Category: DESPONDENCY

  • The devil of acedia starts by making the soul feel the weight of time; the day seems just endless.  Then the victim, prey to a sentiment of emptiness, can no longer concentrate.  He waits for it to end, hoping that someone will come to lend some substance to that day.  But nothing and no one comes to fill that void.  Besides, who could fill it, since it is interior?

    The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
    Jean-Charles Nault

  • The above explains why thoughts of acedia [despondency] can appear in apparently such contradictory ways: in the lukewarm, as sluggishness, indifference, and even depression, and in the conscientious and eager, as unrestrained activism and ascetical maximalism. If this vice is not healed by steadfast endurance and a life of discipline, combined with “tears before God” and constant short prayers, it leads to a complete standstill of the spiritual life and sometimes even suicide. Yet he who bravely and steadfastly passes the trials of this “noonday demon,” who “encompasses the entire soul and [threatens] to oppress the spirit,” emerges from these tests inwardly strengthened. Unexpectedly, those spiritual experiences from which he thought himself forever to be excluded are now revealed to him.

    Dragon’s Wine and Angel’s Bread: The Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Anger and Meekness
    Gabriel Bunge

  • The inexpressible and unaccountable melancholy that oppresses you and prevents you from enjoying anything may be a test, intended to prove the firmness of your decision and the purity of your love of God.

    —Elder Macarius of Optina, Russian Letters of Spiritual Direction p.43

  • He shows that we can dissolve envy, just by bringing an end to comparing our life situation with that of others. The Bible is full of reminders that we are all called into different circumstances in life, and for different purposes of God. As the Lord has called each person, so let each person walk (I Cor. 7:17), says Scripture.

    —Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

  • The greed of Self-Love, say holy counselors, will often spawn Envy. As one who is discontented looks around and sees people blessed with better lives, fewer problems, greater gifts, more secure families and friendships, envy can occur. Much discontent produces envy even of the unborn, because they are free of pain, as the Preacher showed when he said, Rather than the living, I envy the dead; better than both of these is one who has not been born to have to see evil (Ecc. 4:2,3). Another said about his life: Cursed be the day when I was born. Cursed be the man who brought the news, because he did not kill me, so that my mother might have been my grave…. Instead, I came out of the womb to see labor and sorrow (Jer. 20:14-18). For anyone gripped by dissatisfaction and pain, and hatred of the way life has gone, here’s a prayer that can lift a soul up from that discontent, if one faithfully stays with it.

    Lord Jesus Christ, forgive me and deliver me from hating life.

    —Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

  • You can’t resent other people because you let yourself down. But you can try.

    —John Tottenham

  • “You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”
    ―Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  • “They don’t remember something happening, but remember something not happening. They’ve missed out, and now they’re obsessed with the past that they did not live that does not exist for them.”

    commentary on The Unhappiest Person in the World | Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or

  • Though you may be dead for a little while, He will raise you to life again.

    —St. Augustine