We need to talk about boredom in relation to prayer. We lose our appetite for prayer, slack off from reading the Bible, and spiritual lethargy sets in. We become bored with the things of God. This is not a problem unique to our age. A fourth-century monk, Evagrius Pontius, came up with a list of “eight terrible temptations” that morphed into what later came to be called “the seven deadly sins.” Included in his list was acedia, a word that literally means “not caring,” more often translated as sloth. He called acedia “the noonday devil.” After monks finished a round of morning prayers and manual labor, they retired to their rooms in the middle of the day and often struggled with spiritual boredom.
While we may not recognize sloth as a killer sin, it deadens our souls gradually over time. Apathy is the slow fade of the heart into mediocrity. Could our overuse of the internet and mindless TV be indicators, like warning lights on a car dashboard, that something is wrong? Monks like Evagrius Pontius would counsel us to face our boredom head-on and ask God to awaken us.
Today’s prayer originates from another monk, Bede the Venerable (672-735). He was the ablest theologian of the early Middle Ages and wrote a definitive history of ancient England. He recognized the dangers of acedia in his writings and prayed for God “to awaken us from the greyness of our apathy”: