her mini series on the eight evil thoughts. In this episode she discusses both Akedia and Anger. She talks about how spiritual laziness can take the form of over business. 🤝 💸 Support the Channel: https://mattfradd.locals.com 🎧 Mother's Podcast: https://whatgodisnot.com/ 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/matt 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Glory to Jesus Christ. I'm Mother Natalia, a Byzantine Catholic nun from Christ the Bridegroom Monastery, and this is Pines with Aquinas. We're continuing on with our series about the eight evil thoughts. And if you haven't seen the introduction to this series or you're not familiar with the eight evil thoughts,

I would recommend that you go back and listen to the introduction episode that I did, which I think came out three weeks ago. And yeah, I think that's just a really helpful, it's helpful context for what I'm talking about with the evil thoughts and with the passions and things like that. And I'm primarily using Dr. Jean-Claude Larcher's

therapy of spiritual illnesses, which is just an amazing compilation of different teachings of the the fathers about the Eastern ascetical tradition. And so so much of what I'm saying is just paraphrasing him and and also quoting the fathers. So today we're talking about acadia and anger. And I want to, so St. Gregory the Great, I mentioned this in that introduction episode, but St. Gregory the Great blends acadia and sadness when he receives the eight evil thoughts

and in the process of them becoming the seven deadly sins, he blends Acadia and sadness, but the Eastern aesthetical tradition distinguishes between these two. And I think it's important for me to do that for you in part because I'm simply trying to inform you about the eight evil thoughts, and so I want to give you accurate information, but also because I think if you're only thinking of the sadness aspect of Akadia, which is a part of it, then you're going to be locked into just that part and you're going to

miss another big part of Akadia, which is really the part that I want to focus on. So Dr. Larcher which is really the part that I want to focus on. So Dr. Larcher mentions that the fundamental difference between Akkadia and sadness, these two of the eight evil thoughts, is that Akkadia has no precise motivation, whereas sadness comes from very specific motivations. You can listen to the episode I did on sadness if you'd like to hear more about that.

And St. John Cashin says that with Akkadia, there is an unreasonable mental turmoil, is how he talks about it. So the part that I want to talk about, I think the most with Akkadia today, is not just the sloth, but the distraction that comes with Acadia. So I'm going to give this, yeah, sorry this is like a paragraph long, but

I think it's really good stuff, and it's Dr. Larcher's description of Acadia and the effect that it has on man. And this is all just a summary, a paraphrasing of St. John Cashin in his Institutes and Conferences. So he says, Acadia makes man instable in both soul and body. His faculties become fickle. His mind flits from one object to another, unable to stay focused. Especially when he is alone,

he can no longer bear to remain where he is. The passion urges him to leave, to move, to go to one or several other places. Sometimes he begins to wander and roam, and generally he seeks contact with others at any price. These contacts are not objectively necessary, but driven by his passion, man feels that he needs them and finds himself good pretexts so as to justify them. He thus establishes and maintains often futile relationships nourished with idle chatter in which he generally manifests an idle curiosity. So there's this aspect of distraction, of wanting to move, wanting to roam, and I think that's why we shouldn't just look at it

as sadness or as sloth, which often Akkadia is translated, Akkadia is a Greek word, it's often translated as sloth, but again, I think that's just one aspect of it. So when I was on retreat, I just got back from retreat this past weekend, and I really had to confront this spirit of Akkadia in my own life, this struggle with the passion of Akkadia, the evil thought, because I was realizing there was a lot of sloth on retreat. And not just a physical sloth, that was part of it. There was a lot of catching up on sleep, which I don't think is bad to do on retreat and not necessarily slothful, though it can become that.

But most especially in my prayer, which Akkadia, the Fathers talk about how Akkadia particularly attacks those who are trying to grow in the spiritual life, and which is of course all of the passions attack those who are trying to grow in the spiritual life. And I was just noticing that I didn't really, I often just didn't really have a desire to be in prayer. I wanted to just maybe go for a walk or do something else or sit in this place where maybe some people are going to walk by that are going to want to talk to me because I'm a nun and you know whatever the thing is and just noticing this within myself. And I think it was

really important to notice this because it can be easy for me to miss my own struggle with Akadia to not see it because it looks so different in my everyday life at the monastery. Because at the monastery, it doesn't look like laziness as it did on retreat. It looks like the opposite. It looks like busyness. I can get so pulled into all of my work and so distracted from the present that that's a different manifestation of Akkadia.

