Kathleen Norris Recovers Ancient Christian Concept of Acedia

by Jana Riess, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 6/18/2008

It's been more than 20 years since Kathleen Norris first discovered the term "acedia" in a monastery library. For her, reading a fourth-century monk's writing about acedia (supreme indifference or, literally, "not caring") diagnosed exactly what she had long experienced—a depression that wasn't quite depression, a slothfulness that was not at all laziness, a world weariness that sucked the life out of her and her work. "He was describing something that I'd never heard of, but that I knew," Norris told RBL from her home in Honolulu. "I'm looking at the words of this guy who died in 399, and I'm thinking, 'How did he know?' "

Contemporary readers may well have the same reaction when they read Norris's new book, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, due out from Riverhead on September 16. The memoir, which got a starred review in PW on June 9, describes Norris's personal wrestlings with acedia, and how her three-decade marriage and her spiritual practices have functioned as a tether to life and art. (Praying the Psalms, she says, is a "weapon against acedia," since the discipline teaches that repetition leads not to apparent meaninglessness, but to renewal and epiphany.)

Norris describes the book, which was many years in the making, as "an oddball thing, a crazy mixture of monastic studies, memoir and psychology." She stopped and started multiple times as she lost her husband and father after long illnesses. The book also grew in scope, with the memoir expanding to include a section on "the social dimensions of acedia," which Norris says is a widespread but largely unspoken problem in American culture. "Indifference is a major problem," she says. "24-hour news channels are perfect vehicles for acedia. They bombard you with so much that you can't care anymore, or distinguish between what is trivial and what is truly important."

She hopes readers will resonate with her quirky topic but worries that she will receive "angry letters from some people who say that I'm making depressed people feel guilty about themselves. But I'm trying to make important distinctions between depression and acedia." Early readers' responses have been enthusiastic, and Norris is blocking off the last half of September and all of October for a coast-to-coast book tour.