Candlemass 2021
Dear M&Ms,
Life is quite monotonous at the moment. I’m realising that there can be such a thing as too much routine. Waking up to the same sort of day every day is strangely exhausting. Winter feels like it’s going pretty slowly - January was definitely my longest lockdown month so far -and yet like so many, I really have nothing to complain about. I have my health, my home and my job - which is a lot more than so many people.
Nonetheless, it is still important to acknowledge that even those of us who still have so much for which to be thankful in these coronavirus times, might be finding it tough. Most of the time we know we must show gratitude for our situation compared to that of others. However, we can still give ourselves permission to acknowledge that it’s a strain.
No one has been unaffected by the pandemic. The theologian Angela Tilby summarised it perfectly for me in a piece for the Church Times last month. You’ll find the text of the article below: Tilby reflects on this feeling of sameness that can be so life zapping.
ACCIDIE is the name that our Christian forebears gave to what many of us are suffering from at the moment. A listless boredom, a sense of confinement which seems both pressured and without boundaries, a depression of spirit as we contemplate a seemingly endless horizon of more of the same.
This is not everyone’s experience of lockdown, of course. For key workers, police, medical staff, and supermarket and delivery workers, life has got more intense, with a much greater burden of anxiety and uncertainty. But the pressures on them make those of us who are now having to stay at home feel more guilty, as well grateful. We grieve for the time when we could contribute something positive. The condition of accidie is well described by the fourth-century ascetic Evagrius of Pontus, whom I first wrote about in a book about the history of the Deadly Sins.
Evagrius distinguishes two negative spiritual states, which became the ingredients of accidie. Writing in Greek, he uses the word lupe, grief, a sadness for what is no more, often punctuated by outbursts of anger. He also speaks of acedia, neglect, the sin of sloth. Later generations recognised sloth, but hesitated about Evagrius’s insistence that certain kinds of grief were sinful. So they suppressed lupe as a distinct sin, while incorporating something of “sadness” into their understanding of acedia, or accidie.
In his original description of lupe, Evagrius had spoken of “sadness . . . because of the deprivation of one’s desires”. I wasn’t sure what this meant when I originally wrote about it, but I feel that I do now. Deprivation of desire is exactly what lockdown sadness feels like. I have in some sense lost agency: that unthinking ability to plan and to do. Life has shrivelled.
Evagrius was aware that, in such circumstances, our temptation is to indulge in a gloomy kind of nostalgia, which leaves us feeling even more helpless and humiliated. The loss also leaves us angry: found yourself shouting at inconsiderate cyclists and joggers on your daily walk recently? Contemporary thinking medicalises accidie and links it to depression, but Evagrius’s suggestion that what we are experiencing is a kind of grief speaks powerfully to me.
The danger for us all is that grief becomes grievance: a conviction that the lockdown is evidence that we are being wronged — by each other, by the Government, by the Church, by those who won’t wear masks, or by those who do. So, we are hyper-vigilant and extra-judgemental, punching outwards to conceal the sadness within.
To help with the temptations that beset us, Evagrius recommends 76 Bible verses to help deal with lupe, and 57 to help with sloth.* These are listed in his Antirhettikos, which means “How to answer back”. Sometimes, the critical spiritual battleground is within.
Life is quite monotonous at the moment. I’m realising that there can be such a thing as too much routine. Waking up to the same sort of day every day is strangely exhausting. Winter feels like it’s going pretty slowly - January was definitely my longest lockdown month so far -and yet like so many, I really have nothing to complain about. I have my health, my home and my job - which is a lot more than so many people.
Nonetheless, it is still important to acknowledge that even those of us who still have so much for which to be thankful in these coronavirus times, might be finding it tough. Most of the time we know we must show gratitude for our situation compared to that of others. However, we can still give ourselves permission to acknowledge that it’s a strain.
No one has been unaffected by the pandemic. The theologian Angela Tilby summarised it perfectly for me in a piece for the Church Times last month. You’ll find the text of the article below: Tilby reflects on this feeling of sameness that can be so life zapping.
ACCIDIE is the name that our Christian forebears gave to what many of us are suffering from at the moment. A listless boredom, a sense of confinement which seems both pressured and without boundaries, a depression of spirit as we contemplate a seemingly endless horizon of more of the same.
This is not everyone’s experience of lockdown, of course. For key workers, police, medical staff, and supermarket and delivery workers, life has got more intense, with a much greater burden of anxiety and uncertainty. But the pressures on them make those of us who are now having to stay at home feel more guilty, as well grateful. We grieve for the time when we could contribute something positive. The condition of accidie is well described by the fourth-century ascetic Evagrius of Pontus, whom I first wrote about in a book about the history of the Deadly Sins.
Evagrius distinguishes two negative spiritual states, which became the ingredients of accidie. Writing in Greek, he uses the word lupe, grief, a sadness for what is no more, often punctuated by outbursts of anger. He also speaks of acedia, neglect, the sin of sloth. Later generations recognised sloth, but hesitated about Evagrius’s insistence that certain kinds of grief were sinful. So they suppressed lupe as a distinct sin, while incorporating something of “sadness” into their understanding of acedia, or accidie.
In his original description of lupe, Evagrius had spoken of “sadness . . . because of the deprivation of one’s desires”. I wasn’t sure what this meant when I originally wrote about it, but I feel that I do now. Deprivation of desire is exactly what lockdown sadness feels like. I have in some sense lost agency: that unthinking ability to plan and to do. Life has shrivelled.
