Joyful Seekers

“…let the hearts that seek the Lord rejoice” (Psalm 105:3).

St. Benedict set the desire to seek God in all things among the criteria for discerning a novice’s call (RB 58).  It has become a hallmark of Benedictine spirituality. 

The fourth week of Lent opened last weekend with what is called “Laetare Sunday,” named after the Latin first words of the entrance chant at Mass.  “Laetare” means, “rejoice,” a command one does not ordinarily expect to hear during Lent, with its call to austerity in pursuit of conversion of heart.  Yet the note of joy pervades all of the week’s lectionary readings.  St. Benedict himself gives us a hint for understanding joy breaking into Lent’s purple solemnity.  In his summary of Lent, he writes, “In other words, let each one deny himself some food, drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting, and look forward to holy Easter with joy and spiritual longing” (RB 49:7)

Lent originated and still serves as a season of preparation for Easter, both for those who will be baptized at the Easter Vigil, according to the ancient custom St. Benedict would have known, and for those of us who will renew our baptismal commitment then in order to provide the newcomers with a community renewed in holiness where they can grow.  With Easter in our immediate liturgical future, the light of the risen Christ shines back onto our path as we travel toward it.  And light brings joy to those accustomed to the darkness of sin and death that prevails in so much of our world as it did in St. Benedict’s.

The hope of Easter supplies the reason for our Lenten joy, but the psalmist takes it even deeper for Benedictines: “…let the hearts that seek the Lord rejoice” (Psalm 105:3). It seems curious advice on first reading.  Surely it is those who find the Lord who have reason to rejoice?  But those still seeking?  Monastic tradition offers an unexpected reason.  

A little background:  the desert monks of early Christianity were expert diagnosticians of the human heart—that very heart the prophet Jeremiah describes as “more tortuous than anything” (Jer 17:9).  One of their key discoveries, first laid out systematically by Evagrius Ponticus in the fourth century, was the intricate and powerful interactions of eight dark psycho-spiritual forces common not just to monks.  You may know them by their later designation, the “seven deadly sins,” after St. Gregory the Great had combined them in the fifth century. Unlike Gregory, Evagrius identified them not as sins but as temptations used by evil to distract us from our path to God.  They have also been called “the passions,” a reflection of the strength of the energy they generate if we allow them to run unchecked.  One of the trickiest of them was “acedia,” variously translated as boredom, restlessness, despondency and depression.  Evagrius supplies a very entertaining account of the monk beset by acedia, one that is remarkably contemporary: “The demon of despondency, which is also called the noonday demon (Psalms 90:6), is more grievous than all others. ….It begins by making a monk notice dejectedly how slowly the sun moves, or does not move at all, and that the day seems to have become fifty hours long. Then it urges the monk to look frequently out of the window or even to go out of his cell to look at the sun and see how long it is till the [three o’clock], at the same time making him glance hither and thither to see if some of the brethren are about. Then it arouses in him vexation against the place and his mode of life itself and his work...,” and ultimately sends him wandering from place to place, unable to find satisfaction and settle anywhere. Today Evagrius might rephrase the description to read, “checks his text messages every few minutes, surfs the web, goes to the coffee pot or to the fridge to get a soft drink, checks the supply of snacks, calls friends.”

In reading this description and others like it, I have come to see acedia as boredom and restlessness engendered by a lack of purpose.  A life without purpose is a life without meaning.  Austrian psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl identified how essential meaning or purpose is to the human enterprise.  He found that in the camp, the physically weak who had a sense of purpose—his was reunion with his wife when the camp nightmare was over—often survived when the physically strong but inwardly purposeless didn’t (Man's Search for Meaning). According to Genesis 1, we were created with an inborn purpose: to provide this newly made universe with a future by cultivating the land and having children.  Creative relationship and creative activity continue to give us purpose, though the scope of both has broadened and deepened over millennia. And both have found their ultimate expression in the vibrant and abiding mystery of Christ.  There, all becomes relationship in the service of the new creation, the reign of God, the universe redeemed and transformed.

In St. Benedict’s shorthand, the nature of the core relationship is expressed more concretely as seeking God in all things in order to discover and love Christ above all else. That includes choosing to love as Christ loves.  To follow this injunction is to live a life of constant purpose   under the driving force of the Holy Spirit, one of whose fruits is joy (Gal 5:22-23).  This purpose frees us from acedia, that is from bored purposelessness that seeks only our own small satisfactions and finds them forever dissatisfying.  In its place, we discover the quiet joy of living our deepest truth toward the fulfillment of our greatest purpose, the one Jesus summarizes as total love of God and neighbor. 

Since the asceticism of Lent gradually frees us from the strident demands of self that is seeking only its own good, it frees us also to seek God ever more deeply and ever more faithfully in prayer and service. That is a life of fine, deep purpose.  So hearts that seek the Lord are filled with joy in the seeking long before we find the One we are looking for—and who is looking for us.

Copyright 2019 Abbey of St. Walburga