Finding Hope in the Existential Time Warp of Acedia 

by Nicole M. Roccas

When acedia “creeps over the heart of a monk,” wrote John Cassian in the early fifth century, “he looks about anxiously this way and that . . . and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness, and makes him idle and useless for every spiritual work” (Institutes 10.2).