Forgotten Vices, Forgotten Virtues: Sloth vs. Diligence
Sean Kelly, LPC continues his series on the Seven Deadly Sins and their virtue counterparts. Catch up on Forgotten Vices, Forgotten Virtues: Reclaiming a Christian Tradition here.
“I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 3:14
Do you hate Wednesdays? The fact that getting through the “hump day” of the week is an arduous task is readily accepted by all. But what makes it so tough?
After all, on Tuesday, the amount of work that we have left to do that week is greater than what remains on Wednesday. And on Thursday, shouldn’t we be more tired than on Wednesday? There is something about being stuck in the middle. The initial momentum we were able to get at the beginning of the week has faded. And we are not far enough along to feel that the end is in sight.
This peculiar malaise doesn’t just show up in the middle of the week. It scales up (we see it in the middle of our years and in the middle of our lives), and it scales down (we see it in the middle of our days and in the middle of a task that we’re working on). This is not a new phenomenon, but one that has been familiar to Christians for centuries.
This is the vice of sloth or acedia (“uh-see-dee-uh”) and what the desert fathers referred to as “the noonday devil.”
Sloth: Is it Laziness? Or Something More Dreadful?
When you hear the term “slothful,” you may picture a man reclining on his La-Z-Boy, binge-watching Netflix and binge-eating potato chips. You might not think of the busybody, who at first glance seems to be very industrious but is really consumed with trivial matters.
Sloth is operating inside each of them. Being slothful has less to do with your lazy butt and more to do with your cold heart.
A Lack of Care
Acedia comes from the Greek akedia, which translates as “carelessness” or “lack of care.” When we are consumed by acedia, it’s not that we’re not doing enough but that we’re not caring enough. It is the heartbreaking sin of the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, whom Jesus finds sleeping when He asked them to watch and pray with Him: "What, could ye not watch with me one hour?" (Matthew 26:40).
Our focus, our attention, and our care for the things that deserve it are shriveled and dried up. Thomas Aquinas calls sloth “an oppressive sorrow, which so weighs upon a man’s mind that he wants to do nothing.” It is spiritual apathy.
Charity & Diligence: Kindling the Fire and Keeping It Burning
When it comes to a remedy for sloth, there are some who prescribe charity and others who prescribe diligence. It seems to me that both have an important role to play.
Consider your heart as a fireplace. Charity, the sacrificial agape love of God, is that kindling that is necessary to ignite the fire. If our hearts have grown cold, we need to focus on receiving and then giving the sacrificial love of God, seeing ourselves as the vessels in which the love of God burns and gives warmth to us and those around us. See more about how to cultivate charity here.
Once the fire is going, we can’t let it go out. We must keep it burning. Think of diligence as throwing another log on the fire.
To be diligent is to be careful, persistent, and attentive. Just like the man who continually checks the fire, stokes it, and throws another log on to keep the fire burning through the night, we, too, must continually check our minds and our hearts and do what we must to keep the fire inside of us burning.
7 Practical Ways to Grow in Diligence
1. Find Role Models and Imitate Them
The author of Hebrews gives us a clear direction on how to be diligent: “We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised” (Hebrews 6:11-12).
Not only are we creatures of habit, but we are mimetic creatures, which is just a fancy way of saying that we’re hard-wired to imitate. Monkey see, monkey do. We find our greatest role models in Scripture, the greatest being Christ, but it is important to find other role models around you as well. Find those people who you want to be like and spend time with them, watch them, imitate them.
2. Find Some Cautionary Tales
On the flip side, having some examples of who we don’t want to become like can also help light a fire under our hind parts. As most anybody who seeks out therapy can tell you, the pain we experience is a big driver to making changes in our lives. Even future pain that we imagine can drive us to change, and it can spare us a lot of pain and heartbreak in the process. While too much fear can leave us frozen, a healthy dose of it can move us forward. Scripture is replete with cautionary tales, but so are our lives. This is not to say we should sit in a place of judgment. Rather, we must be willing to look honestly at where others’ mistakes have caused them pain, look honestly at ourselves, and declare, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
3. Start a Daily Prayer Rule
There are two kinds of people: those who floss every single day and those who floss a few times a year (I happen to be one of the latter, but that’s beside the point). Nobody flosses three times a week.
For most things in life, if you don’t do it daily or weekly, you probably don’t do it at all. There’s something about aligning yourself to the rhythms that God has ordained in nature that just seems to work. Start a daily “prayer rule” for yourself. Pray even (or especially) when you don’t feel like it.
4. Look At Something Beautiful
Beauty can enflame our hearts like nothing else. The most beautiful thing we could gaze upon is God, but no man can see His face and live (Exodus 33:20). We can gaze upon His beautiful creation in the natural world around us. We can gaze upon His pinnacle creation, relishing the beauty in the faces of those made in His image. And we can gaze upon the beautiful works of art created by those same image-bearers.
5. Pay Attention
You probably are careful when you’re spending money, but what about when you’re spending attention? Ask yourself, what is God calling me to attend to at this moment? In our age of split of attention, where smartphones are always out and a podcast is always on, how often are we giving things our full attention? What would it be like to be present, even for the ordinary tasks of life? As RJ Snell wisely puts it, “Even the most mundane things can be done with love.”
6. Be Still
It may seem ironic that “being still” is a way to fight sloth, but remember, the issue with sloth is internal, not external. Being still is a very difficult thing to do. Blaise Pascal famously said that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” He wrote that almost four hundred years ago! While our modern world has taken distraction-seeking to an extreme, this problem has been with us for a long time. It’s often only when we allow ourselves to be still and silent that the important things we should attend to rise to the surface of our minds.
7. Memento Mori
“Memento mori” is the Latin phrase “Remember you must die.” Your days are numbered; only God knows what that number is. If you only had one year of life left, how would you want to spend it? What if you only had one week left? What if you only had one hour left? Keeping in mind that death could come for us at any moment helps us to see more clearly what truly matters to us.
Eyes on the Prize
When we have a case of the Wednesdays, let us call to mind what it is and Who it is that we are working for. Let us strain our ears so that we may long to hear those most precious words of our Lord Jesus Christ: “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.” (Matthew 25:23).
And, as the author of Hebrews instructs us: "Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest" (Hebrews 4:11).
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing.” — 2 Timothy 4:7-8
