Lent will be upon us soon, and likely with it, our self-designed plans for asceticism. If you’re like me, you are prone to creating far-flung lists of new and renewed disciplines that, one or two weeks into Lent, buckle and collapse under the weight of the “lather, rinse, repeat” cycle of daily life.
Monotony. Routine. Repetition. These words hover over the thousand-and-one daily tasks and responsibilities that every parent faces, always threatening to define and denigrate our august calling to marriage and family. Then we glance at our phones and see what our culture celebrates: everything new; innovative; groundbreaking; disruptive.
A recent Pew study attests to our society’s downgrading of the family, revealing that only 21 percent of parents find it “very important” that their children get married and have children. By contrast, 88 percent of parents view it as “very important” that their kids “have jobs or careers they enjoy.”
Tweeting about the study, scholar Brad Wilcox summarized it this way: “Today’s parents are prioritizing Money & Work > Marriage and Parenthood for their own kids. Spells real trouble long-term for the future of the family.”
In other words, many parents today — readers of the Catholic Herald excluded, of course — struggle to find meaning, purpose, and joy in the “give us this day our daily bread” part of marriage and family. Even with the exquisite gift of their own children within eyesight, only one in five parents see their kid’s future marriage and family as “very important.”
What is going on here?
I can’t help but agree with author R.J. Snell’s diagnosis of widespread acedia, or sloth. Paraphrasing Evagrius of Pontus (345-399), Snell notes in a recent lecture, “Acedia is frustration and disgust at the work that God has given you to do, and the place that God has given to you, and the life that God has given to you, just now.”
Ironically, sloth doesn’t just manifest itself as inactivity, but can also show up as a frenzy of activity and search for diversion because the “trivialities of life feel like a prison” and “you would rather be elsewhere,” Snell notes. In the words of Evagrius, the slothful person “abhors what is there and fantasizes about what is not.”
It is no wonder, then, that parents today — swept up in our broader culture’s epidemic of acedia and its love affair with work, diversion, innovation and fantasizing about what is not — fall prey to viewing daily family life as somehow “less than” or even a prison.
Enter Servant of God Catherine Doherty (1896-1985), author and founder of the Madonna House Apostolate, who invites us to consider a way forward.
“Don’t seek immense mortifications or self-sacrifice,” she advises parents in Nazareth Family Spirituality. “Seek the daily mortification of doing a thing exceedingly well.”
Doherty offers every parent a kind of Lenten examination of conscience and an invitation to reenchant our home, domestic church, or as my wife and I call it, our “Trinity House.” In a litany of questions that cut to the heart of acedia, she wrote, “Have we experienced the utter joy of scrubbing a floor? Do we know how to make it a prayer, a song of love and gladness? Have we recited the litany of dusting and sweeping whose goal is a home bedecked with cleanliness? Or are these humble tasks irritatingly monotonous to us? Do we understand the sublimity of service — humble, daily, constantly repeated?”
“Constantly repeated.” There it is. I wince as I read it. And yet, I can also see that it is acedia’s siren song that is causing me to wince, blinding me to the “sublimity” and “utter joy” which await me in the recovery of hidden, daily service to my family.
Take it from Doherty: We don’t need to spend our Lent fantasizing about a new spiritual life. In the work, place and life God has given us just now, we will find “daily mortifications” aplenty — and not just phoned in, but accomplished “exceedingly well.”
Here, just now, in the floor to be scrubbed, is our Lenten arena. Here — in all the “irritatingly monotonous” tasks that go into launching children and raising saints — is heaven in our homes.
Johnson and his wife, Ever, are cofounders of trinityhousecommunity.org.
