What are My Standards: Comparing Acedia and the Divine Mercy Devotion

               We need standards in life.   Standards guide our paths, but the standards we choose will either bring us to the joy we are created for or towards misery.   So, we must be aware when there are dangerous standards that are disguised as good standards as the prophet Isaiah tells us, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Is. 5:20).   This standard of woe and misery in modernity is the vice of acedia.  It is countered by the standard of joy known as devotion, in particular devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Divine Mercy.    From these two standards, we can see three crucial comparisons to help us avoid trading light for darkness, deception for truth, and manipulation for the peaceful hearts, zealous hearts which God has made for us to dwell.   Thus, we will look at the standards of acedia and devotion in general by defining them.   Then we will compare them, and finally bring all of this together by getting to the heart of the standards by looking at them in light of Divine Mercy.    

                We will begin by looking at the standards.   Acedia is also known as Spiritual Sloth.  It is a sin against charity which makes people slow in moving towards the things of God.    It is a deadly sin because it can kill God’s life within us.  On the hand, St. Francis de Sales tells us, “devotion is simply a spiritual activity and liveliness by means of which Divine Love works in us and causes us to work briskly and lovingly; and just as charity leads us to a general practice of all God’s Commandments, so devotion leads us to practice them readily and diligently.”  Devotion is the grace to do charity briskly, lovingly, and diligently.   Devotion to the Divine Mercy can help heal the ills of modernity.  Now that we have the standards, let us compare them, finding that one is the poison, and the other is the antidote to ills of emptiness and discontent of the day.  

                The first comparison involves what we choose:  Refusing Joy vs Choosing to Love.  Acedia is a sin that refuses the joy that comes from God (see CCC#2094).  Joy is a fruit of charity/love (see Gal. 5: 22-23).   So, we cannot be mopey, constantly complain, or be a “kill joy” and think that we are being devout.   When life gets hard, or the children are running all over the place, the boss is coming down hard on you at work, we must get into the habit of repeating the words of Divine Mercy, “For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”  Our hardships can unite us to Christ making our sorrows, His sorrows, and then they become our sorrows in which we can help redeem the whole world.  In this we adore God and can then take things a little lighter.   This is important for two reasons.   St. Padre Pio reminds us that joy connects us to charity, ““Joy, with peace, is the sister of charity. Serve the Lord with laughter.” It also is important because acedia, i.e. refusing joy, can become a deadly sin because our ability to adore God and laugh are what separate us from the animals.   When we lose our joy, we allow ourselves to be transformed into beasts, something less than human.   So, devotion tells us look for ways to stay in love (after all it is the fruit of it) by being a person who embraces the joy, even amidst suffering as it is a means to come into contact with God’s mercy and help redeem the world as well as a fruit of the Spirit which inspires us to choose the things of God.

                The second comparison involves what we take in:  The noonday Devil vs Vitamin D.   Fr. Nault, O.S.B calls Acedia the noonday devil. The reason is that at noon, the sun can zap your energy as you are unaware of it.   This zapping has a two-fold extreme in either lethargy or exhaustion.   Lethargy happens when you just stop caring because you are not getting the results you want.  So you think, “well, what’s the point!?”    The other extreme is exhaustion-you are just too tired to do anything else.  Both extremes are deadly sins because both result in you abandoning what God has asked of you.   Our Lord speaks of lethargy or lukewarmness as being so bad that “he spits [them] out of his mouth” (Rev. 3:16).   With exhaustion, it is an ironic deadly sin because by being so active, you become slothful in your relationship with God.   In Theology of the Apostolate, Cardinal Suenens tells us this in a beautiful sentence, “We must not be so concerned with the Works of God, that we forget the God of Works.”  The Devil would love for us to do so much for God that we forget God.  This is a huge danger for those who work in the Church.  Devotion gives us the antidote against Lethargy and Exhaustion because it tells us to take extra Vitamin D- Vitamin “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn. 2:5), nothing more, nothing less.   We must discern what is the work that God wants us to do, not simply do what we want in the name of God.   In this, we fulfill the Great Commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.   Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22: 37-39).   As the Noonday Devil of Acedia makes us love our neighbor in the name of work instead of God and instead of ourselves.   It actually twists the Great Commandment which fulfills the Law and thus poisons our relationship with God under the disguise of bettering our relationship with others. This is the reason the Divine Mercy Hour is so important.  We give priority to God at 3pm and “in giving God our time,” as Venerable Fulton Sheen often would say, “He gives us His eternity.” 

                The final comparison involves the mindset: Wanting to Leave the Room (Comparative Mentality) vs Contributive Mentality.  Fr. Nault describes acedia as wanting to leave the room.  We want to leave the room when we live a life comparing ourselves and life-situations to others.   This is poisonous because it leads to ingratitude, disdain for your neighbor, and kills your view of self-worth because you always see yourself as lacking.  Devotion is the antidote because it leads to a contributive mentality in which we celebrate the individual’s gifts because we know that things that we lack do not define us.  Also, someone else may have a gift, so we can celebrate that as we walk together as a Church, rather than simply individuals who need to cut each other down to appear taller.   This is the standard of the Divine Mercy who never cuts us down, but always walks with us and covers us in His Mercy as we see in the Image of Divine Mercy. 

                In conclusion, we see that Our Blessed Mother and the saints carry the Standard of Devotion and ask us to do the same.  So let us walk away from the standard of the world, of confusion, and misery found in acedia.   Let us walk towards the standard of Devotion to the Divine Mercy of Christ.   In doing so we will live with peaceful hearts, zealous hearts and connect to the mercy of God.  In this mercy, we are made new!