The word accidie [acedia] (translated as ‘despondency’ or ‘spiritual sloth’) means, etymologically, ‘lack of care’, i.e. about one’s salvation. With few exceptions, all humanity is now living in the state of accidie [acedia]. People have become indifferent about their salvation. They do not seek divine life. They confine themselves to forms of life which appertain to the flesh, to everyday needs, to the passions of this world, to mundane activities. God, though, created us out of nothing, in the image of the Absolute and after His likeness. If this revelation is true, then the absence of concern for salvation is nothing else than the death of the human person.
Despair is the loss of consciousness that God wants to give us eternal life. The world is living in despair. People have condemned themselves to death. We must struggle resolutely against despondency.
The life of the world is organized so as to accommodate certain human passions, and spiritual life is pushed into the sidelines. We should reverse this order, and put spiritual life at the heart of our life.
The wisdom of this world cannot save the world. The parliaments, the governments, the complex organizations of the most advanced contemporary states, are powerless. Humanity suffers without limit. The only solution is to find within us the wisdom and the resolve not to live according to the ideas of this world, but to follow Christ.
How can we find our way? According to the Gospel, Christ is our way.
What is important is the conviction that Christ is God. The person who loves Him will be near Him eternally, where He is.
If we want to be with Christ, with the Word of God on whom the Father has bestowed everything that He is from all eternity, we must see Christ as God-Man. When we think of His divinity, we recognize Him as perfect God. When we think of His humanity, we know Him as perfect Man. Wisdom, humility, life, eternal light, all are in Him.
Every step in our Christian life is inseparably related to the fundamental dogmas of our faith.
Just as Christ in Gethsemane and on Golgotha remained continuously mindful of the Father, so we too should live at every moment with our thought in God, though in our case our mind can do this through Christ rather than the Father. For it is by the Son that we reach the Father. In practice, this means that our life becomes Christ-centered.
The only thing which attracts us is Christ, the person of Christ. And we must live with Christ as the measure of everything, divine and human. In Christ, we have God our Creator. In Christ, we have the example, the revelation of God’s plan for mankind. The love of Christ must fill our hearts, always. One cannot abide in God by intellectual reflection about Him. God reveals Himself in us by His action. We live Christ as our own life, not as someone we know from outside.
~Adapted from Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), Words of Life, translated from the French by Sister Magdalen (Stavropegic Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, Essex)