Dr. Larcher says that Akkadia is on the one hand, the numbing of the desire to pray, and other times it's simply the distraction from the prayer. Someone asked me, a friend of mine suggested, he said, you know, if you're doing this series on the eight evil things, what are the things that you're going to do to get rid of the evil things?

And I said, well, I'm going to do it. And he me, a friend of mine suggested, he said, you know, if you're doing this series on the eight evil thoughts, maybe it would be helpful to name what that thought might sound like, and which I thought was a brilliant idea. And so with Akkadia, and this isn't a thought necessarily that's a conscious thought that you're cognizant of, but it's the subconscious thought that's motivating your actions.

Akkadia is the thought of, I should be somewhere else, someone else, doing something else. It is not good for me to be in the present moment. Acadia is always a drawing us out of the present moment. It's drawing us away from God who we encounter in the present. So this looks sometimes like just living in these two extremes. It looks like this extreme of sloth and the extreme of busyness. You know, this happens sometimes with, this is a temptation to gluttony sometimes is,

well, I've fasted for three days, I haven't eaten anything. So now I can eat as much as I want, right? Or I just went through all of the great fast, all of lent, and now it's pasca. And so there's no limitation to how much I need to eat because it's like, it balances out or something. And that's not how it works and that's still gluttony. And similarly, simply working hard

and just being super busy does not then mean it's okay to just veg out or be lazy. We need rest, we need leisure, but again if we're thinking of the passions as illnesses, which is how all of the fathers describe them, then we need to be asking the question of am I becoming healthier here, or am I becoming more sick? And so is the vegging out drawing me closer to God, or am I resting in a way that's helping me to rest in Him, that's turning me towards Him?

Because when you're just working super hard Monday through Friday, just so that you can be completely lazy all weekend, then this amounts to living for the weekend as opposed to living for Sunday, living for the Lord's Day. There's this amazing quote that I want to share by Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, before he was Pope Benedict XVI.

He's talking about there were some martyrs who they were arrested for gathering together on a Sunday. And when they were asked, why did you do this? Why did you gather together knowing that it could lead to your arrest? Their response was, without the Lord's Day, we cannot be. They were working for the Lord's Day, not working for the weekend. They were living for the Lord's Day, not working for the weekend. They were living for the Lord's Day, not living for the weekend. So Cardinal Ratzinger's quote on this, he says, as a whole, it seems to me that in the

frenzy of contemporary consumption of free time, in the avoidance of everydayness, and in the search for what is totally new, the truly characteristic operating mechanism, even if it is misunderstood and for the most part unacknowledged, consists of a nostalgia for what the martyrs called Dominicus, that is the necessity to encounter that which reveals existence, the search for what Christians have experienced and still experience in the day of the Lord. Acadia is the drawing away from that. It's the drawing away from the encounter of that which reveals existence. Moving into anger. So there's something that the fathers call the erasable power, you might hear insensitive power, and this is the power that gives us the energy to move, to do, to act.

And this is something that we've had from the beginning of time. Okay, so I'll just read a little intro from Dr. Larcher about the irascible power. He says, God bestowed the irascible power. He says, and to avoid sin and evil. Thus was the definition of its normal use and natural end goal in the beginning. However, man turned this away from its end goal through sin and diverted his anger against his neighbor, thus making a contra-natural use of it. In this, it is this contra-natural use of the irascible power that constitutes the passion of anger. So we have this good power in us, that is the power that moves us to action, that when disordered becomes the passion of anger. And if you remember or if you've seen the other episodes especially in that

introduction episode, yes, in the introduction episode I talked about self-love, the distorted self-love, the disordered self-love, and that our passions arise from a desire for pleasure and this is true even of anger. So I'm gonna read again from L'Arche here because he's gonna say it so much better than me but in this bit he's talking about he's mostly talking about St. Maximus He's mostly paraphrasing St. Maximus, the confessor here. He says, anger is born in man not only when he is saddened at not being able to obtain the pleasure he seeks, but also and principally when he feels, fears,

or finds himself deprived of a pleasure in which he once delighted, and when love of self finds itself thus murdered by suffering. Anger then turns against the person who is or seems to be the cause of this frustration, or at least threatens to be or appears to do so. So there are a lot of places that I could go in talking about anger. And I've

done, I think on my podcast, What God is Not, I think I've done a whole episode on anger before. It might say something in the title about rancor, but anyways, I don't know. Sorry. There's a lot of places I could go about anger, but there's two places that I want to focus. And one is the distortion of reality that comes from anger. So St. Basil the Great in his homily against anger, he talks about how anger disrupts the use of our reason, even seemingly to the exclusion of it. We stop to be reasonable. We're blinded by rage, right? And St. John Chrysostom has this quote.