Evagrius was aware that, in such circumstances, our temptation is to indulge in a gloomy kind of nostalgia, which leaves us feeling even more helpless and humiliated. The loss also leaves us angry: found yourself shouting at inconsiderate cyclists and joggers on your daily walk recently? Contemporary thinking medicalises accidie and links it to depression, but Evagrius’s suggestion that what we are experiencing is a kind of grief speaks powerfully to me.
The danger for us all is that grief becomes grievance: a conviction that the lockdown is evidence that we are being wronged — by each other, by the Government, by the Church, by those who won’t wear masks, or by those who do. So, we are hyper-vigilant and extra-judgemental, punching outwards to conceal the sadness within.
To help with the temptations that beset us, Evagrius recommends 76 Bible verses to help deal with lupe, and 57 to help with sloth.* These are listed in his Antirhettikos, which means “How to answer back”. Sometimes, the critical spiritual battleground is within.
(Angela Tilby, The Church Times 22 January 2021)
*if you look for the article on the CT website, you’ll find the bible verses listed!
Angela Tilby’s suggestion that we may have to look inwards to deal with this particular spiritual background is the perfect reminder that Lent will soon be upon us (Ash Wednesday is 17 February). When the pace of change can feel so slow at this time of year and with a lockdown to boot it feels slower than ever, the rhythm of the liturgical seasons can be a helpful interruption to the monotony.
As we look at the arc of our relationship with God and how it develops over the course of a liturgical year where do we find ourselves now? We have come to the end of the Epiphany season a time of very public expression of our faith, a time when people who might never engage with church for the rest of the year find themselves going (or zooming) to church and singing Christmas carols. It’s a time when the Christian faith is ‘on show’. And now we find ourselves two weeks away from Lent. This is a season when we are called to look inwards, both as individuals and as a community of faith. It is a time when, after the example of Jesus in the wilderness, we work on going deeper into our own relationship with God, deeper into the bonds of our community of faith - ‘further up and further in’ as we are calling our Lenten journey at M&Ms this year. Having done that work during Lent we come to the other side of Easter ready to look outwards, to celebrate the triumph of God’s saving love and on into the season of Pentecost, a time when we consider our role in building the kingdom of God.
The opportunities for formation and spiritual growth that Karen, Ilse and I have put together reflect those different trajectories. Whilst our ‘church needs to talk about race’ series and our advent collections for Sant Egidio and Le Réfuge were about being outward facing during Christmas and Epiphany, we now prepare to change gear and turn inwards for Lent.
The final talk in March for ‘the church needs to talk about race’ series will ask what we as the Church should be doing in response to issues of racial injustice. In addition to this, on Passion Sunday we will offer a liturgical and sacramental response to what we have heard and learnt in the series. If you haven’t already done so, check out the podcasts that have been put together following talks.
Additionally, we will be inviting you to join us in exploring different spiritual practices during Lent. Next week’s newsletter will have more information about the details of how that will work, but if you want to start preparing you may like to join us in reading Spiritual Discipline by Richard Foster.
Detailed information about Lent will follow in next week’s newsletter. For now you can mark your calendars that there will be an Ash Wednesday service on zoom at 8am and another one in the evening. In keeping with tradition we will join with the JLC community for this service. One of the exciting things about Ash Wednesday in lockdown is that you get to ash yourself - or another member of your household!
If you would like to receive an Ash Wednesday kit to help us keep Ash Wednesday holy and you are not sure we have your postal address, please be sure to email anglicanchurchleuven@gmail.com with your mailing address.
With my prayers and best wishes,
Revd. Catriona
As we look at the arc of our relationship with God and how it develops over the course of a liturgical year where do we find ourselves now? We have come to the end of the Epiphany season a time of very public expression of our faith, a time when people who might never engage with church for the rest of the year find themselves going (or zooming) to church and singing Christmas carols. It’s a time when the Christian faith is ‘on show’. And now we find ourselves two weeks away from Lent. This is a season when we are called to look inwards, both as individuals and as a community of faith. It is a time when, after the example of Jesus in the wilderness, we work on going deeper into our own relationship with God, deeper into the bonds of our community of faith - ‘further up and further in’ as we are calling our Lenten journey at M&Ms this year. Having done that work during Lent we come to the other side of Easter ready to look outwards, to celebrate the triumph of God’s saving love and on into the season of Pentecost, a time when we consider our role in building the kingdom of God.
The opportunities for formation and spiritual growth that Karen, Ilse and I have put together reflect those different trajectories. Whilst our ‘church needs to talk about race’ series and our advent collections for Sant Egidio and Le Réfuge were about being outward facing during Christmas and Epiphany, we now prepare to change gear and turn inwards for Lent.
The final talk in March for ‘the church needs to talk about race’ series will ask what we as the Church should be doing in response to issues of racial injustice. In addition to this, on Passion Sunday we will offer a liturgical and sacramental response to what we have heard and learnt in the series. If you haven’t already done so, check out the podcasts that have been put together following talks.
Additionally, we will be inviting you to join us in exploring different spiritual practices during Lent. Next week’s newsletter will have more information about the details of how that will work, but if you want to start preparing you may like to join us in reading Spiritual Discipline by Richard Foster.
Detailed information about Lent will follow in next week’s newsletter. For now you can mark your calendars that there will be an Ash Wednesday service on zoom at 8am and another one in the evening. In keeping with tradition we will join with the JLC community for this service. One of the exciting things about Ash Wednesday in lockdown is that you get to ash yourself - or another member of your household!
If you would like to receive an Ash Wednesday kit to help us keep Ash Wednesday holy and you are not sure we have your postal address, please be sure to email anglicanchurchleuven@gmail.com with your mailing address.
With my prayers and best wishes,
Revd. Catriona
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