10. Such has the Evangelist shown her, such did the angel find her, such did the Holy Spirit choose her. Why delay about details? How her parents loved her, strangers praised her, how worthy she was that the Son of God should be born of her. She, when the angel entered, was found at home in privacy, without a companion, that no one might interrupt her attention or disturb her; and she did not desire any women as companions, who had the companionship of good thoughts. Moreover, she seemed to herself to be less alone when she was alone. For how should she be alone, who had with her so many books, so many archangels, so many prophets?
Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE
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Of the eight principal spirits or faults, dejection and acedia most effectively link the monastic world with today’s psychological suffering. The spirit or demon of dejection is described as one that attacks at random, and prevents the monk from having gladness of heart.[32] It makes the monk impatient and rough with the brethren and causes him to feel angry, crushing and overwhelming him with despair.[33] Cassian also locates the origin of dejection as being from “previous anger” or a previous “lack of gain that has not been realized.”[34] The monk isolates himself and no longer desires to engage in discourse with others, so that Cassian labels dejection the “gall of bitterness that is in possession of every corner of their heart.”[35] Interestingly, Cassian discusses how this demonic spirit is not necessarily a result of the actions of others, but actions of the self. Cassian elaborates that one in this state should not isolate himself, but rather continue to interact with his fellow monastic brethren. This in itself is a remedy against this spirit.[36]
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However, Cassian goes on to discuss that some dejection is acceptable and therapeutic. This is the sorrow that leads an individual to penitence for sin.[39] Finally, he ends the relevant chapter by noting that the way to terminate devilish dejection is spiritual meditation, and keeping the mind occupied with the hope of the future. In examining this chapter of Cassian’s work, clear symptoms emerge, as well as treatment modalities for what is considered depression in the modern world.
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In Book X of the Institutes, Cassian begins to describe accidie, or acedia, known as the “midday demon,”[40] as Evagrius had also done, although in more detail in specific relation to the emotions.[41] While similar to the demon of dejection, acedia consists of the added features of apathy, sluggishness, sloth, and irritability. In naming acedia the “midday demon,” Cassian posits that these demonic attacks often occur around the sixth hour and seize the monk. Carelessness and anxiousness are the main components of acedia, as well as frequent complaining.[42] The monk looks anxiously and often sighs at his other brethren. There are also moments where he is idle and useless for spiritual work. Cassian notes that sometimes the midday demon can manifest in different forms: sometimes one may isolate more, and in other times one may become a busy-body and seek consolation from others — an action which Cassian describes as entanglement in secular business.[43]
John Cassian, Diabolical Warfare, and Psychological Health
Abraham Ghattas
Doss Press -
• Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.
68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
Kevin Kelly -
So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”
Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.
This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.
Solitude and Leadership
William Deresiewicz -
On not isolating…
You talk to them, “everything is so shallow, everything is so surface-like, and nothing more nothing less.”
—Fr. Mina Dimitri -
The saints give us this interesting way to think about the commandment to love our neighbors: They tell us that all our spiritual wealth is stored at our neighbor’s place. And all our neighbor’s wealth is stored with us. Alone in our homes, we are without funds, because the only financial assets we have are over there at our neighbor’s place. To collect some of our spiritual wealth, we have to reach out to our neighbor, where it is stored. And our neighbors, to possess their spiritual wealth, have to reach out to us. Without this reaching out to one another, we both live in spiritual poverty.
As therefore one who had his own gold buried in the house of his neighbor, should he refuse to go and there seek and dig it up, will never see it; so likewise here, he who will not seek his own profit in the advantage of his neighbor will not receive the crowns given for this. For God has placed each person’s profit with his neighbor, that we may be mutually bound together. —St. John Chrysostom
—Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity
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The cost of being by yourself is quite high, not only spiritually, but mentally. Those who are isolated from the community by themselves—over time, they really go off. And when you interact with them after a while, you find their minds have gone in crazy fantasies, in crazy ideas, in crazy places that they should have never been before. Every time I am making a decision to isolate myself, I have to be quite careful.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri -
Let him who cannot be alone beware of community… Let him who is not in community beware of being alone… Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls.
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There are those who are called the slothful in the book of Wisdom, who strew their path with thorns, who consider harmful to the soul a zeal for deeds in keeping with the commandments of God, the demurrers against the apostolic injunctions, who do not eat their own bread with dignity, but, fawning on others, make idleness the art of life. Then, there are the dreamers who consider the deceits of dreams more trustworthy than the teachings of the Gospels, calling fantasies revelations. Apart from these, there are those who stay in their own houses, and still others who consider being unsociable and brutish a virtue without recognizing the command to love and without knowing the fruit of long-suffering and humility.
—St. Gregory of Nyssa
James Stuart Bell, ed.,Ancient Faith Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bibles, 2019), 752.Daydreamers, they have very very high dreams and very very high ambition, and they live in delusion.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri, inspired by Gregory of NyssaThey stay in their homes and “isolate from others” and their community. One of the most dangerous things people do is isolate themselves from the church community. All of this is a big thorn that you are putting in your life that makes you lazy, that makes you not put effort, and makes you isolated, and makes the devil easy to control you and change you.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri, inspired by Gregory of Nyssa -
“Solitude itself is a way of waiting for the inaudible and the invisible to make itself felt. And that is why solitude is never static and never hopeless. On the other hand, every friend who comes to stay enriches the solitude forever; presence, if it has been real presence, does not ever leave.”
― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep: A Journal
SO GOOD QUOTES 