He says, um, truly anger is no less mad than delusion. Behold how this demon casts his victims into delirium, utterly depriving them of reason and convincing them of what is contrary to what their eyes behold. They see nothing, they do nothing with reason. One would say they no longer have sense or judgment. Anger subjugates them. So I'm sure we've all had this experience when in a time of extreme anger it becomes impossible to see the person in front of us. They become an object of our anger instead of a person made in the image and likeness of God in whom God resides.

And when we can't see our neighbor, when we can't see clearly at all, And when we can't see our neighbor, when we can't see clearly at all, then we're unable to have any sort of fruitful resolution. And that lack of fruitfulness actually leads to the other aspect of anger that I want to talk about, which is that the fathers talk about how anger poisons the soul. St. John Chrysostom, when he's talking about harboring anger and resentment, he says, for you suppose that you are paying him back the injury, but you are first tormenting yourself and setting up your rage as an executioner within yourself

in every part and tearing up your own bowels. When St. John Cashin talks about anger he he talks about needing to be careful becoming angry at our brothers for something that they've done, because we are then susceptible to take on the sickness, the very sickness that we are trying to get rid of. And Gregory the Great, Evagrius, Chris System, they all talk about how the passion of anger destroys gentleness. And this gentleness, which is natural to us, though it's maybe been suppressed,

gentleness is a virtue that's natural to the soul through which we especially resemble God. which we especially resemble God. So in the passion of anger as it destroys our gentleness, we become unable, as Maximus the confessor says, to perceive Christ within ourselves. And I think this is, so this is one of the ways in which the thought of anger manifests is looking at someone who has wronged us or someone who has wronged God and saying he is evil instead of his actions are evil. It's she deserves justice and not mercy and not healing. So again, remember why we have the irascible or the insensitive power.

And is that actually what's happening in us? Is this power being used to move us to bring about good, to bring about fruitful resolution? Or is it causing an anger that is just blinding us, that's making us unable to see the dignity of another person, that's causing us to implode? And I think quite frankly, one of the ways I see this in the most harmful place within the church is some of the news articles, some of the podcasts that we're reading and listening to. Like, are these... if you're listening to podcasts that are inflaming your anger and not actually motivating you towards some good, if it's not bringing about something that is healing in your soul, healing in the souls of those around you, and it's just causing you to have this resentment and...

Yeah, then I would just encourage you to try to be honest with yourself in the things that you're listening to, the things that you're reading, the things that you're watching, to be honest with yourself in, is this actually bringing about healing for my soul? Is this actually building up the kingdom of God? Or is this just turning my neighbors into objects? Is it blinding me to the image of God in them, in myself? Yeah, and to really, to pray about that and be honest with yourself, because I know I've definitely had to stop listening to certain things because I'm like,

this is only making me angry. And I'm telling myself that it's righteous anger, it's justified anger because it's an actual wrong that's been done, but is there any good that's coming from it? Is this a problem in the church that God is calling me to try to resolve, to work towards resolution on? Or is this a place in which I need to just be praying for the church and praying for unity and offering my own peace as a healing part of that unity? In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of this day, for the gift of technology. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of this day, for the gift of technology. Thank you for Matt and Thursday and all the work that they put forth to try to bring the

news, the good news, to their listeners. I ask that you grant in myself and in those who are listening to this, those who are watching, the healing of any acadia and anger. Help us to be moved towards you, to be moved away from the ties, the things that tie us to the world. Help us to know our goodness and our value, our beauty, and to know the goodness, the value, and the beauty of those around us. Please let fall from our eyes any scales

that are not allowing us to see that. scales that are not allowing us to see that. Grant us a spirit of gentleness that we may more greatly resemble you. I ask this through the prayers of Saint Nathaniel, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Maximus the Confessor, St. Gregory the Great, St. John Paul II, St. Evagrius, St. John Cashin, St. Sinclairica, the Most Holy Theotokos and all the Saints. Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.