An Encouraging Word – Ready to Roll

Father J. Ronald Knott
Father J. Ronald Knott

See, I make all things new.” Revelation 21:5

A new year is like opening a new blank journal. It encourages dreaming. It invites possibilities. It generates opportunities.

A first entry sets the tone, I believe, for the whole year. Therefore, I am deliberate in my choice. This year, being my 73rd, I chose a quote by C.S. Lewis: “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

Along with putting my dreams and plans for the year on paper, I look for ways to protect them from self-sabotage. That is why I always like to name those lurking enemies of thinking large and planning big who tempt me to back off and back down instead of battling deliberately to see them through to their realization.

This enemy is within. Fourth century monks called it acedia. Acedia is something much stronger than just feeling a little bored or discontented, although it can begin this way. It is less extreme, and more in our control, than a major clinical depression. It has spiritual overtones making it related to, but arguably distinct from, depression.

Acedia is not a disease, it’s a temptation — a temptation to disconnect, to stop caring, to stop making efforts. It is a temptation that can grow and harden into a persistent attitude of apathy and cynicism which is deadly to any kind of personal or spiritual growth.

I find it fascinating that acedia, in its root, means negligence — a negligence that leads to a state of listlessness, a lack of attention to daily tasks and an overall dissatisfaction with life, of not caring or not being concerned with one’s position or condition in the world.

In other words, unlike clinical depression, acedia can be resisted. The sooner it is confronted, the more success one has in that confrontation. It talks big, but once named and brought out into the light of day, it cringes like the coward it is.

One of my biggest fears as a priest is not natural death, but spiritual and emotional death, being here and being not here at the same time. My biggest fear is gradually turning into a priest whose heart is no longer in it! Chaucer’s Parson described such a priest as a “man annoyed at his own life.” My mother called it “just going through the motions.”

I love the sense of possibility this time of year brings if one sees oneself as a partner with God instead of a victim of circumstances. I am reminded that when one seizes the day, good things can happen. W.H. Murray, the famed Scottish mountaineer, may have said it best when he said, “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”

2017, watch out because I am ready to roll!

To read more from Father Knott, visit his blog: FatherKnott.com.

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